Localizing Bungie's Destiny for the World

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whatever it was I guess your data if you love Enid monkey only needs so welcome my name is Tom Slattery I am the localization manager at Bungie and I'm here today to talk about how we delivered the universe of destiny into the hands of millions of players in a way that would hopefully make them feel like it was one that was created for them so there's four main topics that I want to talk about today the first one is how we went about building a world that would not only be as immersive as possible for everyone playing the game no matter what language they were playing in or where they were in the world but also one that would be easy for us to create and maintain the second thing that I'm going to talk about is what we did beyond that in terms of supporting the localized player experience the things that we did to to make the game even better for for players and other languages even though

we didn't need to do them for English the third thing I'm just going to touch on briefly but was our approach to localization for web and mobile destiny has a mobile companion that is spread across web iOS and Android so we also had to think about localization for that and I think there's some things that we did there that are kind of interesting and possibly applicable to other people so I want to touch briefly on that and then the last thing is our approached Staffing for localization on destiny what we did why we did it and what it little allowed us to accomplish so how do you build a world for the entire world we have some unique challenges with destiny one of the first things that we had to think about was the fact that the setting is essentially a real world setting obviously if you play destiny it's set in the future there's gratuitous space magic but it's it's our solar system it's the real the real world parts of the game take place on earth albeit in the future so if you

have a fantasy series something that's completely made up like take dune or Game of Thrones it's set on a world that doesn't really exist you can kind of suspend disbelief you can have everyone speaking English and that works in destiny it's set on earth and in in in our solar system we have a real world in our real world has real languages so we have to be consistent with reality while also making the experience work for the players who are playing it the other challenge is that it's a shared universe so in destiny you could potentially be playing in the same place in the same space with someone else who's playing the game in a different language in a different country so we always had to keep that in mind too so one of the philosophical questions that pops up as soon as you start thinking about that when you have players that are occupying the same spaces is do they see the world in the same way how do their eyes perceive it do they see the same thing when they look at it and the answer at least for destiny is yes we decided very

early on the decision was actually made before I started at Bungie that we wouldn't localize any art assets we wouldn't localize any textures or graphics in the game and that wasn't to say that we would just give a decidedly American gesture to everyone playing in other languages it just meant that we were gonna take a very calculated approach and how we built the world so that we wouldn't need to so why did we do that there's a few reasons the obvious first one is the resource drain there's a cost associated with creating those extra assets and I don't just mean a cost in terms of like dollars and cents cost there's a cost to the project in any project you have limited amounts of time resources in terms of you know people artists and and money so when you think about how you're going to use that all things being equal personally I would rather have an artist spend his or her time making more cool things to put in the game or polishing the stuff that's in there rather than creating the same rusty sign in seven languages and I'm a local guy so I usually get off on that stuff but beyond

that there's also a couple of very concrete reasons why we decided that it wouldn't make sense for us to localize art the the first one is what I touched on before it's a shared universe so players exist in the same space and the moment that you show two players who are in the same virtual space different things you're essentially lying to those players there's a glitch in the matrix it's an inconsistent world and we didn't want to create an inconsistent world we wanted to create a persistent universe that was believable so you can imagine a situation if you've played destiny strikes are our basically cooperative repeatable missions that you can jump in and play with friends over and over so you can imagine a situation where on a Friday night I ping my buddy in Japan and and you know he gets on and we jump into a strike together and we're playing and we get to a certain point where he's like okay I need you to focus on that guy with the red dots on his armor I'm gonna go take care of those other dudes and I'm like dude I have absolutely no

where are you what's going on I don't even see a guy with red dots on it but this Stars and Stripes guy's kicking my ass so you can think of situations like that I mean obviously that's a little bit exaggerated but you could think of things like a sign on the top of a building that you're using as a waypoint or maybe you get separated from your friend and you're trying to describe the things you see so you you spell off you know a logo that's on the side of a building or something like that and those sorts of things are where it breaks down when you have players in the same space the other reason is again something I touched on before the real-world setting and also the fiction that builds off of that so for example parts of the game take place in old Russia when you're in old Russia obviously signs are in Russian because that's what they speak in Russia and there's also a fictional backstory behind the other destinations that you go to in the game so fictionally and destiny there is a base on the moon and that was developed

by china so all the signage for the moon base is in Chinese we also have colonies that are on Mars and Venus and these are fictionally english-speaking colonies so all the signage there is in English the one thing that I would point out there is it's it's very easy to fall into the trap of being an American developer or being someone who only speaks English and naturally just wanting to make everything fictionally English because it's easier if that were the case throughout the entire game the end result for players is that it still is going to feel like a half localized experience you might be able to justify at fictionally all you want but when you jump into the game playing in French and you're seeing everything you look at in English it doesn't really jive so the way that it actually turned out in our game you start off initially in old Russia and then you go to the moon so you're getting this progression of Russian text on signs and then Chinese text on signs and by the time you make it to Mars and Venus as a player you've

kind of been trained you know that that information is not gameplay relevant you know that you don't need to pay attention to the signs that it's basically decoration so it builds the atmosphere in fiction of the world but it still doesn't give that impression that we just didn't localize it because we didn't want to it's clear that it's an intentional fictional decision so there were of course some challenges associated with this one of the big ones is working with text in languages that you don't have support for is very difficult and just about everything that can go wrong will and did so we had things like concept artists who decided to go off and they wanted to make some Chinese concept art so they pulled out Chinese propaganda posters on Google started picking characters at random you know nothing that actually was problematic it was just gibberish but the kind of thing that makes you really nervous we had things where maybe something like that happened and then the designer actually provided an updated version for artists to implement that had correct Chinese or Russian text

on it but the artist who went to implement it noticed it was different from the original concept are in corrected effect to what it was or that sort of thing we also had Russian signage for example where the text got flipped upside down or backwards which is a really easy mistake to make because Russian is basically just like the English alphabet with half the characters turned backwards but if you don't speak Russian it's really hard to notice that sort of thing so we ended up in the end having to go through and have testers take screenshots in the environment of every instance of foreign language text and send it off for review through professional Russian and Chinese game translators to make sure that everything worked in context was implemented correctly and wasn't offensive which was another problem we encountered because it turns out you might have something that's perfectly fine but then you put some dirt and rust on the sign and cover up a few characters and suddenly it says something different like you could imagine in English a sign that said wanted assassin where the end of the

word gets a little bit obscured and it says something very different so yeah we have those kind of problems um quite a few actually that we had to fix another problem that we had was something like I mentioned before having mostly english-speaking developers there's sort of this bias this natural tendency to go English with everything so there was English everywhere in the game yeah we had things like people wanting to put English translations on all the signs that were in other languages or just wanting to put English signs everywhere because they wanted more text and the biggest challenge of all was the tower if you if you haven't played destiny the tower is sort of our hub space our social space where players go back between missions so in the early versions of the tower we had essentially guideposts that would tell you where all of the things in the tower were there was no mini-map or anything like that so your only way of really getting information about where things were other than exploring the whole space was

to go up to the signs and read them so early on this is an early concept that we had the design of the tower has gone through a lot of iteration over the past few years before launch so at this point in time the tower contained three different sectors basically that we had called the under watch the military district and the bazaar and each of these areas had different factions in it each one was associated with a different player class so you know the hangout for the titans was in the under watch and that sort of thing so the basic art that they had graded for that was a big capital letter that was the first letter of the name of the section so you for under watch which makes perfect sense when you're playing in English and the word for under watch starts with a u then the name of it mean English underneath and the list of all the the NPC's and vendors and things that you could find in that area which again if you're playing in any other language than English isn't really helpful because none of that means anything the names of those areas are going to be translated so under watch

won't be under watch the names of the classes have been translated so Titans aren't necessarily Titans it's basically just not helpful and if that's the only way that players are getting that information then you're basically failing to convey important gameplay information to other players and other languages so we took another stab at it and this was the next iteration of that where we said okay we can't use the acronym approach we can't take the first letter of each one let's just call these sectors like sector a B and C because that makes sense to anyone who sees it so this is you know sector B here which is the military district to the former military district let's just put all the languages on there so let's just translate it into all the languages that we support in destiny and throw all those on a sign and this is Google translation by the way so if the thing in Russian says something offensive I'm very sorry I should probably check that but but there's some problems with this too you've got a whole bunch of languages which makes it really difficult as a player to walk up to the

sign and get the information that you need like even even in this example I think there's six here but if you're looking at six different languages that say the same thing it's a lot of information you kinda have to scan through and go oh oh there's the one I can read that's the little tidbit of information I need it's also not sustainable right like if we want to add more languages over time if we you know tomorrow decided to add another language to Destiny we'd have to go through and either update all this art or not provide that information to players in that language which would be kind of terrible and what do you do if we end up with like ten or twelve languages then suddenly you can't even squeeze that much stuff onto a sign so we didn't really like that approach artistically I mean the art team also just didn't like it because it's messy it doesn't look good so some challenging problems there the other problem that I mentioned was English everywhere and that was something that we very much had in the tower this is an example of a very early build one of my favorite games when I started working at Bungie was the proper

new build every morning and go into the tower and see how much more English text the artist had put all over everything so this is actually from an email I used to take screenshots and some to my manager who used to handle localization of Bungie and invent and and get angry obviously you can tell I'm a look guy this was a build before our character heads were rendering so I'm running around in the tower my character has no head and the thing that I'm really upset about is the tiny little wording beneath the picture on the sign but this is an example where that one might be kind of hard to read up there but it says new monarchy new monarchy is is one of the factions in destiny but in other languages it's not new monarchy and French it might be Nouveau monarchy or something I don't actually speak French and it's also just kind of it breaks immersion it's it's weird that you're you're playing the game for example in German you're in the tower all the characters are speaking German all the signs are in English it doesn't really make sense like fictionally if you're playing the game in Italian for you the

tower is an Italian space the characters speak Italian so you would want things to be in Italian right so how do we solve this we've got this decision that we're not going to localize any art we've got a setting that contains a mix of languages we've got this tower that's a kind of complex problem where we need to make make it feel like home for everyone how do we go about setting rules to make sure that everybody has a good experience the first is do not communicate any important information through text and graphics so there can't be anything like a this way sign like the the guideposts are a good example any information like that that needs to be communicated to players needs to be communicated in some other way so through the UI which can be localized through dialogue through some kind of visual cues in the environment that give that information to players without spelling it out next is avoiding what I call Anglo centrist ISM this is the thing that I was talking about before that trap that it's really easy to fall into when you

only speak a particular language don't don't just put everything in English try to show I mean we have a world that has diversity of language so show that in the game try to try to show that we have multiple languages in this universe where ever you can avoid putting English translation on things just because you can the the problem with that is that same thing where suddenly instead of having this diversity of language you're showing again that this is a game that was made for people who speak English but you know you can play it too and that's not the impression that we want to give people and also just don't use English text where you don't have to I mean it's fine if there's some text here in there but if it's everywhere it starts to be that constant reminder that sort of constant slap in the face reminder that this game wasn't really made for you the third which is very important was solving the problem of how to make the tower feel like home for everyone because again the tower is our it's our hub space it's fictionally

where all of the characters which we call guardians are from that's where they live it's your home and it would be very strange to return home and find a place where you didn't really feel like you've felt a part of the community you know it wasn't it wasn't for you so we needed to make it feel like an international space somehow we need to make to give all players the impression that this is not just they a place where English speakers live this is a place that is filled with a lot of different people it's the last city on earth so it makes sense that there's a cultural mix there forth this is the one I mentioned before absolutely avoid defacing or obscuring text on signs we had quite a few issues with this and we eventually just made the rule that any text in a foreign language or English on a sign needed to be kept the way that it was originally created and not not covered up in any way that could make it say something else it's very important in this situation because if you make the decision not to localize art even if you're just putting up signs in

English you need to make sure that that English text doesn't mean genitalia in Italian or that sort of thing you need to run each each example of signage through all of the languages you support to make sure that it works for them and finally no references to the English terminology things like taking the the first letter of the term in English which may not be the same in another language or or putting the names of affections up on signs where that that name would actually be something different in another language so there are some things that we purposefully decided that we would not localize like the weapon foundry names the names of our NPC's in the game that are the same across all languages and give us things that are safe to use but for the most part all terminology in the game gets localized almost this is my badge of shame this is my one big localization fail on destiny this was already on a t-shirt in our store when I started working at Bungie so it was kind of a little bit too late as all over the tower but uh this this is the logo for

one of our other factions called the future war cult and obviously the logo is an acronym for a future war cult you can probably imagine translating future war cult into seven other languages in a way that preserves the meaning and also happens to start with the initials fw c is not achievable so some languages fared a little better than others but fw c only really works for a couple of them so most of our languages the the logo here doesn't actually match the the term for the faction name and that's kind of sad if you're a localization person we do if you've played the game there's also an alternate logo which is just the F and one of the you know solutions I propose to try to mitigate that in the future is let's just try to use that one where we can because that does work for most languages future in most European languages still starts with an F so that one doesn't feel as off as fw c so how do we go about solving all of the problems in the tower one thing that we

did was pull out information that we needed into the UI so like I said before originally we had no map in the tower the only way you were getting the information about where things or was to go look at those guideposts so we actually pulled that out and we did implement a map and the map is all UI so we're able to localize that and provide that information to players and in all languages so you can pull up a map of the tower see what the different areas are called see what the different vendors and things are in that space so any of that critical information needs to go in there you can't rely on the environment art to provide that to players another thing we did was try to lean on iconography wherever we can so teach players what what icons mean and then use those rather than putting the text for it so this is the the final new monarchy faction space in the tower that we actually shipped and you can see on the left it still has that that triangular logo for new monarchy but instead of say new monarchy under it it just stops there and players know that because they've seen that symbol a lot they know it's associated with the faction there's no reason to put a sign

on the wall another thing that we did to cut down just on the amount of English text one of the problems with cutting out all text together is human beings use text so if you just cut all of the text out of an environment it starts to feel fake it doesn't feel like a real inhabited human space so part of the pushback that I got from the artistic side on removing text was just that they still wanted to be able to use text in their designs to make the space look inhabited so one of the things that we did was try to find things that were globally palatable so for example the names of the weapon foundries like I mentioned we kept the same across all languages we made sure that those names would work in all the languages we were shipping so things you can see in that image like oval lawn and Saros those are some of our our weapon foundries and we used a lot of those on labels and things too to just add some text for decoration we also use things like industrial gibberish so just numbers and letters that don't mean anything you know labels

on a crate so that it feels like a real object but it doesn't necessarily say something it doesn't remind people that it it's all English because it it's not it's just numbers and letters Latin is also easy to fall back on because Latin is just cool and nobody knows what it says and they use our v's and it's you know it's Latin so we put a little of that in there too in places and we did actually go back to using some multilingual signage so this is how that that guidepost ended up in the final tower we don't rely on it anymore it's basically just decorative because there's a map you can you can find out where the stuff is without reading this but artistically we just decided to narrow it down to three languages we just went with English Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese so it does it does what we want it accomplishes the the idea of telling people this is an international space there are not only English speakers here or only speakers of whatever language you're playing the game in and hearing this is a space inhabited by lots of different people

but it also solves the problem of us not needing to redo all of the art if we ever add another language or anything like that so how did we arrive at those decisions well mostly through a lot of challenging compromise and I think that's an important it's important to have those healthy discussions about what's important for localization but then what does that mean in terms of art or story or that sort of thing so a lot of these decisions came about after a lot of discussion with a lot of people so one example of that is the what we call the human colonial palette the the set of textures that gets used on Venus and Mars where all the text is English like I said before if if that had been the decision for everything that every space in the game was just fictionally English that wouldn't have worked and I would have protested that decision but because because of the way we present this in the game it works and so I think this was a good place to just say you know what it's okay that both of those spaces are English because it's not really a problem the way it is right now

another example is the multilingual tower signage that was a compromise in the end of going back and forth having having a lot of discussions with the art team about what looks good and and what's what's sustainable and things like that and we ended up with something that I think accomplishes what both sides wanted which is giving that impression of a multicultural society that lives in the city but but also not putting every single language on the wall another one that I hadn't talked about was we used to have a lot of text on our weapons that was another thing I used to take screenshots of all the time and send in angry emails all English of course but you'd get things that were literally in your face almost every scope on every gun had English text on it that was very often associated with the city things like city Armory blah blah blah so again it's it's feeding that impression that the city is an english-speaking city which doesn't jive with what people are getting when they're playing the game in another language so we've looked at that and we ended up making pretty good

compromises we tried to pull it off where it was extremely visible like that we left some text in places there's things like on the safety of a weapon F and s for fire and safe are used generally by International weapons manufacturers so it's normal to see that even though it's English so we kept things like that and we didn't remove all of the text because there's some weapons that have you know the names of the the weapon manufacturers which some of those are not English words so you get a nice mix and it's not all over the place so we did cut out a lot of it we tried to remove anything that fictionally wouldn't work in in relation to the tower in the city but but we left some of it and another one that was kind of similar was the opening cinematic for the game so if you've played destiny there's this opening movie which you're about to see where there's some astronauts walking on Mars and it has text in it and our initial plan was just to render out the video in seven languages and everything was fine and we

did that it wasn't gonna be a problem and then all the sudden at one point we didn't have enough space on disk and it was a problem so of course the the art team said yeah you're gonna have to subtitle that and I said well what we could do that but then again this is the first thing that players see when they pop in the game is this opening movie and the impression that they're going to get is this is a game that was made for English speakers and I have to watch it with subtitles which is not a very good impression so the compromise that we made was to alter the artistic direction of the video a little bit to work in multiple languages again just a sampling but where it would appear to be an artistic choice and players who spoke one of the languages that were in there would would be getting that information through there and players for the other languages where we did have to throw in a subtitle what think that it was oh well this is just an American game and that's why it's this way it's oh well this is the artistic direction and they have these three languages in there but they're providing this information because not all players speak those languages so

here's where we landed in the end [Music] so I mean we don't really explain it and as a player you can sort of interpret that however you want there's three astronauts there's three languages maybe they're from different countries and speak different languages it's kind of up to you to interpret but it solved the problem it didn't make the first thing that players see in English only experience so I basically told you that I was gonna give a talk about localizing destiny and I've spent half an hour basically explaining how we didn't localize destiny so I'm gonna actually switch modes now and talk about the things that we did do how how did we go about making the game better for players and other languages so one of the big differences between destiny and the games that Bungie had been making like

Halo was that you can create your own character and invest very very deeply in it so in Halo your Master Chief Master Chief was you master chief was a dude in destiny you don't have to be a dude you can create a character you can choose your your race your class your perks your weapons your gear and your gender so if your player playing the game in English the gender choice doesn't really have a lot of impact it changes the voice for your character it changes your model but that's basically it's a it's a cosmetic decision in other languages that's not the case especially for Romance languages like French Italian Spanish Portuguese the very concept of gender is built into the language in the grammar so once you make that decision to play a female character you suddenly need things to be said differently about your character than they would be if you were playing a male character so as an

example here is French so the English term Guardian in French you've got you've got look and you've got LA there's no gender-neutral way to refer to a guardian you're either a male guardian or you're a female Guardian same thing with like class names you've got hunter is a sewer or sha SUSE so we basically are presented with a choice we can either stick our head in the sand here and just ignore that this problem even exists and just refer to everyone as a dude or we can in meant things to actually support and affirm the choice that we've allowed players to make and that sounded more difficult so we went with that so here's a quick example in Italian probably a little bit subtle and hard to pick up if you don't speak Italian but Italian the male version of Guardian is Guardian no and the female version is Guardian now so depending on which gender character you're playing the other NPCs and the

tower will actually address you with the correct gender so in terms of implementation how we went about doing that there's there's better and worse ways to do it we wanted to do it in a way that wouldn't have huge like memory impacts we didn't want to do anything dumb like just duplicate the set of lines that are used for male players to female and if one of them needed to be different put a different wave file in like that would waste a lot of space so for actual implementation what we did was we have dialogue sequences in our game so for a given dialogue sequence we look through each language and for any line in that sequence if even one language needs a female version of a line we create a branch node so that line of dialogue will branch for male and female so if you're looking at this example here English English we generally don't use this so the English dialogue sequence it has a branch for male and female on the second line but it doesn't doesn't actually use that it's the same as the male line for the French dialogue sequence it does so on the English one all it does on the female or I'm sorry

the female node is just point to the male line so if there's not a duplicate it's just referencing the other the other dialogue event and then for the other lines where there were no female versions you just have a single node single line of dialogue and then at runtime we filter based on the cause of the trigger of that dialogue events which is generally the players character so we look at the gender of the cause and play the correct line so a lot of games don't do this most games actually don't do this but we thought it was very important because that idea of creating and investing in your character is fundamental to destiny you put a lot of time into building that character and actually I talked to a lot of people I talked to a lot of gamer friends European friends translators and whatnot about their own feelings and the thing that I just kept hearing over and over again was yeah most games don't do this but whenever I play a game and I choose a female

character and it actually respects that I just think it's so awesome and we wanted to be awesome so we've supported this throughout our entire game in the dialogue system so anywhere from random random NPC lines to two-story a mission dialogue that sort of thing if you're playing a female character that should actually be respected and if it's not it's a bug and please tell me about it the other thing that we did initially in our dialogue system we had some pretty nasty restrictions our mission dialogue lines needed to be exactly the same length as English which if you've done any kind of translation you know is not fun to make a line in another language match exactly with the language you're translating from as a translator first of all is just challenging because naturally the way that you say things is gonna be longer or shorter so you might have to pad a line with some fluff you might have to cut out some information you might just need to write a line of dialogue that's pretty awkward or force the actor to rush through it to fit it in the amount of time because there's no

way to cut it down but it also adds a lot of cost when you go into recording it's the same problem the actor in a normal recording session can just read a line and if it sounds good you move on but when you're trying to match length of another language you have to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and try to get it to work and when it doesn't work then you might have to have someone rewrite it on the fly or or you know add some padding in or try to stretch it out and see if it doesn't sound too weird when you do that you know with a with audio processing so we fixed that we decided that was not a restriction we wanted to put put in place so our mission dialogue can now be free length the only dialogue actually in the game that needs to match English was our cinematic dialogue because there's motion capture and you need to match the actual things that are happening on-screen so there's a little bit of restriction there but we were able to get rid of the rest the other thing that we put a lot of effort into was making sure that the UI supported what we need for zatia so we actually did a lot of early

work throw away translation just so that we could get real text in the game in all languages and test out every part of the UI so we just took like a little a file or two here and there for each each portion of the UI I got it translated and started looking at what worked and what didn't and some of the things that we noticed very early on were there weren't enough space for item names our UI if you can see in the little purple box there it capitalizes all item names which makes the text wider which means you have less space to begin with and a lot of our item names in the game use compound words or possessives or things so when you have something like dust Walker boots and translating that into French where you can't use compound words it turns into something like boots of the Walker of the dust or something like that which gets really long so what we realized was we could probably find a way to make that work for destiny we could just call them dust boots in French or Walker boots in French but this isn't just one game this is an IP that we wanted to span a decade or more

so we had to think long term and and that wasn't that wasn't a situation we wanted to get ourselves into we wanted to make sure that we were doing things right so we we expanded it so that the UI will just automatically resize and we can go up to a second line for localization languages and we did that in most places in the UI if you look at the tooltips there anywhere anywhere the text gets longer in another language it automatically resizes we implemented font scaling so if we have to we generally try to avoid it because it's not as pretty but if the text is just too long to fit it'll scale down a pixel or two so that it you can you can actually squeeze it in yeah scaling everything essentially in the UI and the next part I want to touch on a little bit like I mentioned at the beginning was our approach to web and mobile localization when I came into Bungie we had an english-only website

there was a new website in development that rolled out shortly thereafter which which had locales built into it it was intended to be localized but naturally had never been localized or tested in any way so we had to think about how we wanted to implement localization for the website and get it working so challenges that we had things that we were thinking about when we when we sat down to spec out how it would work was we knew we were always going to be lagging behind English a little bit in terms of translation it's always going to take time our our community and marketing team tends to post very timely information they they move very quickly so things are always coming in pretty hot and we knew it would never be possible to to keep up with things in six other languages on the same timeline so we wanted a system that would be flexible where we could get stuff out as soon as it was possible but still make sure that people are having a good experience without that the other problem was that we had no real tools

support at all we had a content publishing system that was designed to create English content and post it to the web but there was no concept of localization in there when an item got updated and if you went in and updated in English we had no way to know that that had happened we had no way to track what had been translated in the system and what hadn't been translated and we also have essentially not all of the game strings but most of the the text in the game also used for web and mobile if you've if you've used the destiny companion at all you can look at your character so you can see items and their names and the flavor text you can look at missions and their descriptions and all that kind of stuff so the bulk of the text from the game is also used for web and mobile that fortunately turned out not to be an issue for localization just because of the way it was set up to begin with our website pulls that content from a build of the game so whatever whenever we update the game with a patch or something we have a new content build that contains the text that the website can then use so that's

something that we didn't have to worry about it all for localization thankfully because if we didn't have that you get in the situation where you have two sets of duplicate content over here and over here and it's very easy for something to get updated and changed and to forget to go back and do it on the other one so how we we solved the big problem there with our content publishing system was first of all to implement localization cues so anytime that a particular piece of content got updated or created in English it would go into the queue for each of the other languages so each language had its own cue that could work at its own pace go through and translate items submit them push them out onto the web within that I mean we've iterated on this for a couple of years now so it's gained a lot of functionality but within each of those cues we now also have priority queues so five different levels of priority where if I'm going in and writing a piece of content in English I can decide for myself basically the priority that I think should be assigned to this I would I think this is super

urgent and critical information to get out so I'll mark it as priority number one or this is something that yeah get to it when you have time but it's it's not super critical it's just a minor minor update so maybe that's like a priority four and within each of those queues then an individual translator can go in and reassign so if if French has a huge backlog and a lot of things that are all set to priority one you could go through and say well yeah these are all important but you know these ones are more important so I'll put these other ones in a lower priority queue and the other thing that you can do whenever you're updating an item is add a note a sort of revision history so if I go in and update the English item three times and then the Italian translator goes in to update his he'll see the comments that I put in and see what has changed since the last update and we also added import and export functionality to work with computer-assisted translation tools so that we we have the benefits of translation memory when we're doing this stuff too so the fundamental philosophy that we we tried to apply when we were

thinking about the localization of a site was that we wanted anyone who went to the site for the first time in say French to experience a web site that was fully localized in French we if you go to a lot of web sites that are localized you you'll see a little flag at the top and you'll click on it and maybe you click the the French flag and like three words change to French and the rest of the websites still in English and I don't like that it's a big pet peeve of mine so what I wanted was the best localized experience that we could provide by default but what we also wanted to do was make it so that people had the option if they speak English or maybe they don't speak English but they just want to see like you know there are fans who might want to see a trailer the moment it comes out even if it's not available in their language yet we wanted to give people the ability to see the untranslated content too if they so desired but understanding that the vast majority of our customers don't speak multiple languages so we don't want to just flood them with with English content when they most likely don't

speak it because they've actively selected a different language so our solution to that problem was to implement English fallback settings so each individual piece of content in our content system has a property of whether or not it should fall back to English if there's no localization available so we have that on individual things like like news articles but we also have it on content sets which are another content item which is basically a container of other items so using that we're able to do some kind of interesting things and then within each user's account settings they have an option they can check to say I want to see content in English if it's not translated yet so between between those things we're able to to do some kind of powerful and interesting things so here's one example until very recently our website had this top news set on it where there would be the three spotlight news items we wanted to show to people the the ios and android apps still use this so for this one we would

make the content set not fall back to english because we would never want to be in a situation for example where we posted a new weekly update in english and it wasn't translated yet but we decided to go ahead and throw that on the front page for english we wouldn't want that to show up in other languages because i wasn't translated so this is one where we curate the content we don't fall back to english and an individual translator can go in and his or her language and say these are the three things that i want to display in my language these are the three most recent most and articles that are available in my language then the other pattern that we use is this one this is what we use for example on our help site where we have a set of the trending help articles so the most like generally useful or relevant things for users maybe something happens in the middle of the night and we need to post information for people this is one where a it changes pretty frequently so on the localization side due to you know staffing which I'll get into later

we don't want to be responsible for having to update this all the time but also in general at least for help information I think it's better to to give that to people even if it's not translated yet if there's something critical that's going on I think being able to get that information and at least like google translate it I just said a dirty word but I think that's that's better than nothing so so for this one we've made the active choice that this one will fall back to English so the set of items that's displayed is always the set of items that's displayed for English but there are situations where we want to remove some of them so for example our game is only available on so many platforms in Japan so on the Japanese version of the website if there's a help article about Xbox it doesn't make sense to show that so we mark that one not to fall back to English don't localize it for Japanese and it disappears so quick example of that this is a snapshot of our website from last month so here we've got a weekly update that was posted on February 12 and

beneath that there is a content set of calendar events that are upcoming so looks like five of them for English when you look at the website in German now we have the spotlight item being the weekly update from the week before so the English one was just posted it hasn't been translated into German yet so it just shows the most recent one that we do have for that language the calendar set beneath it also there is one item that had just been added hadn't been localized into German yet so that one isn't displayed but it's okay as a as a user going to the German site nothing seems wrong like unless you actively go to English and and see that there's something different you're just you're getting the most recent information that's that's available in your language but if you are a user who speaks both German in English and you've set your account to show you that content this is the view that you'd get so because there is a more recent article that hasn't been translated suddenly the spotlight news item becomes that one in English the calendar shows you all of the events

that are translated in German but the one that was not translated yet also shows up so part of the reason that we did things this way was because of the situation we have for staffing so I want to talk a little bit about that so I'm gonna take you on a journey into the distant past 2012 to be exact so in 2012 Bungie had no localization staff at all we had an english-only web site mobile apps we had games that were only coming out on a single console so things were simpler then today we've got a fully staffed localization team we have a game that we're supporting that's a live game with frequent you know patches and releases and things like that we have apps in seven languages and those are the website and the mobile apps have two week sprint release cycles where we're constantly updating them so all together says seven platforms up there I mean we have four consoles and then we're also

supporting web iOS and Android so seven separate platforms that we're supporting for localization all together so I want to talk a little bit about how we went about doing that in terms of staffing so for destiny we used basically a hybrid staffing model we had me internal localization manager we had external translators that were in in-country working working externally we had a internal localization editor working at Bungie one for language and we had internal testers also a Bungie one for language and one for languages is pretty pretty small but uh like I said we were able to start early and do a lot of early iteration that made it so essentially when we got to the end of the project there weren't a lot of things to fix so so things like getting that that translation in early and fixing the problems in the UI meant when we got to localization almost all the problems that we had were things we could fixin translation we didn't have to ask for features and support for that sort of thing we were able to get in at a

stage where it was still early enough to solve the problems so localization editors this was an idea that was already in place before I joined Bungie but the basic idea would be to have someone who would be the main tester for that language but was also capable of doing translation so when we got to the end of the project if we needed very quick turnaround on things we would have someone in-house who could do that translation hearing stories from the past at Bungie one of the problems for them in terms of localization had always been not being able to turn things around quickly enough because Bungie is a company that likes to iterate and and do things if there's even a little bit of time left where they can make something better they want to so very often at the end of the project there are changes going in something something Jason Jones something something pistols or something anyway things things go in where we need a quick turnaround and if we don't have the ability to do it we can't make improvements to the game or we can't fix a bug so that was the basic

idea that's not actually how it worked out we we've ended up using our localization editors for a lot of things so we have we have them doing all of our web and mobile translation so all of that is done internally the actual builds of the website and the apps but also all the content that gets published is done by that that person we have the ability to like I've talked about work on things before they're really ready for localization so being able to go in and do that early translation man we were able to make changes to the UI while the UI was still being developed so rather than having to make people go back and repeat work we were just able to identify problems for localization and make sure that the UI the final UI when it was implemented supported those things we also done all of the game translation up to at least the capacity of our team so almost for the past year not quite a year now but most of the past year we have we've supported all the game translation

internally too so after we did the bulk of the translation on destiny we took back ownership of the text in-house we've closed out the game we've done all of the feature for patches our first expansion that came out last year we translated in-house and at least so far we've been able to keep up with everything internally we've also been able to use localization editors to do all of our testing between the major releases so again being a live game with patches there are things that are constantly being added that require a little bit of translation maybe a little feature here that has some text associated with it or a bug fix over here that needs some something changed in all languages so there's not a lot of test work it doesn't really justify keeping a full time test team for localization all the time but having those people who who speak the languages in-house means that we're able to still do that internally and finally and probably one of the most important things is is that they review and edit everything that's done

externally so we essentially have a single funnel point where everything flows through for for each language so there's someone who is ensuring that the translation is consistent the quality is consistent if something's done externally you might have something that references for example a line of dialogue in the game and a translator who hasn't worked on the game might not realize that so they they translate it a little differently than it actually appears in the game having people in-house means that they'll catch that sort of thing and actually be able to preserve those references keep up the quality because they're intimately familiar with the game and with Bungie so benefits of having an internal team one of the biggest ones and the reason the Bungie wanted localization editors to begin with is agility it means that we can do things very quickly if someone comes up with an idea in the afternoon generally nine times out of ten we can get get it done in all languages the same day obviously sometimes people are sick or on vacation or whatever but most of the time we're able to turn things around very very quickly another one is

security Bungie is a company who is very very tight on security and does not do things like send builds outside of the building if you work in localization you can probably imagine not having access to the game that you're translating makes things very challenging we on destiny we flew over the external translators for a week to play through everything and get familiar with the game so they at least had a sense of what they were doing but having that person in house then who can check everything that comes in and communicate information recognize where people are misinterpreting things and provide more context to the translators is very very valuable and finally quality which is I mean what all that kind of comes back to having having that single person who has a vested interest in making things better and no conflict of interest either when you're working with external translators I mean external translators are great too and I haven't met one ever who isn't passionate about what they do but they're kind of in the position of being forced to do what they think you

want which is generally translate things very quickly and don't ask too many questions and send it back whereas if you have someone internal they will they will actually point out when you do the things that you shouldn't be doing and they will fight for the things that should be fought for so it's it's a person who will be very steeped in the game and care about it and ensure that the the quality of everything that's done for it stays high so that's another big game so the other thing that I've been asked to remind you is there are evaluations that'll be sent to you after this talk so please they're electronic so check your spam folder and be sure to fill those out and also Bungie is hiring we are hiring for localization we're hiring for many many disciplines and one of our recruiters I actually spy in the back of the room so if you if you have any interest in coming to work for a really awesome company and doing awesome things feel free to come up and talk to me or talk to Jessica in the back she'll be happy to give you more information thank you very much

I think we have about seven minutes for questions so if anyone has any feel free to go up you give me just a quick introduction your name in and yeah and for anybody who is working in localization now working localization for years before living in a country that wasn't localized to my needs and it taught me a hell of a lot about what I should expect out the localization that was great I've got a question yeah support seven languages to which were a four of Chinese and Japanese correct no so the question is what languages we support we support English and then French Italian German Spanish Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese okay obviously nearly 10,000 individual characters yeah all of which you probably don't want to load into memory and your phone yeah

what less to kill it so what techniques did your team use to minimize memory footprint of your localization process that would be a better question for you i engineer I I want to say that it actually turned out not to be a problem this time I know in the past when I when I've talked to them about that on past titles they've done things like actually scan the strings in the game and see what glyphs are actually used and only put those into the font set to conserve memory I want to say that we were able to have the whole Japanese font in memory but you would have to ask someone who is not me because I don't actually do the coding first I want to thank you for the talk and congratulate you guys on a job amazingly well thank you it's so good actually that Zoar is a dick in any language good job but one thing that I thought was really interesting do these localization editor editors have had access to the main development teams especially the writers because they notice in the

Spanish at least the Spanish localization is really really very good and there's a lot of things that were adapted not necessarily they're not as literal they could be that it really makes sense in the concert of the game I was wondering if they actually did interact yeah the external so the question is did did our translators have access to the writing team and to be able to ask questions and things the external translators did not accept that they did have access to us who could then ask the writing team but Bungie is I mean we're been essentially a big open floorplan studio so everyone can talk to everyone so yeah the localization team the editors that we have in-house go to talk to the writing team all the time so we have pretty much free access to anyone which is really really nice but there wasn't a centralized process do you have that not a super centralized process I mean we did because we have so many languages we didn't want to have six people asking the writers the same questions so we do things like build a spreadsheet where we put the questions in and then you know once a day or once every couple of days send that to the writing team to get answers but I mean a

lot of stuff just happens organically to you run into someone by the coffee machine and have a conversation about something you were wondering or that sort of thing thank you yeah yeah I am 40 I work for Capcom I'm the manager of the localization group there yeah a lot of the problems you were highlighting here are the same things we face every day yep and we do have an internal team especially with FIGS to handle all those problems that arise so my question isn't really localization based I'm more curious about your source language English how who's editing the English who is watching the writers do you leave that to your QA team what it happens when you find mistakes in the English I'm sure your internal localizers versus inference about finding mistakes in English because that impedes their language so who handles that over at Bungie yeah so the question is who who checks the English content and the answer is we're sort of in the process of changing how that works we just we

just hired a copy editor so we're kind of implementing new process there but it's it's always been the case that anyone can can report anything so the localization team definitely like translators see every bit of text in the game very closely and have to understand it so like you're saying it's very often translators who find the bugs in English and report them and yeah they did I mean we can file anyone in the studio can file bugs on things so they would file bugs or just give a heads-up to the writer that they knew were in and was in charge of that particular bit of content thank you yeah hi I'm kind of curious what your approaches to localization of some of the like legendary and exotic names of things like you know like doctor nope and example you know and like how do you handle that as that's translated into other languages and does that affect how you kind of name things in English that might not translate as well no we we don't we don't give them any restrictions in English so I mean English is what English is and then we find the best way to deal with it in other languages how how do we go about

translating things like exotics I I hire good people and I basically trust them so I basically give our editors a lot of flexibility to name things in their language the way that they need to to make make it good I mean there's a lot of things like you know doctor nope it's not gonna directly translate but maybe you can come up with a similar name that captures that that theme or that idea and works for a French audience so it's kind of kind of play about two questions one of them is that you said that you realize sort of an iconography do you do any culturalization of that or any checking to make sure that the the images that you're using are appropriate for those markets and also in terms of your web development in the web portals do you use sort of a global gateway or how do you address people coming into that for the first time and being able to adjust their language settings uh-huh so a couple questions there so the first

one is iconography how do we go about making sure that the icons and images were using are okay for other regions we we have a geopolitical review process where I mean we send stuff off so all all textures in the game all those assets go off to people to be reviewed for that sort of thing and a lot of that I mean because we have Activision as our publishing partners we have we have the ability to lean on them for help with a lot of stuff like that but yeah we definitely do reviews because you can get into a lot of trouble with that sort of thing and because we don't localize graphics that is something we have to worry about because we can't change it for another language I'm sorry the second question was the web portal yeah so I don't know a lot of the details because again that stuff that engineers implemented what I'm told is it redirects based on the locale from your IP so if you don't I believe there's a cookie that gets set and if you're a first-time user and you don't have anything it tries to figure out where you are in the world based on either IP or browser settings or something like that to initialize it yeah my name is G dagger Kauai from

Japan and um you know considering a lot of like developers and publishers in the States are kind of like you know ignorant about localization and they usually local Aegis localization happens in the end of the production and production and considering that it seems like there was a huge leap from 2012 to 2015 and whom can you tell me what exactly happened to change that mindset yeah well I mean I think at Bungie a big piece of it was they went independent so the last game that they'd published they were still a part of Microsoft and be an internal at Microsoft they had Microsoft's localization team to work with localization had never really been something they needed to worry about internally it was something where towards the end of a project someone who-who had another job would just be tasked with you know okay get the strings together to do a localization handoff get those assets implemented back into the game but there wasn't a need to have dedicated internal people so it was a combination of that I think and also just building this new IP and wanting to do things right and build a

global brand they wanted to make sure that we were taking a good approach to localization well it's hard for me to say because I I came on after they'd already decided to start building a localization team internally so yeah half-half answer but sorry thank you I'm sorry I apologize but it's not time to in this session there is a wrap up room in South 300 you're welcome to ask additional questions there all right thank you you