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开发者谈游戏本地化测试的7个核心逻辑

发布时间:2019-02-20 09:00:04 Tags:,

开发者谈游戏本地化测试的7个核心逻辑

原作者:Thomas Barth 译者:Willow Wu

很明显,现在的绝大多数游戏不会只迎合某个特定国家的市场或者语言。他们通常会全球发行,得到各地玩家的青睐。

因此,严格测试多种语言的翻译是至关重要的,要确保那些第一语言是法语、俄语或者其它语言的玩家能够和英语国家的玩家得到一样流畅的游戏体验。

这就是本地化测试(Localisation Quality Assurance,简称LQA,)的任务:检验每种语言版本的对话、文本、用户界面、以及其它相关资源,发现、记录、解决本地化过程中出现的bugs。

LQA的成功意味着各个地区的玩家,无论他们说的是哪种语言,都能够沉浸在游戏中,不会因为本地化效果差而觉得有违和感。

以下是实现成功LQA的七个最佳方式。

1.在开发初期就着手LQA

最重要的一件事就是在游戏设计初期阶段就要开始LQA工作,这样在后期的大规模测试阶段能省去不少头疼问题。这意味着你不仅可以减少测试次数和时间,还能腾出更多资源用于其它事项,提高工作效率。

举个例子,在设计游戏菜单时如果UI设计和LQA是同步的,HUD元素(让玩家可以随时了解那些最重要最直接相关的内容,比如角色状态栏、字幕等)就不需要根据不同的语言重头设计一遍,因为有的翻译可能会比较长,需要调整界面空间布局。

听起来可能觉得是个小问题,但它的确会对玩家的信息接收产生极大影响。没人想看一个需要花上30秒甚至是3分钟才能读懂的游戏菜单。

2.三个测试

如果你的游戏并没有做好充分的测试准备,那么也别指望它会成功了。

1)预测试

许多开发者在进行QA之前不考虑预测试或制定测试策略。就我自己以及Keywords Studios来说,预测试是一个非常重要的环节,不仅仅是为了LQA,也是为了所有QA工作的开展,它起到了主心骨的作用。因此你应该尽可能地根据实际情况进行预测试。

预测试阶段一般包含以下内容:

-为测试团队做工作规划

-熟悉可用的debug工具,把它们纳入到整体测试策略中

-验证为本地化和QA准备的伪本地化build版

-定制并记录与bug报告和解决相关的核心流程

增加预测试时间能够帮助团队在实际测试期间更快地达到测试效率峰值。

ruse(from gamasutra)

ruse(from gamasutra)

2)回归/确认测试

在开发周期中,游戏都在不断地被加入新内容、修改,后期有QA介入也是如此。

最重要的是,当你的LQA发现了确实需要修复的bug时,程序员就要做出修改写新代码,从而可能会产生额外的麻烦。

因此,回归和bug确认测试是至关重要的,要确保测试结果不会和新版本产生矛盾,并且原bug所引发的关联错误也有被纠正。

3)测试用例

测试用例是QA过程中一个相对独立的过程。比如,包含所有关卡资源(声音、文本等)的整块切片,这些可以由QA外包团队或主要开发人员创造。

测试用例是所有测试者的工具包中不可缺少的一部分,允许测试员sign-off整个区域。

对于LQA来说,这样做的好处是你可以将某个部分从后续的检查中单独提出来,而不是以整个游戏为单位进行测试,一路修到底,并且你还得进行第二轮end-to-end LQA以确保你所做的更改不会影响到其它东西。

简而言之,测试用例能够帮助团队获得有效进展以及覆盖跟踪,并且减少了回归测试的需求。测试用例应该和预测试一起规划以确保LQA策略连贯一致。

3.利用debug工具

使用debug工具,例如“作弊”是LQA测试人员的隐藏武器。一个装备精良的工具库可以在测试过程中大大缩短游戏时间,无论是开启上帝模式还是穿墙模式都能让你花更少的时间反复测试游戏,得到更准确的结果。

跟你的QA伙伴协作,共享工具库并进一步集成你们的工作流。

4.使用词汇表

在游戏设计中,本地化团队编写重要词汇表是很常见的,比如武器名称,术语和虚构的语言。对于LQA,本地化后第一个看到游戏运行的人来说,词汇表是非常重要的。它确保知识库不会被更改和命名的一致性,防止翻译错误和不一致性破坏沉浸感、让玩家迷惑。

5.多语言团队

如果你的LQA多种语言版本,找一个有能力的团队负责无疑会省去很多麻烦。在同一个团队中拥有不同母语人士可以减少bug数量和工作量。比如,游戏的英语版本(译出语)出现了错误,只需要一个英语为母语的人报告,而不是等5个不同语言的(外包或非外包)LQA团队报告。

在多语言团队内部协作可以保证游戏质量的稳定,而多个团队工作你难以保证某一方不会出现疏忽。

6.游戏开发是一段合作过程

就如上文所说,合作+整合意味着能得到又快又好的成果。就拿服务类游戏来说,LQA与本地化团队的整合尤其重要,因为开发过程中需要不断扩展知识库。随着后续更新加入一系列内容,你需要知道可以在已有内容的基础上做哪些预测试。

有了这些共享知识,你就可以更快地测试下一波内容,小规模更新的测试周期非常短。

在多语言团队中,协作还可以提高质量。因为相较于单语言团队,这种多样化团队出现疏漏的几率更低。

7.赋予测试员自主权

这又得回到协作和拥有多对语言团队的话题上了。如果游戏中出现了语言方面错误(比如拼写、语法或标点问题),而你是该语言的母语使用者,能够自己纠正,那么就不需要走程序了。

让母语使用者自主工作,授权他们自行修改文本,这可以减少bug数据库中的小问题,并减轻翻译团队的工作负担。

本文由游戏邦编译,转载请注明来源,或咨询微信zhengjintiao

It’s an obvious truth that the vast majority of video games no longer cater to one specific country or language. They are universally beloved experiences with global launches.

Therefore it’s crucial that their inevitable translation to multiple languages is tested rigorously, to ensure those experiences ring as true for English speakers as they do for those whose primary language is French or Russian (for example).

This is where the role of Localisation Quality Assurance, or LQA, comes in: where each language variant of a title is verified in terms of its assets (dialogue, text, UI, supporting materials) and that bugs arising out of translation are discovered, documented and resolved.

Having successful LQA means releasing a game that can be enjoyed by all players around the world, no matter what language they speak, and where their immersion is not hampered by a weak adaptation to the local market and gaming culture.

Here are seven best-practice methods for achieving successful LQA.

1. Integrate your LQA at the onset of development

First and foremost, engaging in the LQA process alongside your initial game design will vastly reduce the headache when it comes to going gold. It means you can reduce testing in and of itself, and free up resource for other activities and efficiencies.

For example, if UI and LQA are in sync when it comes to designing menus, HUD elements such as status bars and subtitles, they will not need to be redesigned to accommodate for languages that simply take up more space on the screen.

This may seem trivial but it can greatly affect the information a player receives in addition to the overall look and feel of a game. Nobody wants to have menus that can either take 30 seconds or three minutes to read dependent on the language and its UI integration.

2.The Three Ts ; If you fail to prepare to test, your game is prepared to fail

Pre-tests

A lot of developers do not consider enacting pre-testing or to have a testing strategy in place before they undertake QA. For myself and Keywords Studios, pre-testing is an essential component, not just for LQA but indeed all QA: it forms the overarching backbone of all QA once its in motion and thus you should seek to pre-test as much as feasibly possible.

A pre-testing phase would generally include the following:

- Planning a relevant progression path for the test team
- Getting familiar with debug tools available to QA and incorporating them in the overall test strategy
- Verifying a pseudo-localised build for localisation and QA readiness
- Setting up and documenting core processes around bug reporting and bug fixing

Increased pre-test time will effectively reduce the amount of time that the team will require to reach peak testing efficiency during the actual test pass.

Regression / Confirmation Testing

Games are constantly being developed and changed throughout their development life-cycle including the later stages when QA kicks in.

On top of this, when your LQA does raise bugs to be fixed, these changes can create additional issues as a consequence of the new code.

It is therefore crucial to perform regression and bug confirmation testing to ensure that test results remain relevant in new build versions and bugs are correctly addressed in a continuous development scenario.

Test-cases

Test-cases are self-contained areas of a game that go through QA. For example: Entire level slices that will encompass all the assets within that section (audio, textures etc.). These can be created by your QA outsourcer or by the main developer.

They are an integral part of the toolkit for any tester, allowing sign-off on entire areas with a pass/fail criteria.

For LQA, this benefit enables you to remove whole sections out of subsequent checks, rather than testing the game as a whole, revising errors along the way, and having to do an end-to-end second LQA run-through to make sure the changes you made did not affect anything else.

In short, test-cases enable effective progress and coverage tracking and also reduce the requirement for regression testing. They should be planned and created alongside your pre-tests to ensure a coherent LQA strategy.

3. Utilise Debug Tools

Using debug tools, i.e. ‘cheats’, are a LQA tester’s hidden arsenal. A well-equipped repertoire of tools will allow you to greatly reduce playtime during testing, be it granting yourself God Mode or being able to move through walls via ‘no-clipping’, allowing you to test more frequently and with better results.

Collaborate with your QA partners so that you can share your toolset and further integrate your workflows together.

4. Use a Glossary

Within game design, it is common for a glossary of important words to be made up by the localisation team; things like weapon names, lore and fictional languages. For LQA (who are the first to see the game in action after localisation) a glossary is essential. It ensures a definitive knowledge base and consistency in nomenclature, preventing translation errors and inconsistencies from breaking immersion and confusing players.

5. Multi-language teams

If your LQA requires multiple languages then assigning it to one supplier will make your life easier. Having a variety of native speakers in one team allows you to reduce bug counts and workload. For example, if an error is in English (i.e. the source language) it can be reported as one issue by your native speakers rather than as five from five different outsourcers/languages.

Collaboration within your multi-language team allows for consistent quality as the nature of a diverse team creates opportunities to spot errors that one team may not see.

6. Collaboration: game development is a co-op experience

As stated above, integration and collaboration mean faster and better results. Integrating your LQA with your localisation team is especially important within Games-as-a-Service for example, because it requires a continually evolving knowledge base. With continuous content being added through successive updates you need to know what you can pre-test off the back of your previous work.

Having this collaborative knowledge helps you test the next wave of content much faster and allows for quick turnarounds on smaller updates.

Within your multi-language teams also, collaboration fuels quality as the nature of a diverse team will create more opportunities to spot compound errors that a single-language team may not see.

7. Empower your testers

This harks back to collaboration and having multiple native speakers in your LQA team. Basic linguistic bugs (for example spelling, grammar or punctuation issues) will not need to be raised as a formal ticket if you are a native speaker and can simply fix the issue first hand.

Let your native speakers work to their own initiative and empower them with the ability to modify text themselves, which reduces the amount of low severity issues in the bug database and reduces the workload for the translation team(source:gameindustsy.biz


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