Localizing Historical Settings: Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Article Contents
Game localization is a complex process that involves much more than simply translating the interface and artistic parts. One major goal for any story-driven game is to fully immerse the player in a new world that is often entirely fictional or historically distant from their own. This disconnect creates a significant challenge when it comes to localization. While carefully preserving the world invented by the game creators, the translator must ease the player into the unfamiliar context in an engaging way.
This task becomes particularly complicated when the game setting is at odds with both the culture of the source-language country (the original language in which the game was developed) and the realia of the country the game must be adapted for. In order to accurately convey the developers’ intentions, the localization needs to preserve not only the textual and narrative nuances, but also the subtle, perhaps hidden features that make it unique.
How can we make a game world exciting and lively? How do we depict the world elements if the necessary context is simply absent in the target language? Moreover, how do we ensure the player comes along for the ride? In this article, we’ll go into these issues using our experience localizing Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the latest release in the popular franchise, as an example.
Creating Illusions via Linguistic Elements
Developers and translators rely on a wide variety of linguistic techniques to make a game world feel real. In the Assassin’s Creed series, the local cultural realia—societal structure, traditions and customs, art, and everyday life—play an important role. These components allow players to experience how the people of various classes lived, thought, and perceived their surroundings in one era or another.
Exoticisms, words without a direct analogue in different languages, are often used to describe the cultural ephemera. These may be specific character or everyday item names, titles, or common expressions. The translator’s job is to find suitable terms in the target language or organically introduce new ones the player will understand.
To show the country through the eyes of its inhabitants, translators need to follow in the footsteps of the game’s creators and study specific cultural phenomena like religious orders, everyday traditions, or tabletop games. For example, it’s impossible to discuss feudalism in Japan without giving attention to the tea ceremony, numerous significant elements of which were fully formed in the 16th century. Before beginning the localization process, translators review all kinds of sources, from artistic works and historical texts to scientific and popular literature. This context allows translators to accurately describe the local cultural specificities in their own language, as well as to recreate the way people spoke at the time.
However, the use of exoticisms and other expressive means must be handled with care. For the gameplay to feel well-rounded and the experience pleasant, the text needs to be crystal clear, even for an amateur gamer. The player must always understand what’s going on, what the game is asking of them, and what their choices are in any given scenario. It's also important to avoid words and phrases that break the immersion, like modern slang, new loan words from other languages, and so on. Maintaining a balance between the familiar and unfamiliar, between exoticisms and well-known expressions, is the responsibility the translator holds in their hands.
Speech Etiquette in 16th-Century Japan
Every game in the Assassin’s Creed series takes place in a new historical era and a new location. Assassin’s Creed Shadows transports us to Japan at the end of the 16th century. This was a time of splintering, change, war, and the eventual uniting of countries, as well as cultural development and the first encounters with Europeans. Real events and historical people were used as a foundation, but the game’s narrative and main characters are fictional. The developers also tried to recreate the everyday life and culture of feudal Japan as much as possible.
However, the game was developed in English, and its main target audience was players in European countries. Localization required transferring all the exotic realia into a Russian context for a Russian-speaking audience. Needless to say, all three cultures involved differed significantly from one another.
One complication arose from the complex hierarchy based on Japanese society in the Middle Ages, which was an essential piece to convey to players. For example, Russian distinguishes between the formal and informal “you” (ты and вы, respectively), but the distinction is different from the multi-tiered Japanese forms of address (keigo). Furthermore, in modern English, the difference between the formal and informal “you” is completely nonexistent, making it nearly impossible to fall back on the original text when deciding which to use. For this reason, translators need to essentially reconstruct speech characteristics with consideration to the relationships between characters and other narrative details. If the relationship between characters changes—when they become friends or enemies, fall in love or break up—the way they speak to each other must follow suit. A character’s ancestry, social hierarchy, upbringing, and their relationships to others all influence how they speak and their behavior when interacting with others. This phenomenon is particularly noticeable in the game’s main characters, who differ significantly in status, personality, and vocabulary.
The shinobi Naoe
Naoe is a young shinobi from a remote village. The player learns that her father taught her martial arts, which drove her to embark on her journey, as well as the events that tempered and hardened her. She is often short and brusque, and not only with enemies. She simply doesn’t find it necessary to express respect. In the Russian localization, Naoe almost always addresses others with the informal “you,” but she’s deferential with older members of her family, even those she’s very close to, as is customary in Japan.
The foreign samurai Yasuke
Yasuke is a foreigner, a former slave, and now a samurai, albeit of lower rank. The locals are unsettled by his powerful skin, and he makes them tremble with a single word. The man himself is honorable, though, and his speech is stoic and measured. Yasuke is respectful and courteous, so he addresses almost everyone formally. He even uses literary turns of phrase, since he studied the language among the aristocracy of his master.
Japanese culture is notorious for its wealth of respectful forms of address, which are difficult to reproduce in both English and Russian. Additionally, an overabundance of linguistic nuances may draw the player away from the plot and gameplay. Games are not meant to be textbooks. The developers, therefore, chose the path of simplicity, using the universal word lord to address all prominent military figures and notable feudal lords (including when referenced). But in translation, “lord” sounds unnatural and creates a disconnect with the atmosphere, and the Russian gospodin is used in a completely different way. As a result, the translators had to create their own system, taking into account both the Japanese context and the developers’ simplified approach.
For example, one of the key characters in the game, Oda Nobunaga, is a powerful feudal lord called a daimyo, but this word isn't used as a form of address. Instead, the suffix -dono or -sama is appended to his name. In Russian, the title of daimyo often corresponds to the title of knyaz, or “prince” (see Russian translation of “The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga,” “Zapisi o knyaze Nobunaga”). It is for this reason that the majority of characters in the localized version of the game respectfully call him “prince,” and why even after Nobunaga’s death, Yasuke refers to him as “my master.” In Russian, the words daimyo and knyaz were used only as titles to designate those who genuinely held this status. For lower-ranking but significant military leaders, like Akechi Mitsuhide, the word “general” was chosen. Through these linguistic choices, the ephemera and concepts of another culture can be recreated in the player’s language.
Exoticisms: Words You Won’t Find in the Dictionary
Game characters live in a richly detailed word full of items and events both familiar and foreign to the player. The words used to describe these things in Japanese—the aforementioned exoticisms—are unobtrusively incorporated into characters’ speech, which creates a sense of authenticity. These words needed to be translated in such a way that the reader understands the meaning just as naturally, thereby introducing the player to unknown concepts seamlessly.
Words like “sushi,” “sakura,” or “katana” entered the Russian lexicon a long time ago and have become commonplace. They have lost the tinge of exoticism required to create the historical atmosphere. For the same reason, players will not encounter the well-known word “ninja” in Assassin’s Creed Shadows; in its place is the more authentic pronunciation in Japanese characters, “shinobi.”
A variety of obscure terms and expressions have been used in the game to produce a faithful Russian translation. Young Naoe, for example, deferentially calls her father chichi-ue, and when something goes right for her, she joyfully exclaims, Yatta! To disguise herself in one quest, she needs a special piece of Japanese clothing that historically preceded the kimono, called a kosode. In another, she must take part in rengakaye, a poetry game where participants stack special poems called renga. Yasuke is an excellent marksman with a teppo, a Japanese firearm. There are several hundred examples of these words and expressions, and the total number of exoticisms is over five hundred.
Clever adaptations of historical terms help players to more quickly familiarize themselves with the unfamiliar hierarchy and culture of medieval Japan
To strike a balance between atmospherity and textual clarity, translators worked with the game creators to develop rules for using exoticisms, while also relying on traditional localization practice and scientific data. When multiple solutions are available, experts analyze the options and choose the best one.
This is one way these rule sets can look in practice.
- Japanese names, toponyms, and other exoticisms, by default, were translated into Cyrillic using the linguist E. D. Polivanov’s system (called Cyrillicization).
- There are exceptions made, if necessary, for universally accepted terms already used in Russian in some form or another. For example, the Japanese name for the edible Lentnula edodes mushroom is written as shiitake, rather than the sitakeh suggested by the Polivanov system, as the former is already well-established in Russian via the Hepburn system. Other exceptions include already entrenched geographical names like the Yodo River.
- Glossaries put together using scientific literature as a foundation were used for the names of the innumerable temples and sanctuaries, religious schools, and sects that are not present or not yet established in Russian.
- For words and expressions whose meaning was unclear from the context, the first usage was followed by the translation in parentheses, like chichi-ue (father).
- Personal and geographical names ending in -a (Oda Nobunaga, Osaka, etc.), which require declension in Russian, were declined as usual, as is customary in literary fiction, unlike in strict scientific translation of medieval texts.
The meticulous linguistic work and research not only produce a high-quality localization, but also allows the player to learn something new about the real-life culture and history of a country.
Just Don’t Overdo It
While translators must find ways to create a colorful atmosphere in the game world, it’s also important that nothing prevents the player from enjoying the immersion in another reality.
Among the obvious taboos are jargon and modern slang, as mentioned above. However, there are other words and expressions that are unsuitable to the culture and era. As an example, when translating text about non-European cultures of the past, linguists try to avoid using loan words introduced from Western languages later. Our translators used “train,” for example, instead of “practice,” “upheaval” instead of “revolution,” and “rebellion” instead of “revolt.” In the case of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, however, the presence of Europeans (the Portuguese) in Japan gave linguists the opportunity to use similar words sparingly. Of course, these words still weren’t universally usable across all characters. Our editors would not have allowed Latinisms in the dialog of a simple peasant, for example. But well-educated characters of higher status could absolutely have used a few loan words like “army,” “general,” or “commander.”
Certain other expressions were also prohibited naturally, like those that emerged during the technological revolution. Many of them are so common that they’re barely even noticeable, but Japan in the Middle Ages did not have the vocabulary for turning off the light, braking, or doing something automatically. The team also decided against using the word “Shintoism,” changing it to “Shinto” instead. After all, a medieval Japanese character would never use a Western scientific term.
Our experts and linguists create similar lists of prohibited, required, and recommended words and expressions for every localization project.
Summary of Results
Localizing games of this scale is a massive, complex undertaking, for which there are no ready-made, universal guidelines. The process requires careful adaptation of the content, preserving all nuances while making the content clear and understandable to the target audience. Through meticulous, intentional localization, a game becomes engaging and atmospheric in any language, and players from any country can experience the vivid emotions and exciting experience intended.
This is precisely why projects like this cannot be properly completed without the knowledge and experience of professionals. Experts are able to find the balance between historical accuracy and enjoyable gameplay, while also taking into consideration cultural specificities and all legal requirements of the countries they are translating for. Logrus IT has over 30 years of experience in game localization, as well as voiceover, localization assessments, and marketing material creation.
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