Localization Shenanigans in the Chinese Speaking World

[Music] okay uh thank you all for coming uh it's final day of GDC I hope you all had a great week and uh before I start uh uh I want to remind you to turn off your cell phones and would very appreciate if you can fill out the uh questionnaire uh after the talk so uh if you don't know how to pronounce my name you can just call me Johnson is close enough I am not a native English speaker so my English may be wrong sometimes but still I hope I can get most of the points across uh I'm actually a programmer but in recent years I run an uh Indie Dev Meetup called igd share in Taiwan I also run igd Taiwan chapter and co-organized taipe gain developers Forum since 2012 but more importantly regarding this talk I was on a translation team for the official uh traditional Chinese subtitle

for indie game the movie uh but Netflix uh recently messed up our work I will talk about this later so uh I also worked on some of the indie game localizations such as Nova 111 and tangam I helped Global game Jam as the Asia Regional organizer and the traditional Chinese translation volunteer uh and I also roughly do the same translation volunteer thing for uh indicate Festival so let's just start with this very famous uh image I think you all seen this before uh all your base are belong to us suffice to say I'm trying to help stopping the opposite case of this uh because from my personal experience in the past at times I wish I could have helped you know people fix their traditional uh their Chinese localization issues uh gaming is a global Community now and uh not just the players in the US will see crappy or funny localizations like this a lot of games now are being local ized into fast

growing uh non-english-speaking markets especially in Asia where China and Taiwan play a bigger Factor so let's check out some of the questionable Chinese localizations here that we have been exposed to in the past so this example is the traditional Chinese version of Never winter nights uh just by looking at a screenshot here even if you don't know Chinese uh you can still tell there's something wrong the dialog options are obviously duplicated and um there are strange numbers between the sentences but the most iconic thing in this particular screenshot is that the last part of the dialogue reads like this in English originally so I tried to gra to grab her hand her being an old woman but she gave me a kick in a teeth so this kick in a teeth as far as I know is an ediom u meaning that treating you badly when you are in need but the traditional Chinese version mistranslate that into literally a woman that kicks

your teeth so there are hundred things like this in the traditional Chinese version of Never nights and this being the most funny and notable one as a result uh te kicking old woman sort of became the nickname for NE interights in Taiwan so you definitely don't want your localization end up like that I'm going to show you some more background information and the context of this talk and then uh lots of examples Group by category you know general idea and also like simplifi this traditional things uh naming and encoding UI phones and lastly a little bit political stuff and uh then finally some tips and conclusions that can take away so let's look at this uh from a practical point of view first China's market share is huge and growing fast and Taiwan although small in land mass but still the number six on this chart and if you look at the chart carefully

you can you also notice that China has only one color in the bar simply because the chart maker couldn't track down numbers from Android related markets in China and this is the uh year-over-year growth both China and Taiwan is in top five although again uh at a Google place part uh they couldn't check down the number for China and in addition to that uh Taiwan is also an important soft launching region for a lot of developers uh if the game type is suitable it's similar to Australia or New Zealand for the US market so if you want to eventually go to Japan or China chances are that you might want to soft launch in Taiwan and see your result and performances here so these are probably the more convincing and practical reasons why you want to treat the chines localization more seriously now after we've established some reasons you might want to do this let's start to talk about different aspects of Chinese localization I would assume you probably already know this uh simplified uh vs

traditional stuff but uh in Chinese things are things are definitely diversely more different than you would think so this table shows the national language service description in Windows for the various Lang uh Chinese uh systems as you can see it's very confusing to say the least not to mention the spoken language differences such as Mandarin and cantones and you know I used to have to deal with all the UI and phones and encoding and some other stuff so there's a very valid question you can ask uh you may you can ask yourself is is this just too much trouble from my point of view it's perfectly understandable if you choose only one Chinese language to localize if at all also I asked myself the very same question uh why is it worth talking about this and spending time preparing all the materials because uh it's hard for me to see that some of my favorite games especially some of the indie games sort of struggle in this regard also I

often feel like Chinese speaking regions are not that uh well understood by people when I travel abroad and it goes without saying that I was greatly inspired by the Arabic crash course that Ramy gave us uh in GDC 15 now let's just uh dive into some of the actual examples in games and for the first example I want to pull up uh the witness so actually for the winess I am going to talk about three different uh issues of three different issues of different complexities in it the first example here actually is very very straightforward you see five menu buttons in the traditional Chinese version on a screenshot here the first button in English uh is load a game and then uh the traditional Chinese look like this one so if we take that button text in the traditional Chinese version and translate back back into English for you to

understand then becomes download a game so if you uh play the the the witness in traditional Chinese this really sticks out like a sore thumb the game was seven years in the making and very deliberate and dedicated all kinds of ways yet the translation people make this kind of mistakes and the original developer have no way to double check that it just feel like the movie Titanics night sky if you get the Neil deas Tyson and Jim Cameron joke does anyone know that joke okay star the yeah the star is wrong in the sky yeah so another example I want to highlight in the in the game is this one uh it's rather complicated and reflects a few uh issues and as uh also is about one of the game's endings so uh spoiler alert uh in the main ending of the witness you step you step into this elevator thing and you launch it the

game basically will play a sequence of scripted animation of this elevator flying you around the island and the game will also read you a part of diamond Sutra in English and you can see there some uh traditional Chinese translated lines of the diamond Sutra in English on screen there and so the line on this particular on this particular screenshot is a star at dawn then a bubble in a stream a flash of lightning in a summercloud a flickering lamp a phantom and a dream so at at the game's ending as at least for the first time you sort of leave the game and you wake up from the dream so to speak but it's not that simple so actually the fourth paragraph of this diamond Sutra has another sentence in the beginning starting with so you should view this fleeting world as a start down a bubble in the Stream and so on and here here I've extracted uh

extracted the corresponding traditional Chinese counterparts from the screenshots which actually is a secondhand translation directly from the English there and there are a few things I can say about this uh it's a little bit too literal and some uh Mis mistranslation but the most important thing here should be this translation should uh remind the players of diamond Sutra in Chinese so let's look the diamond Sutra as we know it in Chinese it's like totally different and um I've got a color code uh thing here even if you don't read Chinese at all uh you can still sort of understand what corresponds to what so things to note here is first the in-game English version already ignored the first sentence and that first sentence which is grayed out actually is uh sums up pretty nicely for the first and the last Chinese sentence here so actually the Chinese character that corresponds to the in-game English version just those 10 characters in the

middle secondly you also notice that the order of the colorcoded words and sentences is actually different if you recall the screenshot that I just showed each line of diamond Sutra is timed to the animation sequence so you cannot just put the original Diamond sura in English uh into the game as I've mentioned a good localization here is supposed to be um making you think of diamond sura in Chinese because if you don't then an important layer of the meaning of the game would just be lost for people who play in Chinese and you would be a little bit confused about why the ending is this mystical gibberish if you can understand the fact that these lines are from Diamond sura so then you can understand what it's about is actually it actually connects to a few important ideas in the G uh in the in the witness so when I reached the ending for the first time I didn't realize that only after I saw the discussion on Reddit I had a much clearer idea about the endings and

several other smaller crews in the game so at least to me this feels pretty important otherwise why would a developer randomly choose those specific quotes for the ending sequence but as we've as as we have established either you have a translation that's not going to make people think of diamond Sutra in Chinese or when translating you use Diamond Sutra in Chinese originally um but the ending animation sequence would be out of sync if the translator could somehow know he or she was actually translating Diamond Sutra at least there is a chance there's a workable solution could be found uh something like this so you see now uh so I made this and uh you see now all the Carly coded words and the senten are in line with each other and even for the line that's actually not present in the uh Chinese version the sentence in white there a flickering lamp that is actually nowhere to be found in the uh trines version I can still just add that line and not breaking the order so if you're a

Chinese speaking person and you you you've heard of diamond sura before and then you see this version it would just be a lot easier for you to think of the source of the quotes and it's also deliberately uh written in the poem like format although I wouldn't claim the poem quality is good but I think that serves the purpose so in the witness we've uh discussed about uh three different issues first is a very trivial localization error down load a game sometimes things like this happen due to the translator uh doesn't know that domain well or the developer provide insufficient context to work with since a lot of times the translator only get a simple script text file and there are no visual cues no audio cues no explanations and no references but of course I honestly don't know why people would get uh uh they were confus load with download at a secondhand translation issue uh which you definitely want to double check if you're content originates from other cultures or other

countries most other quotes from the audio log in the witness actually already State their Source in game so the translator would have the basic context of the quote but unfortunately the diamond Sutra ending doesn't have the source stated so supplying additional notes or references here definitely will be very helpful for localization process also the important decisions you've already made during the development of your game such as how to make the ending SE sequence based on translated materials like diamond Sutra this might come back to haunt you when you are going to localize the game in the end I would have no idea what other languages can do about it if there isn't a version of diamond Sutra in that particular language already so in the F in the last few slides uh things like uh the things we talked about can actually happen to all kinds of localization process in any language and now I'm more I'm I'm going to more Focus uh on some some of the detailed examples of simplified and

traditional Chinese differences the first uh question you would ask is maybe why uh don't you just use use a converter I will show examples why converter is just not viable so we've just seen the term game uh in Chinese moment ago so I will just use that again now that let's break the two character down the both traditional and simplified Chinese versions The the vocabulary game has two Chinese characters the idea of the second character is uh easier which just means drama and it actually is a onetoone mapping but for the first character both uh play and swim characters are used in traditional Chinese and they have uh different meanings but in simplified the two characters become one and uh so the mapping is many to one in this case which is not viable if you want to do a simplified to traditional conversion okay now this is a bit more complicated here uh there are three

Chinese characters here and we use all three of them in ch uh in traditional they have the same pronunciation the only difference being the last character's tone is different from the former two so what is the big deal among these three characters so now let's do that mapping again first of all this three stroke uh character is used both in traditional Chinese and simplify Chinese meaning interfere or involve the next character the first meaning is dry but uh in simplified it is then mapped into this three stroke character like the one above and when this character forms compound terms uh combined with other Chinese characters um it forms terms like dried fish but when it is combined with a relative term such as sister it means step sister and also stepmother stepf father and so on finally let's talk about this third character it's pretty versatile in

meanings already as you can see uh but then the simplified Chinese version also simplified it into the very same character uh like the ones above and not only that now you can see uh it's really hard not to consider the fword potential and implication here when you see the very same uh character can also be used to describe step relatives yeah so you see some of this funny internet pictures about machine translated sence and in simplified Chinese that look like this and it probably means dried vegetable right this particular f- word confusion won't happen to machine translated traditional Chinese but you know this kicking old woman is just as bad so uh just to recap some of the points we've talked about uh uh simplified BS traditional it goes without saying that the writing of a lot of characters in the simplified Chinese is a lot simpler but also the meaning of the characters are changed or

funneled and is it is not a onetoone or many toone mapping it's rather a many to many mapping considering a lot of the daily vocabularies are different in China Hong Kong and Taiwan making the conversion not really viable both ways you may also say that okay I'm making a game without words and text so localization should not be a problem for me right but that's not true unless your game doesn't even use text for the game title uh which is almost impossible and beware of this issue because it might affect discoverability and also people's perception of the game in the Target uh in the Target regions so the first example is jum blow's another famous title braid which as far as I remember doesn't have any other official names other than the English one when it came out in Taiwan we just called it as as is but in China I think it's some press or uh prominent uh players online started to call this four character term uh that

basically translate back to time and space fantasy or something similar but anyway it's an unofficial name that just caught on in China however in Taiwan if you convert that four character name uh into traditional Chinese that actually is the name for Tales of Fantasia and the later Tales of Series so if you dump that four character uh into Google and search that there would be two different famous game coming up which is rather confusing at times now the second example Pokemon this is going to be particularly interesting one and maybe start to uh get a little bit political so in early 2016 Pokemon company tried to unify name and the logo in the major Chinese speaking markets namely China uh Taiwan and Hong Kong and for their upcoming uh their then upcoming game Pokemon Sun and Moon which released released last year because this was also the first time

they were going to do an official Chinese uh Chinese version of the Pokémon games so they thought they want to fix the name of the game in different regions once and for all so here's the problem Taiwan and Hong Kong have totally uh different names for Pokemon in the past because uh back then in the mid90s Pokemon anime was introduced into both regions independently um although roughly around the same time and the local people have different localizations and it's not even about a game it's just animation and all the different uh Pokemons in the series they mostly have different names between Taiwan and Hong Kong and then the Pokemon company want want want to unify that uh last year so here you don't have to understand what all the Chinese characters uh mean suffice to say now in Chinese speaking worlds these three character these three Chinese character bong uh in bottom maps to Pokémon now

and it's based on Mandarin pronunciation this is an important point so about this specific issue China Market didn't have much influence over it over time in the past because it began with the localization of the anime and China lagged behind Taiwan and Hong Kong in this regard a bit back then and when their Market was eventually exposed to franchise in a big way China more or less settled down with the naming uh from Taiwan the reason is pretty obvious now because Hong Kong have been using canones pronunciation to name the Pokemon and the Taiwan and China both use mainly use Mandarin so the key here is while people in Hong Kong and Taiwan both use traditional Chinese as the writing system you can still end up with potentially face you can uh end up still facing hugely differ uh different uh localizations when trying to do the the the games local Iz ation and the Pokemon company's decision didn't fare well uh

didn't Fair too well for them in Hong Kong some gamers are really baffled by it while while it was supposed to be an unification on naming and uh lots of stuff in Pokemon Hong Kong player were facing the fact that more than half of their beloved Pokemon names which had been used for around 20 years now being changed as a consequence China and Taiwan players were hardly affected by it so this was an act photo for real demonstration against Pokemon's new Chinese version in Hong Kong the slogan on the sign here uh basically say is saying give our Pokemon names back these are kind of things you just cannot be too careful about you know Japanese has uh always been very famous for their carefulness when doing business but but this kind of thing still happen and I doubt they knew this would invoke protests like this as an opposite example some of you might be familiar with the or or or at least heard of the um Mobile Suit gam

and you see Bai has uh basically no problem with it different regions have their own uh official translations so next example I was on a team that helped the official traditional Chinese uh subtitle for indie game the movie and I mentioned that Netflix re uh recently ruined it so the thing is when we decided whether to translate the names or not the main factor for us was is the translation used by the developer or publisher themselves if not is there any local uh is there any local translation that could be verified by big and credible gaming press locally and even to a point that usage is customary or even historical like a legacy name if not we just use the original name in in English or whatever uh is from

but when inan movie was published on Netflix late 2016 Netflix changed almost all the names in our subtitle to use the names they found on Chinese Wikipedia which is almost at all times not official names disrespectful or not the main issue here is going to be discoverability on a storefront uh because if people watching IND movie in Chinese and saw name of the game and couldn't find it on any platforms uh that it's on are you doing any good or maybe you're actually hindering the Discover you hindering the discoverability of the game and there's more to it so let's see how bad the Wikipedia translated names can be using super me boy as the example so let's see what's going on with this uh super Bean uh super me boy's Chinese name the first two character is simple last two characters simple super and boy but the middle two characters that means

carnivorous if you watched indicate in a movie and or seen Edmund talk about this character before you know that it's about the concept of without skin and protection and saying Meat Boy is carers is almost the opposite of the point and in fact when the game was uh published in by Microsoft Studios onto XA for the first time uh they actually did a good job on Chinese localization and give mid boy a cute Chinese name to use the same character twice here is usually usually a way to emphasize the cuteness or in this case it can also mean chubby as well without sabotaging the actual title of the game so the points here are uh if you don't decide on a localized name yourself you are leaving this kind of opportunities to others you should work with your translators on this issue if possible uh because as I said it hinders uh discoverability on the storefront and also the perception of the game in that particular region and unoficial

translations on Wikipedia is actually a real issue here I have no concrete idea how to solve this because uh you actually have no way to uh control you know Wikipedia editing and the next example I'm going to bring up is uh Thumper so back in mid 2016 uh mark uh from drw asked me about the possible Chinese name for Thumper he already knew some things up with uh the Chinese speaking region since his uh his lovely wife is actually from Hong Kong now let's do a small challenge in your mind just for a few seconds if you know a second language other than English uh how and what would you name Thumper in that language do you translate it by pronunciation or by meaning or a bit of both or neither what is the reasoning behind that I hope you

can agree with me that this is actually pretty hard I don't know if it's possible for developers to do this uh to do this but there will be names that are hard to Translate and there are names easy to translate let's just hope that you can land on something that's easier to translate and still being cool and unique in a way so an opposite example to thumer situation uh is this let's take a look at the manifold Garden so sort of at the same time uh mid 2016 uh during early July I invited the developer William back to uh Taiwan and give a talk at our conference which is uh type game developers for in 2016 and he just casually mentioned this to me uh saying that his friend suggested to him that he go with the name uh this four character name which means infinite Garden in Chinese as you can see it's very close to manifold Garden so uh this serves as as an example of uh easy to train translate names and infinite Garden in Chinese still sounds pretty

cool and true to the theme as well so uh William said he probably will go with this name in Chinese of course sometimes there are very good reasons to leave some specific things in your game on unrated on purpose and I don't mean just the title but also other specific terms you created for your game because gameplay or design or aesthetic aesthetic reasons or maybe your translators just couldn't find a good corresponding term in the target language however when it comes to China let me briefly talk about uh China's new policy here since late 2016 basically uh they have a mobile game content regulation citing uh other language related uh regulations in China and as far as I know somehow it is not only enforced on mobile games but also on Console platforms that have branches in China it's either that or there are similar regulations or laws for console and PC game uh that I didn't dug

up like there are several other related laws uh regarding General publication online publication online games uh which more or less have the same context in China so these are the actual title of the regulation if you want to check them out of course there there are no English versions for these documents I only write them down uh I I write those notes down so that uh English speakers can understand if if if there are uh friends here who know more about the specifics of the approval process in China please correct me if I'm wrong as far as I understand the reason why Thumper needed a Chinese name is exactly because of uh it's it's exactly because of those regulations when he asked me about it back then he was trying to get the deal sealed with the approval process in China but in fact Sony had already sent uh names to the process without Mark realizing and uh three of them were

pre-approved so basically he um the developer had to choose one out of those pre uh pre-approved names there was no other options due to uh time constraint uh since it's extremely costly to resubmit the official statement is that the process usually cost one month but what I've been hearing is that uh it's between 3 to 6 months in the worst case so in China uh Thumper is translated to rampaging beo this is sort of an okay name considering the circumstances and uh the other two pre-approved names were even worse so uh another example I want to talk about this uh is uh demo so this game is from a pretty successful game studio in Taiwan called R Arch which is best known for their Rhythm games demo was released on PSV some time ago and during last year they was they were also

trying to get approved in China in order to get approved they translated the game title and also they have to show it next to the original uh title other indie games on PS on the on PSN China had to do this as well including Thumper but for demo there are other stuff further complicated things so you see uh this is the result menu after you finish a song in a game and it originally looked like this and the simplified Chinese version got changed uh to this one interesting thing is that they didn't translate the uh there is a yellow text there hard level8 which is the difficulty of the song they didn't translate instead they just changed it to the corresponding text uh to to L8 and because hard level eight in simplified Chinese is just so much more cluttered visually than the original hard level hard lv8 texts and the approval feedback said if the English text or letters

don't have obvious meanings you can leave them as is but you have to translate everything else so LV uh in this context obviously means level so they said it had to be translated then the approval uh feedback also demanded them to translate all song names but then again it didn't look as good and the song names textures were custom made by artist originally it would be quite impossible to redesign them all in simplified Chinese not to mention that some of the song names don't sound as as good after translation so their compromise was they would show the suggested translation for the song names on top right corner of the screen at one point they were even asked to translate the composer names that will be shown in another menu but the composer names a lot of composer names actually are invented words that that is not uh uh even translatable and even if

they're even if they are translatable a lot of times composer names serves as a unique trademark for them and should be universally used it would be a huge problem for rhythm games if the translation is enforced fortunately the approval uh people in China finally understood that and dropped the topic for the composer names so uh a few things here first I think negoti negotiations during the uh the approval process is also uh is almost unavoidable and also the AO uh the approval feedback could still be reasonable in the end but you need to uh be prepare be prepared for several back and forth discussions that take up a lot of time and you need to put effort into modifying stuff other than the usual things you already have to do when doing General localization since every game is different though there are guidelines you can check out uh it is still hard to tell if your specific case will be

approved or not in in advance and I'm not even talking about other parts of the regulations they are just so much more detailed but up to interpretation not exhaustive or not exhaustive stuff uh so all that is already out of scope of this talk so I'll just stop there in short suffice to say if you want to release on mobile or console in China find a good publisher and uh in the case of SRA and demo that I just talked about basically it's Sony helping them dealing with all this approval and feedback process okay so go back to easier stuff encoding now nowadays this should not be a problem anymore because you should be able to just stick to utf8 at all times but uh just watch out for this bite order Mark thing that only windows has when I was helping in a movie during the doing the

subtitle at some point during their text processing the encoding was somehow changed into us ucs2 utf16 and we didn't realize that and made a mess for a little while another big issue turned out to be that when utf16 and the ucs2 text were being integrated into the Indie G movie uh movie player on Steam there was a forced replacement of all Carriage returns with line fees and because of the fact that utf16 characters uh are multipied fixed length encoding the Zer DS uh and Zer A's which are uh which were uh Carriage returns and uh line feeds in ASI were also used by multi-b Chinese characters in UTF 16 so the Force replacement ruined a very small portion of the subtitle that's what's being shown here and we we didn't even notice that before uh it got released on Steam so we

have to fix that afterwards very quickly so I think the takeaway is that always check every related options options in all the editors you might uh touch during the development process unless uh I mean you usually it's not just uh you uh it's all the people on the team some people may do texts most PR programmatically and some people may use you know different editors because of specific reasons and best stuff can happen and hide within all the sorts of places you might not think of so basically utfa all the way now this is a big deal here you are in phone issues here's the menu of scull the Shogun in simplified Chinese version on Google Play of course the game it was uh itself was great but at the first glance at this screenshot even if you don't read Chinese you you should still notice there are serif and sense serif phon mix up with each other under no circumstances you should should you do

that and it's just strange why this was published as is of course the original developer 17 bit was not responsible for this I think another Studio ported Android version for them but again the point here is just that even if you don't read Chinese you should still be able to see the problem the second problem is also pretty common when you try to localize into Chinese you see the button text uh is already quite small on the uh top left but let me just show you the Chinese version so uh the button on top left corner are like you know totally unreadable so two things here Chinese characters just have a higher stroke density it's a fact so when you use small fonts English versions may still be readable but there's going to be some chance that the Chinese version will be unreadable just like this moreover maybe because of the scale of the phone settings or uh just different the phone settings just

different between uh different uh phone files when you want to draw it using the API calls uh say I want the texture the text the text texture to be generated from this 24 Point glyph the end result might not be the same uh using different phones so like in one phone the 24 Point character is like big than the other one and another example here is from the game FZ this is from the English PC version you see all the pixel art characters are very cool and sliek but now the traditional Chinese PC version just by uh changing it into a pretty standard sensitive Fone there you start you start to feel that there's a conflict in style with the escape button down there already and now let's see the original Xbox 360 version of Fez which was an earlier release they used a different

Chinese phone back then and this particular phone was sort of an equivalence of comic sense uh in Chinese which although was kind of cute I I just don't think they are a good fit for Fez in my opinion it's also worth noting that the different phones were chosen for different platform releases of course there could be multiple reasons uh why they did this such as the phone license was exclusive for 360 version we don't know but this is also a real problem we are trying to localize in for multiple platforms because you might need different you under certain certain circumstance you might need different phones on different platforms and also you see this spacing between the punctuation marks and other Chinese characters and also the line Heights everything just so you know cluttered and making quite hard to read this can this can also happen to a lot of localization process and it's quite technical because you you need to understand the effect uh and the the details of typography information from a

true type phone and such and the different phones for different languages can just throw you off in all kinds of ways so finally some general concerns about Chinese phone themselves the biggest problem we Face collectively is that the pricing is just so steep uh I have an actual quote from the Taiwanese phone company so if you want to embed a a phont into your distribution for one font they were charging it for 10 uh $10,000 us per product per platform it's just crazy and also there's a lack of choice most of most of the time you are left only with two standard Choice which is a standard looking Ser font and a standard looking sense Ser phont because Chinese phon are just hard to make you know like asky 128 characters is

pretty easy right you you can have thousands of phone choices and also you know you can have things like windings but for a Chinese phone uh to have general purpose usefulness it has to say at least have 5,000 different characters and the average design difficulty for each character is also way higher and to keep a lower cost on this especially for Indie Developers usually you would have to rely on system phones you know calling from OS specific apis and it can be very hard to unify the looks and style across platform although I have to say the default sens Ser F nowadays on uh different platforms actually look more and more like each other nowadays so if you only need a style neutral sens Ser font you may be able to get away with just using the the always default uh phone but if for any reason you need a free

and embeddable Chinese phone for your game for CIF you can try uh hanazono mcho which is a Japanese Academia produced phone originally intended for Buddhism research I think it is also covers all Chinese Japanese and Korean characters and for sensitive style I think the best uh the best one currently is the Google notal sense cjk series uh cjk stands for Chinese Japanese and Korean it was it was a a brilliant collaboration between Google and Adobe there's also open- Source phone uh project called wi Tren e in China and they started the project many many years ago and it's also quite popular but W TR e is licensed under GPL so there may be uh GPL complication uh implications and just for the sake of being thorough uh when it comes to fonts there are also font glyph design differences so the phone glyphs here on the left side are designed in Taiwan and the ones on the right side are designed

in China and this is not about simplify or traditional differences basically what I'm saying is uh there are phones more suitable for Taiwan and some phones more suitable for China uh but actually it probably won't affect your game in any way if you really are interested in knowing more about this stuff you can try looking into there's a book called cjkv information processing published by O'Reilly and the last category of issues uh it's you know political and going to be pretty fun although we've already seen a bit of this from the Pokemon thing so uh back in early 2016 in Taiwan this is actually pretty huge Street Fighter 5 came out back then and uh you know what can possibly be political about Street Fighter 5 but as you recall Street Fighter 5 uh has been developed

and promoted as an esport focused video game and uh they were doing all kinds of official push for Street Fighter 5 Esports in a way that is never seen before in the series now locked in players can choose their own nationality to represent themselves on or or their country and of course national flag system was also designed but when it comes to Taiwan you if you ever watched the Olympics or you know some of the baseball World Cup games before you might recognize this flag as Chinese Taipei flag which is a flag that is Taiwan is forced to use in actual international sports events but even then there is something off about this flag it's a mash up by Capcom people using Chinese type flag and their own trademark I mean what the flying f is this ke gone a very famous uh Taiwanese Street

Fighter player gamer B uh and a lot of Taiwanese other Taiwanese players tried to send comp uh complaints about this but Capcom just gave a sorry not sorry answer this is fairly new to winning 1117 also came out last year uh or as you note here Pro Evolution Soccer actually uh they really put into some serious effort for Chinese speaking regions the game has complete Mandarin and Canon's voice over which is actually pretty fun when you imagine Anchorman shouting in canones but they also did this if you choose Taiwan in a country options it will warn you about not being able to attend any International games uh you know as a Taiwanese gamer I can only see I can only say that this games realism is impeccable so uh lastly this example just came out a few months ago Yakuza 6 was uh Yakuza 6 has a

Taiwanese Hostess that you can meet up one particular dialogue is about her Homeland and this was the line when Yakuza 6 came out originally what is your impression of the country of Taiwan there is no English version of Yakuza 6 now so that's just my translation as a result a lot of Taiwanese Gamers were very proud of Sega at the time but not long after the screenshot was posted online and begin to circulate some of the prominent uh prominent internet personality in China started to raise this issue and basically Sega bailed out so about a week later the line became uh you know like this and uh from a production point of view let's just be neutral about it from a production point of view if you make mistakes like this mistakes like this uh this is not just text changes you know you have also to change the voice over as well in just in a few

days however fun fact Yakuza 6 isn't even released in China yet there is no simplified Chinese version as of now and as a matter of fact the whole Yakuza Series has never been officially released in China ever in the past somehow Sega had to employ self-censorship over this so I guess this is quite interesting uh this is kind of things you have you might run into when doing localization in Chinese so now let me just quickly summ summarize a few tips and conclusions so uh I've noticed uh this on a few occasions in the past there is this uh One symptom you can easily recognize if your Chinese localization is machine translated so what you see here is the option menu from Scoles the Shogun in the simplified Chinese version on Google Play the option being uh highlight here is is the language setting option the last the last character in

that three character term uh is is run meaning person and the language option should not be something person right and another language uh Choice it's a four character word uh if you see that particular character in the uh at the end of a Chinese word it either means off something or it's an empty word following a verb or an adjective and uh still the language option should not be like that so if your language choices have something similar to those you know it's almost certainly uh machine translated and by extension other parts of your localization may be machine translated as well so you better do something about it and just for just for your information if you don't know yet the term simplify Chinese written in simplified Chinese look like that and the traditional Chinese Written In traditional Chinese look like that so so uh this is what your language options should look like also I talked about the converter

issues between simplify and traditional Chinese you don't want your translator ever to using to be using converters although if you don't know Chinese you cannot check if they use the converters uh but actually that's not true uh what I'm going to propose here my sound a little bit stupid but actually you can find your own uh converter online there are uh uh ones with English uh interfaces on the web you can find the converter online and use that yourself and try to compare a small portion of the text from traditional and simplified Chinese versions of your game you know better to test uh a few longer sentences it should be pretty obvious uh if they would uh if they are autoc converted because they would look the same as your output uh from the converter you just used and you can then decide if something needs to be done about it like find another localization service or

something but if you just want to check if your traditional Chinese localization is converted from simplified there is a very simple way to tell that so if your traditional Chinese menu has this term which is restaurant menu then this is 100% guaranteed a direct conversion from simplified Chinese because the term is simply used like uh simply used like that in China this a sort of a legacy term but both Taiwan and Hong Kong don't use that of course unless you're making a restaurant game so uh next you have to know who you are working with uh be sure to ask your localization service translator or Publishers to make sure whether they are doing simplified or Trad or traditional Chinese or both best case best case scenario they should have different people dedicated to simplified and traditional separately and please do not say just you know we have that in Chinese simplify or traditional you have to specify otherwise is what it's just confusing if I see a game saying we

support Chinese then when I started playing the game I will assume that I'm going to uh see traditional Chinese myself but if it shows up in simplified Chinese that actually can be a little bit annoying and actually it's vice versa if you are um if you are uh using mainly simplify Chinese and you see a game called saying we have it in Chinese and uh when it comes up it's traditional it will also feel you know a little bit disre uh disrespectful or you know Annoying also as a general idea work with your localization service and or translators provide them with enough context and references to work with uh get them hands on your game if you have watched the movie arrival you would get idea what what means what it means to be you know on the scene uh if you haven't watched the movie arrival go watch

it a full spread a spreadsheet full of just ingame texts can sometimes be very hard to work with provide explanations for invented terms or special usages specify quote sources uh joke sources uh spe specify when you can allow translators to deviate from your original text to better fit a target audience things like that and uh fan translations not saying that you should solely rely on this but it can actually happen for example there's a fan translated traditional Chinese version of the manual for the game keep talking and nobody explodes which is like a 20 or 30 pages of PDF and also uh one friend of mine in Taiwan helped unepic uh with it all its traditional Chinese translation 60 years ago just because he loved on Epic so much and happened to be a very professional translator

himself and again uh in my opinion political stuff A lot of times is not avoidable as a few examples I've brought up today what I'm trying to do here is present the situation to you and uh put these issues up on the table I think at least this is beginning this is a beginning for uh further communication I'm perfectly comfortable with the possibility that all of you decide that you don't want to deal with ch Chinese localization anymore or maybe you want to just give up on traditional Chinese and Taiwanese players uh in the future but at least that's not a that's now that's not a decision from insufficient information I just want people to really recognize and understand that that's all uh finally we all know this is not easy at all uh and as a game developer it's difficult not to uh have the sentiment of like like uh if only all people speak the same

language so as the final point I want to make today uh is that uh different languages and different cultures lead to diversity and uniqueness and I think they are uh The crucial parts of innovation in games as art and games as media so we can have more and more exciting new games in the future every time I come to GDC it's uh I'm always so impressed with the diversity and the inclusiveness here I hope this talk brought to you more insights uh into Chinese speaking regions and more understanding of our situation uh a quick shout out to these friends who have being a great help during the preparation of this talk and thank you please feel free if you want to ask any questions you can line up to the microphone there I think hi okay so uh my question is regarding uh the recent legislation uh for no foreign

language in uh in Chinese game um so uh specifically regarding uh credits and license text sometimes there's license like legal license texts for software like an Apache license that you include in your credits um is that generally just fine to have that verbatim in English as the original legal text was presented that you're required or is there going to be usually problems with credits and then also like English names and things like that uh so for I think for documents that is not actually in the uh the final version of the game I think uh it's so this would be like credits that are displayed in the game like when during credits and like the license text it's it's in the game it's not a part of the game play but it is in the game so uh from my understanding there are some exceptions to this like uh they will give exceptions to some of the technical uh like the

license documents do you talking about uh so from my uh friends experiences before they said there are some uh exceptions you can maybe tackle but uh the problem is that you really have to just you know negotiate and uh try to get uh uh you know go through this whole feedback and approval process cool thank you hi and firstly I'm here to say sorry about the prion s example because I'm from the prion team so just say sorry I didn't let you in the international competition I remember there was a serious discussion going about the definition of international competition so um so so sorry I I don't I don't think this is national competition I think it's just I want to uh present this uh situation to you guys because I don't think a lot of people actually

really know that you know right yeah so okay my question is about the approv process actually um and I my basic understanding is that the government is checking if the all the uh known uh Chinese context are translated into Chinese language um do they even check like uh if the like all the terms in the game is a equivalent to what's common in Chinese I mean like uh we are dealing with lots of football player names uh for example and then we don't know like uh what Like official uh translated Chinese name for each player so um we're now struggling with that and uh uh my my question is just uh do they even check they like uh check the Pokemon uh example like uh that was different from what you use uh uh in uh um usually in your country I I don't think they will check that no yeah I don't I don't think

so okay so they they uh basically check if the uh context is translated in Chinese like other context Yeah so basically if you want to translate I think they are like uh people's names or spe specific terms that may uh may be used in China already things like that I think uh either you can look up those and [Music] I so I think if it's not uh well you got me there so so like you know uh official translation for the uh supports players name things like that I don't think those will be

enforced by the China government right are it may be enforced by representatives of or maybe it's not reinforced it it can be just that if you have a name uh that is uh not a common ones people would not get recognize okay but I I don't think that will get you blocked during the approval process okay yes okay thank you very much okay okay oh sorry uh so uh if you have other questions you can just uh come uh up front and uh thank you for your time today and hope you have have a yeah thank you very much