This week’s guest lecturers were Robert Lo Bue and Anthony Ash, Robert Lo Bue is the CEO at Applingua and Anthony Ash is the Director of training at Applingua. They gave a presentation about who they are and what their company does, it was a very interesting talk on how you have to be ready for the world and not the other way around. It is a good wake-up call because you think that if you publish your game, everyone who plays it will enjoy it, that is not too far from the truth but you have to also take into consideration that there are other cultures out there who might not connect with what you may have in your game and may even find it offensive. In order to let everyone, enjoy what your catering for them you will have to go about the Localisation route. What localising allows you to do is to deliver a product that would be appealing and understandable and non-offensive to the player.

‘Many of those involved in this movement, however, fail to understand that game localisation isn't merely a process of getting the rights to translate something and then plopping an English script into it. It's a challenging process that involves a lot of back-and-forth between translators, editors, marketers, and developers, with an occasional bit of interference from local rating boards.’ (Kemps, 2016)

What this shows is that even though localisation is a great way to make your game be more appealing to foreign countries, it is still a very difficult process because of the sheer number of tasks that are involved in localising a game. It's not something you can change the script on a game and realise it into the market because there might certain elements withing the game that could offend some people. So you have to take all this consideration before you realise your product into the market. This ties it back to what Robert and Anthony were missing in the presentation, how even if you have the language part of the project sorted you have to still go about correcting any culturally insensitive material in the game or change it even if it means having to change the look of the game.

frontlines.

 

References

Team, M. T. (2010). Meet the team. [ONLINE]. Available at:

https://applingua.com/about/ [Accessed 13 February 17].

 

 

Kemps, H .(2016) Localizing Video Games for Different Markets Is a Minefield. [ONLINE], Available at: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/localizing-video-games-for-different-markets-is-a-minefield [Accessed 12 May 2017]