How to Improve Game Localization Quality with the Logrus IT QE Portal: A case study
Article Contents
High-quality game localization is crucial to succeeding in the global market. This is especially true for AAA and AA games, in which players invest significant amounts of money and expect a flawless gaming experience. Despite companies’ best efforts, traditional quality control methods are not always capable of preventing all localization errors and inaccuracies. Let’s explore this issue in more detail.
Challenges companies face
The game localization process is quite complex: translators often receive isolated fragments, often without context, which greatly complicates the task. As a result, it’s not always possible to avoid errors. Based on our experience, here are the most common issues:
- Inappropriate translation style: A mismatch between the game’s tone and the expectations of the target audience can turn players off.
- Awkward string combinations: Individual words and sentences may be translated correctly, but when combined in-game they can lead to absurd or ambiguous constructions.
- Inconsistent terminology: Names of characters, locations, or items may change from scene to scene or episode to episode, creating confusion.
Any of these issues can negatively impact the gaming experience and may cause the game to fail in certain markets. And detecting these problems is no easy task, as traditional quality control focuses mainly on technical aspects such as voice acting, recording, formatting, and tags, which are easier to check.
Balancing quality and cost
Testing a game comprehensively on every screen is expensive and time-consuming. The optimal solution is a well-organized, selective check focused on key aspects of the gaming experience, which can significantly improve localization quality.
The Logrus IT QE portal enables a thorough assessment of game localization quality, with a focus on the user’s perception of the game. Structured feedback helps both publishers and localizers identify and fix issues promptly, improving the final product’s quality and satisfying the expectations of players worldwide.
Logrus IT QE Portal in action: Improving game localization quality
The task: The client wanted to evaluate the quality of their game’s localization into several languages, with an emphasis on user experience. In addition, it was necessary to identify and systematize problems, as well as develop recommendations for improving future localizations. The Logrus IT team was given the task of completing these objectives for simplified and traditional Chinese, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese.
The challenge: The project’s budget was limited, so the evaluation had to be conducted on small fragments — no more than 2,000 words per language.
Why us: The Logrus IT QE portal was the perfect fit for this task. It has everything needed for quality control, including creating custom metrics, and a combination of holistic evaluations with recording of specific issues.
Additionally, the QE portal offers an arbitration feature, allowing localizers and reviewers to discuss disputed points. Localizers can leave comments on remarks or issues recorded by the reviewer. The reviewers, in turn, can then adjust their evaluation based on these comments or escalate the problem to the project manager if an agreement cannot be reached.
Solution
The client provided a random representative sample of localized game strings for each language.
First and foremost, the project required a suitable and simple quality metric focused on the target audience’s perception of the game. We selected a relatively standard hybrid quality metric, which combined two holistic categories (information-relevance and consistency-uniformity) and an atomistic assessment with a simple error typology.
The holistic criteria we chose allowed us to assess factors often overlooked in traditional quality checks but critical to the player’s experience:
- How informative is the translation?
- How well does it fit the overall context of the game?
- Are names, locations, objects, and actions localized consistently throughout the game?
The atomistic assessment covered literacy, style, adherence to local norms and formats, technical issues, and other translation characteristics.
Once the metric was ready, the Logrus IT project manager developed guidelines for the reviewers, taking into account the specifics of the project. These guidelines explained the project’s goals and priorities, commented on the metric (including a detailed description of each level of the holistic quality scales to avoid subjectivity), and provided detailed instructions on how to use the Logrus IT QE portal. After that, our specialists began assessing the quality of the localization.
We maintained close contact with the client’s representatives and the localization provider. We granted the client’s representatives full PM-level access to the project on the portal. The permissions of localizers were limited to viewing and commenting on their own sub-project.
The portal supports several roles with different access rights. The PM can limit the access of reviewers and/or localizers not only to specific sub-projects but also to a certain time period to prevent changes after the project’s completion.
At the arbitration stage, localizers could review the evaluations, comments, and recorded errors from the reviewers and discuss contentious points, explain certain decisions, and request a revision of the assessment.
Results
To conclude the evaluation, the Logrus IT team and the localizers agreed on general recommendations that helped improve the game’s translation quality and, as a result, the overall gaming experience.
The client and the localization team received the following from us:
- Summary overall feedback;
- Detailed, specific recommendations;
- Processed statistics for each category of holistic and atomistic quality assessment;
- Detailed reports in Excel format for further review or in-depth analysis;
- A complete arbitration history, containing all discussions and decisions made.
Conclusions
The Logrus IT QE portal demonstrated its advantages in this project.
- The quality assessment process with real-time arbitration (involving client representatives, reviewers, and localizers) proved highly effective and valuable. Both the client and the localization team agreed with this conclusion.
- Driven by a clear common goal, all parties exhibited excellent teamwork and professionalism. This greatly facilitated discussions related to systemic issues and optimal approaches for addressing them in future projects, and helped successfully bring the project to completion.
- Despite the limited scope of the testing, positive results were achieved for the game as a whole.
- The joint recommendations from the project included training localizers, expanding glossaries, and providing more detailed context for the most problematic areas.
Even more impressive results could have been achieved by conducting the evaluation directly in the context of the game, which would have required a slightly larger budget. The Logrus IT QE portal can also handle assessments based on real scenarios in the localized game or via screenshots.