Why do you need a game localization style guide?

Indie game developers are constantly reminded of “develop your game with localization in mind”. You must be fed up with this. Even I, as a translator and localizer, am bored with all the “do not use texts in images”, “translations to other languages tend to be shorter or longer”, “pay attention to placeholders” etc. All of this is VERY important, but you already know this. Yet, there are some less technical solutions that can be as important when “developing a game with localization in mind”. What I mean here is a style guide.

Depending on:

See this very simple yet informative style guide from one of my non-gaming clients.

This is short, concrete, informative and facilitates my work A LOT. Yours can be similar or way more elaborate. The rule is simple: the more information you put into a style guide the higher localization quality will be. Below I will try to describe, why.

When you need to compile even a short list of localization requirements, data, resources, you start to think about it from translator’s perspective (at least to a certain extend). And then you might get new ideas, how to rephrase some texts in your game, introduce changes, perhaps you will spot some spelling errors, polish the language here and there and make your game strings even better.

This is your game and you want it localized the best way possible. You devoted a lot of time to find perfect localization specialists, so now spend 2–3 hours more and provide them with the reference materials. As professional as they can be, they do not know ins and outs of your game. You do. So share it.

Quality in -> quality out. If you deliver a lot of informative, high quality materials of all sorts and formats (texts, graphics, videos etc.), your localizers will be able to produce translations of higher quality.

You compose a style guide only once and all localizers can use it when translating to any language. You will not have to answer the same questions several times and deliver the same resources. Time spent on creating a Style Guide is the time saved (many times), as your translators WILL ask questions and you WILL be answering them. Imagine if you have to answer similar/same questions asked by translators localizing your game to 10 languages. This is tideous and after a while becomes frustrating. You write a style guide only once, and all your translators will use it and ask way less questions (if you prepare a thougough style guide). And perhaps you will also create a style guide template and use it when localizing your future games.

You can think of a style guide as a document holding all the information about your game, that you want to pass to your translators. Below I suggest some of the vital, language-independent (although I localize only from English to Polish) localization-related aspects you can use while compiling your style guide.

A style guide is a great, easy to prepare tool that positively impacts localization quality on many levels. Additionally is saves your and my time, allows to handle knowledge about your game and your quality requirements in a concrete manner. Now select some of the above mentioned items and compose your own indie game style guide. Or use this list as a reference and compose a style guide that is substandard but suitable to your game.

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