The "non-creative" side of game localization. How do we do it
(New post from Marina Ilinykh virtualtomato , senior project manager at All Correct Localization )
In the comments to one of our articles there was a question about what the localizer actually does with the files that need to be transferred. Frankly, this part of our work seems to me the least exciting, but if at least one reader is interested, we will be happy to tell about it using the example of software that our team uses. Since the conversation is not short, we decided to divide the narrative into two parts: project preparation and management (functionality for the manager) and work with text (functionality for the translator and editor).
Illustration from Dageron.com
I think it is no secret to anyone that any professional has rather strong feelings towards the tools with which he has to work. If the tool does not work well or even interferes, then the worker experiences righteous anger. If, however, it is impossible to abandon this tool, the expression of righteous anger can sometimes go beyond the limits acceptable in a decent society. But we were lucky - our main working tool, the MemoQ program, if sometimes brings us to the use of profanity, it is solely due to the complete delight of its functionality.
')
MemoQ belongs to the category of TM programs . TM is translation memory, translation memory. In my opinion, it is possible to translate well without the use of such programs only in a number of limited cases. And now it will be a question of that part of the work that the project manager does in MemoQ.
It all starts with the fact that there is a file for translation. It can be Excel, Word, txt, xml, po, json ... Yes, whatever. All file operations: statistics calculation, translation, editing, quality control - are carried out in MemoQ. After the file is downloaded from the program, the source text in it is replaced by the translation.
The peculiarity of TM-programs is that they segment the text (divide it into cells) according to one of the predefined rules. And if there are duplicate segments in the text, then the program will automatically insert your translation into all these segments further in the text. TM - translation memory is connected to each project. It contains all the translations that you previously performed on this project. That is, you will never have a case where you have to translate a text twice. For this TM-program and all love.
For example, this well-known poem is replete with repetitions:
And here is how the translation of one segment is substituted into all the others:
Statistics show that in this text 67% of repeated segments. Instead of 246 words, you need to actually translate a total of 81 words.
On large projects (games with a capacity of 20,000 words), such a number of repetitions is a great rarity. Usually their share hovers around 5-18%. For example, in Rayman Legends of 21,000 words, 2057 turned out to be repetitive. And in one of my last projects on the localization of a social game, the percentage of repetitions in the text reached 18.2%. Imagine the savings on such a project, if the game is localized, say, into 6 languages. So ask the localizer for a replay discount!
As I said, the text is segmented according to predefined rules. The choice of segmentation rules is one of the first important decisions that a manager must make. In most cases, the text for translation comes in Excel format. And then we usually select the segmentation by cell. That is, one Excel cell table corresponds to one segment in the MemoQ. Also, quite often we segment the text on sentences. But there are some completely unique projects where you have to apply something very specific.
Once we translated a project from Korean into Russian. The client had a certain budget, therefore, to help him save money, we did a “smaller” segmentation so that the project had more repetitive segments. Without going into unnecessary details, I’ll say that there are really more repetitions, but we just didn’t take into account that the structure of the Korean language is very different from, say, Russian. And as a result, without knowing it, we activated the Yoda regime. These are the funny stories we have turned out (each line was a separate segment in MemoQ):
Kesivion, having quarreled with her husband,
Cook reconciliation dish
Going.
Or here:
Out of curiosity in the night market
Played in a casino and lost Elena.
And my favorite:
Elephant seals are crazy.
They used to have a lot of people
Come to watch, travel industry
Blossom And for some time
They decided in superman t-shirts.
Attack the tourists
Where is it?
In the vast majority of games, developers use variables. MemoQ can facilitate the work with them. For example, you have the following text for translation:
Get {X} [cash] for {Y} [feez]?
Do you want to refill for {X} [feez]?
Loot for {0} Fee'z?
The manager (and the translator) can (and will certainly make) for your texts a template according to which all variables and tags will be identified and displayed as uneditable segments (red flags).
After the implementation of such a simple procedure, tags and variables are not taken into account in the budget for translation (some more savings!). The undeniable advantage of this approach is the ease of substitution of variables in the translation. They are inserted by pressing a single key, and not by endlessly clicking on Ctll + C, Ctrl + V or typing them from scratch. This reduces the risk of error and reduces labor costs.
Very often we are sent texts in xml format asking if we can translate so. Of course, if the translator opens such a file in notepad, he will see something like the following:
Translate "so" can not. This document still looks pretty good. There are cases when you just get lost in that chaos from the code that you see when you open the document. The risk of missing something or damaging the code is too great.
The most standard MemoQ xml filter in less than a minute will bring the document to such a beautiful view:
In this case, the translator works only with the text, but in the preview window immediately sees the results of his work. For more complex documents, you can create unique filters that are stored on the server and can come to the rescue at any time.
It so happened that the translation team should work on the game. That is, more than one translator per language. How to divide the text? Kromsat file itself will take perhaps some manager-doctor. MemoQ can divide a file into exactly as many pieces as needed (I once divided a file into 12 parts). At the same time, the file itself remains intact, virtual copies are created in which the translator can make changes only to the part to which the manager has granted him access. But he sees the entire document and the work flow of his colleague, since they work in the same server project. To make things even clearer: we don’t share files with translators. They get access to projects on the server and work only in MemoQ.
With such uncomplicated and sometimes, of course, clever ways, we prepare the project for localization: we count the statistics for translation, work with tags and variables, distribute files between translators. Now you can not be afraid that your files will be mercilessly dismembered, they will spoil the code, and you will also have to pay for the "translation" of the tags. No normal localization service provider will allow this. We will soon write an article about what the translator and editor sees in MemoQ, what advantages the program gives them, and how it affects the quality of localization. And this article promises to be great!
Part 1
In the comments to one of our articles there was a question about what the localizer actually does with the files that need to be transferred. Frankly, this part of our work seems to me the least exciting, but if at least one reader is interested, we will be happy to tell about it using the example of software that our team uses. Since the conversation is not short, we decided to divide the narrative into two parts: project preparation and management (functionality for the manager) and work with text (functionality for the translator and editor).
Illustration from Dageron.com
I think it is no secret to anyone that any professional has rather strong feelings towards the tools with which he has to work. If the tool does not work well or even interferes, then the worker experiences righteous anger. If, however, it is impossible to abandon this tool, the expression of righteous anger can sometimes go beyond the limits acceptable in a decent society. But we were lucky - our main working tool, the MemoQ program, if sometimes brings us to the use of profanity, it is solely due to the complete delight of its functionality.
')
MemoQ belongs to the category of TM programs . TM is translation memory, translation memory. In my opinion, it is possible to translate well without the use of such programs only in a number of limited cases. And now it will be a question of that part of the work that the project manager does in MemoQ.
Upload and statistics
It all starts with the fact that there is a file for translation. It can be Excel, Word, txt, xml, po, json ... Yes, whatever. All file operations: statistics calculation, translation, editing, quality control - are carried out in MemoQ. After the file is downloaded from the program, the source text in it is replaced by the translation.
The peculiarity of TM-programs is that they segment the text (divide it into cells) according to one of the predefined rules. And if there are duplicate segments in the text, then the program will automatically insert your translation into all these segments further in the text. TM - translation memory is connected to each project. It contains all the translations that you previously performed on this project. That is, you will never have a case where you have to translate a text twice. For this TM-program and all love.
For example, this well-known poem is replete with repetitions:
And here is how the translation of one segment is substituted into all the others:
Statistics show that in this text 67% of repeated segments. Instead of 246 words, you need to actually translate a total of 81 words.
On large projects (games with a capacity of 20,000 words), such a number of repetitions is a great rarity. Usually their share hovers around 5-18%. For example, in Rayman Legends of 21,000 words, 2057 turned out to be repetitive. And in one of my last projects on the localization of a social game, the percentage of repetitions in the text reached 18.2%. Imagine the savings on such a project, if the game is localized, say, into 6 languages. So ask the localizer for a replay discount!
As I said, the text is segmented according to predefined rules. The choice of segmentation rules is one of the first important decisions that a manager must make. In most cases, the text for translation comes in Excel format. And then we usually select the segmentation by cell. That is, one Excel cell table corresponds to one segment in the MemoQ. Also, quite often we segment the text on sentences. But there are some completely unique projects where you have to apply something very specific.
Once we translated a project from Korean into Russian. The client had a certain budget, therefore, to help him save money, we did a “smaller” segmentation so that the project had more repetitive segments. Without going into unnecessary details, I’ll say that there are really more repetitions, but we just didn’t take into account that the structure of the Korean language is very different from, say, Russian. And as a result, without knowing it, we activated the Yoda regime. These are the funny stories we have turned out (each line was a separate segment in MemoQ):
Kesivion, having quarreled with her husband,
Cook reconciliation dish
Going.
Or here:
Out of curiosity in the night market
Played in a casino and lost Elena.
And my favorite:
Elephant seals are crazy.
They used to have a lot of people
Come to watch, travel industry
Blossom And for some time
They decided in superman t-shirts.
Attack the tourists
Where is it?
Work with variables
In the vast majority of games, developers use variables. MemoQ can facilitate the work with them. For example, you have the following text for translation:
Get {X} [cash] for {Y} [feez]?
Do you want to refill for {X} [feez]?
Loot for {0} Fee'z?
The manager (and the translator) can (and will certainly make) for your texts a template according to which all variables and tags will be identified and displayed as uneditable segments (red flags).
After the implementation of such a simple procedure, tags and variables are not taken into account in the budget for translation (some more savings!). The undeniable advantage of this approach is the ease of substitution of variables in the translation. They are inserted by pressing a single key, and not by endlessly clicking on Ctll + C, Ctrl + V or typing them from scratch. This reduces the risk of error and reduces labor costs.
"Complex" formats
Very often we are sent texts in xml format asking if we can translate so. Of course, if the translator opens such a file in notepad, he will see something like the following:
Translate "so" can not. This document still looks pretty good. There are cases when you just get lost in that chaos from the code that you see when you open the document. The risk of missing something or damaging the code is too great.
The most standard MemoQ xml filter in less than a minute will bring the document to such a beautiful view:
In this case, the translator works only with the text, but in the preview window immediately sees the results of his work. For more complex documents, you can create unique filters that are stored on the server and can come to the rescue at any time.
Large files
It so happened that the translation team should work on the game. That is, more than one translator per language. How to divide the text? Kromsat file itself will take perhaps some manager-doctor. MemoQ can divide a file into exactly as many pieces as needed (I once divided a file into 12 parts). At the same time, the file itself remains intact, virtual copies are created in which the translator can make changes only to the part to which the manager has granted him access. But he sees the entire document and the work flow of his colleague, since they work in the same server project. To make things even clearer: we don’t share files with translators. They get access to projects on the server and work only in MemoQ.
With such uncomplicated and sometimes, of course, clever ways, we prepare the project for localization: we count the statistics for translation, work with tags and variables, distribute files between translators. Now you can not be afraid that your files will be mercilessly dismembered, they will spoil the code, and you will also have to pay for the "translation" of the tags. No normal localization service provider will allow this. We will soon write an article about what the translator and editor sees in MemoQ, what advantages the program gives them, and how it affects the quality of localization. And this article promises to be great!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/212371/
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