Reply To: no more heroes

[quote1204081700=madamadam]
For the europeans:

The reason we get pissed all over for release dates is the massive amount of time translation takes. This is partly because of the 5 standard languages they release games in (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish) but also because the translating itself requires many redoes. You have no idea how easy it is for a professional translator to mistranslate phrases that we take for granted as basic in our own languages, something I've learned from Flemish TV in Belgium (I haven't taken a single Flemish class and yet thanks to the numerous subbed English/American shows & films I can vaguely speak the language and pick out many translation errors when watching TV) – those of you who watch Japanese anime will have probably noticed this too and put it down to the complexity of Japanese (which only adds to the problem). For this reason (amongst many), games in Europe are play tested many times simply for some dude to go "wtf?" and send the game back into translation.

If you ever played Mario Sunshine you'll probably remember the bizarre "Shine get!" sequences, in which case I'm sure you now understand the importance of getting your shit right, no matter how long it takes.
[/quote1204081700]

that hasn't really been my experience so far from the inside. translating is pretty much the easiest part of the process when releasing a game. the code is already in place and all the bugs have been fixed that will be fixed and things that couldn't have been cut, it's just a matter of putting the new dialog in if needed and new text for the subtitles again if needed. probably the hardest part is when there's something like the standards they have in germany where you can't have any kind of reference to the nazis at all in any game or vague rules about excessive violence.

from my experience, the localization process takes only a couple weeks up to about a month and this is before the game is released and remember that games are normally finished a good couple months before their release.

from what i know….i don't have a good reason but i'm sure there probably is one…game developers hate to have games not out of the door already.