One of the over-riding impressions of the Conference is the massive change going on in the business of games. Some 90% of industry revenue currently comes from the sale of packaged product: consoles and licensed- or first- party titles for them. The remaining 10% represents everything else: PC titles, mobile games, SNS (Social Network Software, aka Facebook) games, subscription MMO’s, Free-to-Play MMO’s and the rest.

But this is changing fast.

The traditional consoles are, at best, not growing in sales and are likely contracting. Gordon Walton mentioned it in his Localization Summit Keynote (“It’s no secret …”). In the world market, the major growth regions of China and India are awash in pirated package product, giving little incentive to develop (and localize) such products for these markets.

All of the growth in the industry is coming from mobile apps, SNS games and Free-to-Play MMO’s. Even though revenue from these titles is small, the tremendous growth that they are seeing means that almost all new business investment and most of the best minds in the industry are gravitating there.  Peter Vesterbacka, creator of Angry Birds, said at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference that console gaming is “Dead”.

Phil Harrison, a former Sony Computer Entertainment President, was even more blunt at GDC. “If this conference was called ‘Game Publishers Conference,’ I think everyone would be in the bar crying into their beer and being just miserable.”

It’s not hard to see why this shift is happening. In the West, game players (along with everyone else) are suffering through the Great Recession. In the East, most particularly in China and India, the console paradigm never established itself for reasons of piracy and cost, with most players having far less disposable income than their counterparts in the West. Hence, fewer and fewer people are paying $60 for a disk to load into a $500 console to entertain themselves. Taking out a cellphone you already own and playing Angry Birds ($0.99) seems much more sensible.

This means an enormous change for the business. The new growth players are much smaller, face a far more competitive marketplace, and yield revenue far less than others once received by selling disks for $50 to $70 each. See Trip Hawkins’ (founder of EA, now with Digital Chocolate) tirade on the subject here.

Now for the $100,000 question: What does this mean for Localization?

Until now, most localization in the games field has been contracted by a few large publishers (THQ, TakeTwo, Sony, etc.) to agencies (Babel, Apogee, Binari, etc.). These agencies then farm out the individual pieces of their projects to translators, as well as providing voice-over recordings, project management and consulting.

This worked fine with the console paradigm. It does not work in the new world, where margins are smaller and most publishers are not large, well-funded public companies. Now every cost is analyzed, so it is far more practical, even necessary — essential — for publishers large and small to hire translators directly. And this is where the growth of our industry lies now.

Most of the new games are simple and text- or image-based. There is no voice-over. The role of translation is simply that, translation of text with a round of proofing provided in linguistic test. There is no room for a middleman in this low margin environment.

For most of us in the industry, this means a sea change is in the making.

Apogee has already made its place in the new world. We’ve announced our intention to re-organize as a non-profit corporation and operate as a Translators’ Advocate. We’ve started the Apogee Certified Translators program which allows publishers — small and large alike — to hire translators directly, by knowing at a glance who they can trust to handle their titles. In our first move, we released all of our best translators in 15 languages and are now encouraging them to communicate directly with end clients. Every quarter starting on April 15, we will be releasing a new list of high quality translators. Apogee is offering ala carte services to replace those of a fully featured game localization agency, including translator sourcing, management and back office bookkeeping.

It’s not a question whether the new world is better or worse than the old; things change, and we all need to change with them. There are no more buggy whip manufacturers in our world. Old business models are dying constantly: book stores, video rental outlets, and the like.

And there are good aspects to this. By using translators directly, cost per word drops dramatically. It suddenly becomes feasible to release games in 30, 40 or 50 languages. Vast parts of the world that have never before seen well localized game products will now get them delivered on their cellphones … and soon to their tablets.

Its our role and our duty as leaders of this industry to change with the times, and make things better than they ever were before!

1. Does Apogee Certify agencies? No, and here’s why. Agencies don’t do translations, people do. If we certify an agency, there is no way to know exactly who is actually handling translation work. Translations are done by individuals, so only those individuals can be Certified.

That said, we have no problem with an agency that wants to advertise that they ONLY use Apogee Certified Translators (so long as it is true). There are probably other good ways to show affiliation with the program, and we’re open to suggestions. But the understanding is that individual translators are the heroes of our story, not processes or organizations.

2. The Smartphone Requirement. All Apogee Certified Translators must own and use email-capable smartphones. And, yes, that is a requirement.

“Why?”, shout more than a few perplexed people. “What does a high tech toy have to do with our work?”

Let me tell you a story. When Apogee was working in a new language three years ago, we identified three translators to work with us. In the end, all three proved equally capable, but one of them had a Blackberry. He was able to answer any question or issue we had within fifteen minutes. This was gold. That translator is now on our Apogee Certified Translator list. The other two are long forgotten.

I suspect that many, even most, translators who are without instant and continuous access to email have lost work like the two unfortunate and talented forgotten souls in my story. And Apogee Certified Translators need to stand out from the rest of their brethren, not only in quality of translation, but in responsiveness to clients. This is what makes them different. This is what makes them special.

If you want to be an Apogee Certified Translator and you don’t have a smartphone, it’s time to go out and get one.

Today we are launching Apogee’s Translator Certification Program. Apogee will query, test and research all applicants to determine their quality of translation and ability to communicate with clients and colleagues. These translators are the best of the best. Publishers can feel assured that their valuable properties are being well taken care of in the hands of an Apogee Certified Translator.

The website explaining the Certification program is here.

The list of Certified translators is available here.

Translators interested in being Certified should follow this link.

Publishers interested in being part of Apogee’s Client Publisher program should link here.

Below is a brief introduction to the program. The text is a transcription of the video.

Welcome to Apogee Certification! Apogee tests and verifies translators in all languages of the world. We ensure that Certified translators are not only able to deliver excellent translations, but that they are professional businesspeople who quickly respond to clients’ needs.

My name is Edwin Steussy, and I am the President of Apogee Communications. I started my first translation agency in 1989 in Taipei, Taiwan, converting Chinese into English for the computer manufacturers in the region. I’ve been running translations in the United States since 1996 and it has been my exclusive business since 2003, when Apogee was formed.

In all that time, there has been a gradual change in the industry. When I was running translations in Los Angeles in the late 90′s, all of my translators were local Los Angeles residents; professional translators in some cases, self-taught dual language speaking individuals in others.

Starting in about 2000, we converted to using more and more home-based translators working over the internet. It was a new idea at the time to “off-shore” work. We received much higher quality work, typically from much more professional translators.

As time has gone on, more of our clients saw that they could do the same work as an agency; hire translators from abroad directly, and save on the middleman’s profit. It’s called disintermediation.

This is a good thing. Translators now work much more closely with their clients. Clients have direct access to translators to get work done quickly and efficiently. Questions can be answered more quickly – problems solved faster.

The biggest issue in this new set-up is determining who is a good translator, and who is a mediocre or bad one. This is where Apogee comes in. By Certifying truly excellent and efficient translators, and publishing their names and contacts for all to see, we take the guesswork out of translation hiring.

Apogee further assists Client Publishers’ by making them the priority recipients of newly Certified translators, consulting on difficult job problems and providing back-office invoicing and purchase order processing.

Globalization. Direct contacts. Certification. Come here to find the best of the best. Come and be part of us.

Personally more important, this was my first trip to China in 21 years. My first localization agency — indeed, the first business I ever started — was a high-tech Chinese->English house in Taiwan in the 1980′s. I spent an extra ten days in the Shanghai/Suzhou area re-acquiring my Chinese (details here). I also had a chance to try out technical communications from behind China’s Great Firewall (see here, recommended for anyone new traveling to China).

The participants at the LISA conference included some of the largest translation houses in the world, as well as small specialty houses working only in Chinese and more than a few major clients (partial list is here).

The setting (a five star hotel in Suzhou, one hour from Shanghai) was excellent. The three of us presenting for video games were welcomed with open arms, as there is much interest in our specialty from those outside our business. I would strongly encourage more outreach by video game localizers to organizations like LISA, with their broad background in different businesses and translations tools. They have much to offer.

My presentation (available below in Chinese and English) is a general backgrounder in video game business and history, along with the current status of the world video game industry. At the end, I piece China into the puzzle.

Conclusion? There will be less translation into Chinese (due to market particulars, including legal barriers and rampant piracy), and more work for Chinese to English and other languages (given the high-quality of locally produced MMO, Free-to-Play titles — an area where Chinese developers have a 5 year lead on the West).

Victor Alonso Lion from Pink Noise, who gave a simply excellent Spanish Language presentation at GDC last year, gave an equally excellent presentation on the differences in handling video game localizations to other kinds of localization, aimed at professionals.

The differences? Size — the latest batch of MMO’s are running over a million words per title. Malleability — no other localization branch has to swap genders, objects and actions on-the-fly like interactive entertainment. Cultural issues — different countries have strong laws or customs about what can be said or shown in entertainment.

And the list goes on …

His presentation drew the second-highest ratings at the LISA conference amongst the workgroup sessions.

LISA ASIA Forum – Localizing Interactive Media & Game

View more presentations from Victor Alonso Lion.

Rolf Klischewski not only gave a presentation, No Man’s Tool, detailing the inadequacies of the current generation of translation tools for video game work; he also ran a day-long workshop on game localization issues for professionals with little or no experience in the field.

Rolf’s presentation is available here.

Like most of the Americans in the audience, I did not know anything about Buzz. Buzz is a highly successful series of quiz games developed by Relentless Software for the PlayStation line of consoles and handhelds. The wild MC and writing immediately remind me of the “You Don’t Know Jack” series from Berkeley Systems, which I fondly remember from ten years ago. Only Buzz is much bigger, wilder and funnier.

If you haven’t played Buzz, at least look at look at this video to get a taste of it.

The localization issue here is immense. Some of the questions work well between countries (Elvis, DeLorean cars and science fiction movies translate well). However, some topics do not (Golf is popular almost wholly in English speaking countries, for instance). The problem here becomes one of not translation, but transcreation. Substantial parts of the game must created anew for the target countries.

How big a job is this? For some game types, transcreation might not be so difficult. For something as far ranging and difficult to quantify as a quiz show, however, the difficulty is extremely high. Fifteen years ago, when I first entered the game industry as a writer I was a member of the Hollywood Writers’ Guild (WGA). Of their members, the very highest paid writers in all of Hollywood were the question writers for Jeopardy, a quiz show. Jeopardy is a popular quiz program in America which has struggled in every attempt to take it outside of the US. It currently only shows in the US, Canada, Sweden, Slovakia and Russia.

Excellent and informed writing, in each language, is essential. Without it, the whole project flounders.

Target languages for Buzz are French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Polish and Russian. In each language, there is a team of ten including four dedicated writers — people to create original text for their countries.

Questions are divided into those suitable for an international audience and those that are not. Those that aren’t are further divided into those that require additional assets and those that do not. Everything is handled in a single CMS: Scribe.

The results are fabulous. A well reviewed, well liked game that appears to travel over borders seamlessly. Millions upon million sold. 16 total titles, numerous awards. This is a case study of a great success, in a field where failure is far more typical.

Screenshots from the presentation at GDC are below. Please click on them to see a full-sized, readable version of each.

(A Japanese version of the presentation is available here.)

Now, let’s switch gears. Imagine you have an MMO on your project list. These are big. The smallest one that Apogee has bid on was just over 500,000 words. And they have to be geared for on-the-fly changes with player characters, NPC’s, weapons/items, locations, quests … Dang, that’s a big job.

Now let’s up the ante. Let’s make it not one MMO, but SEVEN. Welcome to Sony Online Entertainment. Scroll down and take a good look at the first slide of David Kim’s presentation. Seven MMO titles (plus unannounced projects), the main SOE user website, two trading card games, ~2.0 million words every year of English just in updates … Everquest 2 alone boasts over 9 million words in its current iteration. This is a massive undertaking.

David Kim, left, of Sony Online Entertainment takes questions

David, SOE’s Localization Producer, gave the presentation at GDC in San Francisco. A few days later I had the opportunity to visit their offices in San Diego. There I met David, Raymond Nguyen (Operations Manager) and the head of International Operations, Bob McEntee. Any mistakes in this summary are mine, not theirs.

Given the crushing weight of these wordcounts, the first impression visiting their offices is, “Where is everybody?” I’ve worked for operations that handle less than 10% of SOE’s annual wordcount with much larger localization staffs. The two dozen souls at SOE take up only a part of one floor. They’re even more impressive when you realize that they also handle the actual operation of SOE’s international servers, a responsibility not normally burdened on localization teams.

Brutal, complete organization is the answer. Ad hoc translation techniques and workflows would only cause delay and inevitable quality problems, overloading the small staff.

-> Data is standardized for both content and context.
-> Translation memory at SOE holds more than 60 million words, separated by title.
-> A translation engine is completely integrated into the game.
-> English strings are assigned persistent and unique ID’s.
-> Changes to English text are automatically tracked in the system.
-> A feedback loop is installed, allowing the team to improve with time.
-> The team at SOE holds a patent in on-the-fly translation methods.

Some 40% of all translation can be handled internally using the tools developed here, improving quality and saving Sony hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in external translation costs.

One downfall with having so large a workload is the language basket and geographic availability for their titles remains small. SOE titles are translated into French, German and Japanese with only a few new expansion languages. Taking older titles into a new language (see reference above for Everquest 2′s nine million words) is a massive undertaking.

As the videogame industry evolves, publishers will begin to look more and more like the streamlined operation at SOE. Localization tools will be integrated at the very beginning of game development, automated tool sets will allow easy import and export of text and other assets, English (or other first language) changes will automatically be flagged. The penalty for not doing so is losing your non-English (or Japanese) speaking customer base. That non-E, non-J base is significant now (see here), and will only grow with time.

David’s presentation slides are below. Click on them for a full-size version. Japanese localized version is at the end.

Victor Alonso Lion and Diana Díaz Montón gave perhaps the most useful presentation of the day with their Localizing for the Global Spanish Speaking Community. The vast number of Spanish speakers in the world is daunting, made worse for marketers and localizers by the array of dialects. Victor and Diana did their best to synthesize all of the data. The information here comes from their presentation, an extended discussion I had with Victor during the SIG meeting two days later and some additional research. Any mistakes here are mine, not theirs.

The first thing to realize is that the Spanish speaking world is vast, located on two sides of the Atlantic. While the languages are all mutually intelligible, that does not mean that a resident of Buenos Aires will find it easy or pleasant to hear a Mexican or Madrid-based TV show. How many different versions of Spanish are there? Well, the answer becomes how finely you want to slice. Victor and Diana presented strikingly different sound bites of the same phrase from Spain, Argentina, Chile, Columbia and US/Mexico.

How different are these? Very. Simple terms in one country’s dialect might be a venomous curse in another. The polite word for “female” might mean “bitch” in another place. Further, basic terms in each language (pronouns, conjunctives, etc.) are different from one another. (I’d really appreciate if people could give examples in the comments.)

What is a game localizer to do in such a situation? The current solution has been to split the Spanish world into two parts: Castilian Spanish for Europe and Latin American Spanish targeted to the Western Hemisphere. While this works fine for Spain, it bulldozes the differences between the Western Hemisphere dialects.

Effectively, when we have our translators render Latin American Spanish, they create a neutral, understandable and inoffensive product which everyone can understand. David suggests Disney first created the concept of a single, neutral Latin American dialect to more effectively distribute their films.

The problem with neutral Spanish is that the language is not just neutral, but neutered. Imagine the scene from the movie Die Hard with Bruce Willis swinging down on the bad guys, bare feet bleeding, machine gun in hand, yelling, “Yippee kay yea, motherfuckers!” A neutral language might have to change that. “Comin’ to get you, boys?” That’s not memorable.

Is neutral Spanish bad? No, but it lacks emotional content. It would be hard to imagine a blockbuster — an entertainment product that strongly connects to people — using a neutral language. In fact, neutral language generally means lower perception of quality, both in the general population and, critically, in the local press. To maximize production values, different markets should be targeted.

-> Spain, with Castilian Spanish (the largest market)
-> US/Mexican Spanish, by far the richest market of Spanish speakers in Latin America
-> Argentina, with a population of 40 million and relatively wealthy
-> Chile, with a population of 17 million, but 50% more per capita wealth than their Argentine neighbors
-> Colombia, also ~40 million people but with half the GDP of Argentina

Another possibility, suggested by Victor, would be to mix the languages. For instance, a sports game could use a mix of well-known announcers from several countries: say Mexico, Argentina and Columbia. Spanish speakers would relatively easily understand (and forgive) speakers clearly from a different country, as well as feel attachment to the announcer from their country. It’s an elegant solution that limits the number of SKU’s a publisher must create.

Also, translation can be handled differently for the dialects to save time and money. An original translation can be done from English to Castilian Spanish, then a conversion from Castilian to the different dialects.

Another solution is to allow for amateur translations to be integrated into the final project. While this means potentially lower quality work in some cases, enthusiasts can do extremely good quality (note Wikipedia). Further, the amateurs working on the project then become evangelists for it, increasing market share.

Below are the slides from Victor and Diana’s presentation at the GDC Localization Summit in San Francisco, March 2010.

]]> http://www.apogeecommunications.com/blog/2010/03/22/gdc-2010-global-spanish-localization/feed/ 2 http://www.apogeecommunications.com/blog/2010/03/18/gdc_2010_localization_languages/ http://www.apogeecommunications.com/blog/2010/03/18/gdc_2010_localization_languages/#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:37:30 +0000 Edwin http://www.apogeecommunications.com/blog/?p=305 This post is about the surprising changes that came to light at GDC this year. The spectacular rise of Polish, and the disastrous fall of Spanish and Italian. The inevitable, short-sighted contraction of the language basket was indeed severe, but looks to be recovering.

2010 is a year of recovery for the Games Industry. The Great Recession hit with full force in 2009 and few were spared. Nintendo, home of the all-powerful Wii, was hit with a 40% drop in sales in June 2009. Less well-known, less powerful companies dropped even more.

The games industry reacted. THQ reduced their number of SKU’s (“stock keeping unit”, or the number of game variants released) from 1,200 in 2008 to 600 in 2009. Other companies reacted in similar ways.

Localization is an easy target in these times. Translation is seen as a large upfront cost and, given the gaming industry’s nascent international market, sales are dwarfed by the vast English language market (or substantial Japanese market), as seen here. Fully 82% of Take Two’s income is derived from English language SKU’s. EA cut back from its famous 10 language expansion in Europe, releasing one AAA title with only three full translations. Sometime in the future, when games will be a truly international market, these “savings” would never even be considered. That day is not here yet.

Bioware’s two AAA titles shipping this year had severely truncated language baskets. Spanish voiceovers were dropped from both titles, effectively removing them from the Spanish market. On the right is a slide taken from the Spanish language presentation at GDC; it tells the story eloquently — and the slide is from a pre-recession year. With 43% unemployment of their young people in 2009, Spain last year was perhaps a market best left alone. Italian voiceover was also dropped from the larger Bioware title, Dragon Age, leaving only French, German and … Polish.

Polish? Really? Yes, absolutely. Poland is the only European economy not to have entered a recession. This new powerhouse for Europe boasts the largest population of former communist nations with 40 million people. And the games market is clearly on the rise here. Poland is one of the few languages that certifies and awards well-done localizations (see the award on the left, hat tip to Rolf Klichewski).

Anecdotal evidence at GDC, and by other measures, things are very much improved now. Sales are going through, new releases are coming out, language expansion is being pursued again. 2010 is certainly shaping up to be an improved year over 2009. Possibly, with a little luck, 2010 may be a standout on its merits.

Some bits of data that weren’t included, or came out in the question-and-answer period:

Mass Effect 2 (450k words) was fully translated into four languages: French, German, Italian and Polish. There were text only translations into Spanish, Czech, Hungarian and Russian. There was an initial effort to localize fully into Russian that went so far as recruiting voiceover actors, but that part of the project was shelved due to market forces.

Dragon Age was fully translated into French, German and Polish. Text translations were done for Spanish, Italian, Czech, Hungarian and Russian. Given that there were between 900k and 1M words of text in this title, it’s understandable why the language list was shortened like this.

When asked about Asian languages, there was a “No comment” answer.

Each language had a relatively small group of translators in order to keep consistency throughout the work. Teams were composed of just three translators each.

The truly remarkable items in the presentation were the extensive Character Bible and string tracking facilities. If these were not in place from the very beginning, the project would have been quickly lost in a sea of changes as the games got developed. The other solid choice was when they decided that the text was locked down and ready for translation: one month after the English voiceover had been completed.

This was a very good, detailed nuts-and-bolts look at two projects that are much bigger than any non-MMO on the market today.

Below are snaps of most of the presentation’s slides. Click on any image to download the full-size photo. Please let me know in the comments if you have anything to add to this summary.

The biggest take-away from these slides is that localization is still in its early days. Companies are still relying too heavily on their home language markets. Between 20% and 30% of publisher income is from localized SKUs. Only relatively small parts of the world speak English or Japanese. Truly global companies will need to embrace the world more fully.

For an example, I’d look to Hollywood’s most recent blockbuster, Avatar. With some $700+ million in US revenues, the film has made of $2.5 billion worldwide. That is a close fit for the market graph at the top of this page. Avatar represents a truly international endeavor, and one which should be emulated by the major publishers in our industry.

These slides are free to use with attribution to Apogee Communications. If you want to see the underlying data, please email us. Click on any slide to see or download the full size image.

Sources of this data are:

Nintendo, Annual Report 2009, Kyoto Audit Corporation auditors. June 26, 2009.
Electronic Arts, Annual Report (Form 10-K) 2009. KPMG auditor. May 21, 2009.
Activision/Blizzard, Annual Report (Form 10-K) 2008. PricewaterhouseCoopers auditor. Feb. 27, 2009.
Konami, Annual Report (Form 20-F) 2009. KPMG auditor. July 31, 2009.
Square Enix, Annual Report 2009. Ernst & Young auditors. July 2009.
Take-Two Interactive, Annual Report (Form 10-K) 2009. Ernst & Young auditor. Dec. 18, 2009.
THQ, Inc., Annual Report (Form 10-K) 2009. Deloitte & Touche auditor. May 22, 2009.
Capcom, Annual Report 2009. PricewaterhouseCoopers auditor. August 5, 2009.
GDP Market Data from Economic Research Services, USDA, 2007.
Quebec GDP Data from Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions, Nov. 2008