作者：Michael Carr-Robb-John

首先我想让各位先查看自己的项目安排表，看看是否已将“本土化事项”列入其中？如果你的列表上确实存在这一项，那我也敢打赌它肯定被安排在项目开发末期。

如果你在项目动工之初就已经将“本土化设置”考虑入内，那就说明你或者团队成员可能已经汲取了一些本土化操作的教训，并做好了迎战准备。

本土化

许多人对本土化的了解主要集中于语言翻译，尽管这一点很重要 ，但它只能算是完成一半的任务。“本土”则是另一半更微妙的工作，它需要你拥有一些文化敏感性以便顺利完成本土化任务。

就以本文英语内容为例，你可能没有注意到我已经针对美国用户进行本土化处理，因为我是英国人，所以我得将自己习惯使用的“Colour”替换成美国人惯用的“color”，将“localisation”写成“localization”。这些不同并非源自语言差异，而主要取决于文化区别。

在开发阶段就将本土化铭记在心意味着，出现问题时你就可以快速应对，而非等到项目接近尾声时才匆匆修补。

我并非本土化领域的权威，以下只是我在处理这一工作时遇到的一些常见问题总结，希望能与各位共同分享。

手势含义

Hand-gestures(from cutcaster.com)

动画师常使用手势来增添角色的活力。但需注意的是，有不少手势在其他国家会引起误会。例如表示“OK”的手势，竖起拇指的手势，以及伸手并让掌心向外的手势，就是三种我在本土化过程中经常要从游戏中移除的手势。

你也可以根据每个国家的需求制作不同的动画效果，但这样无疑会增加项目需保存的数据量，并且在特定国家更易引起漏洞等问题。

所以最好事先通过互联网搜索某些手势在其他国家的含义。

视觉元素

想象一下在你的游戏中有一堵墙，上面用马克笔潦草地写了一条信息，而它正是将玩家引向正途的重要内容。假设你使用的是葡萄牙语，如果你不将这条信息转换成其他语言版本，那么海外玩家就难以顺利无阻地继续前行。

除了文本语言转换之外，你还可以考虑添加一个语言触发器，当玩家靠近这面墙时，系统就会自动弹出翻译版本。

颜色含义

颜色在人们的情感及生理状态中发挥重要作用，尽管我们多数时候对此浑然不觉。最有趣的是，不同颜色在不同国家也会呈现特定含义。例如，西方国家常用黑色代表哀悼，但南美国家使用的却是紫色。

暴力内容

德国法律对暴力内容限制极为苛严，尤其是涉及人类暴力的元素。因此德国市场上有些游戏就会将红色的血腥场面转换成绿色。以我的一个项目为例，角色在游戏中会被严刑逼供，但我们在德语版本中屏蔽了这一画面，没有让德国玩家看到这一幕。

成人内容

值得记住的是，并非所有国家或地区都认为游戏在成人群体中不受限制。最为典型的就是澳大利亚，该国至今未通过R18+评级标准（游戏邦注：根据澳大利亚现行评级制度，凡是未得到15岁年龄级及以下等级评级的游戏，都将被拒绝分级。这类游戏将不能在澳大利亚国内刊登广告，不能通过零售商公开发售）。

音频

本土化过程的另一个环节很显然就是确保游戏中的对话内容准确无误。通过查看Excel文件可以轻松找到哪些翻译文本内容存在遗漏。但要核实音频内容的准确性却是一个更有难度的任务。这也是我为何要鼓励不同平台的美工/工程师/设计师尽早花点时间研究不同语言及地区文化的原因。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Opinion: Localization notes

by Michael Carr-Robb-John

[In this reprinted #altdevblogaday opinion piece, Monolith Games' Michael Carr-Robb-John's offers some useful advice on keeping localization in mind for your game early in its development.]

In a few days, I am going to jump on a plane and move to a new country; this time I am off to Seattle to work at Monolith Games. With this pending adventure, it got me thinking about some of the wonderful fun I have had localizing games for foreign markets, and I thought some of my notes might make an interesting post for anyone thinking of doing localization.

First, though, some reader interaction… dig out the schedule for your current project and look through it. Is there a task anywhere on it titled “localization?” If it is on the schedule, I would put good money on it being close to the end of the project, usually within five tasks of the Alpha build.

If you have a task titled “localization setup” in the first half of your project’s development cycle, then you or someone on your team has probably already been through the pain of localization and is already preparing for it.

Location, Location, Location

What most people focus on primarily with localization is usually the language, and although it is important, it is only half the equation. The “Location” is the other half, and this is where things get subtle and you need to become a little culturally aware.

Let’s consider this post; you might initially be unaware that I have localized it for English American. I am from England and I am British, which means that I learned to spell color as colour, localization as localisation, and I pronounce ‘Z’ as “Zed” rather than “Zee”. These differences come about not because of the language but because of the differences in culture.

Keeping localization in mind during development means that when issues arise, they can be fixed quickly rather than waiting until the end of the project and trying to fix it with a hack.

I do not profess to be an expert on these various countries and cultures. What follows are issues that I have experienced during the localization process. By sharing them, I am hoping that you will firstly have a clearer idea of what to watch out for, but also I would encourage you to share your own experiences in the comments section below.

Hand Gestures

Animators use hand gestures to breathe life into the characters. Unfortunately there are quite a few hand gestures that can cause problems when dealing with localization. The “Okay” gesture, the “Thumbs up,” gesture and the extended hand with palm outward are just three gestures that I have seen removed from various games due to how different cultures react to them.

You could go down the route of generating a different animation tree localized for each country, but that does increase the amount of data to be maintained and also the likely hood of a bug being introduced in a specific country.

A quick internet search can produce some good descriptions of various gestures that can be problematic. This one even shows gestures I was unaware of before writing this post.

In-game visuals

Imagine that in your game, there is a wall upon which scribbled in a marker pen is a message that is important for putting the player on the right track. Now imaging that Portuguese is your language. Unless that texture has been translated into a different language, you have just made it extremely difficult for those players to progress.

Apart from doing a texture swap based upon the selected language, you might also consider adding a language trigger where if the player gets close to the wall, it will pop up a translation.

The language of color

Color plays a huge part in our emotional and physiological state even though for the most part we are completely unaware of it most of the time. What is really interesting is that the specific colors actually change from one culture to another. For example, in Western countries black is used to represent mourning, however in South America the color to use would more appropriately be purple.

I am mentioning this here more for completeness since I can remember only ever once changing a game color for localization. The specific issue was relating to the color that a map of Germany had been painted.

This is quite a useful and interesting chart.

Violence

Germany has very strict laws about violence, especially where humans are concerned. As a consequence, there have been a few games where the red blood has been changed to (robot) green. Or in the case of one of my projects, the characters were to be tortured for information; in the German version, we simply covered the animations up, hiding the offending visuals from the players in Germany.

Adult Content

Worth remembering that not every country believe that games are for adults; one such example is Australia, which at present does not allow a rating of 18+ for games.

Have a look of this list of of banned games in different countries It’s useful to know why a game was banned since it isn’t always about violence and adult content.

Audio

Another facet of the localization process is obviously to make sure the correct spoken speech / dialogue is triggered in-game in the correct language. It is easy to look through an Excel document and see when translation text is missing.

However, it is a lot harder to check the audio, which is why I try to encourage artists / engineers / designers on different platforms to spend time working in the different language and locations as early in a project’s development as possible.

Hopefully, you have finished reading this and there wasn’t anything new that you didn’t know already. If anything here was surprising and new, then you probably should kick localization up your schedules to do list.（source:gamasutra）