Steps for Effective Localization

[Music] so good afternoon everyone and thank you for attending this presentation my name is nadal jose and i am a senior project manager for localization services at sony interactive entertainment in europe so this presentation has been created together with nadine martin senior manager for test services and chris burgess manager for our localization tools at sie so yes it took three of us to come up with a recipe on how not to screw your localization so with this joint effort we would like to share with you what we have been experiencing and implementing three years of localizing exciting games at sie and what we see as essential steps towards

efficient cost-effective and painless localization for our dev teams so it is our ambition that you will be able to walk away today with a good few tips either to establish a new localization process or tools or just to answer some of the difficulties that you are currently facing so after this uh presentation at the end the three of us will be available for q and a's should we have any time for uh for this but the cherry on the cake today is that chris will be holding two poster sessions 15 minutes after the end of my presentation where i will be going more in depth into some of the tool features that i will that i will be touching on today so please come along it's going to be in the overlook 2018. and we'll be waiting for you there as well so before we start chauvin's

here is from a death team okay and ooh from a localization vendor translation or geo-testing services okay that's a good mix so starting now with a brief intro to localization at sie so since last april 2016 up to december 2016 so in a duration of nine months we have worked on 108 full titles we have translated culturalized and adapted 15 million words we have recorded 18 000 hours of dialogues in studios across the world we have set up 75 or over 175 servers on our localization dedicated tool we have tested more than 1 000 patches

and overall performed 450 000 hours of testing globally so whilst this will give you some context on the localization scope of challenges that we face at sie we found that the solutions that we have put in place have been effective whether your project be small or large complex or straightforward so now as a developer who will be in charge of integrating one ten or more languages into your game the big question usually is at what time do i need to think of localization in our opinion the earlier the better getting to meet with your localization experts as early as possible is vital in order to allow the people who will really look

after your localization to immerse themselves into your needs your game your objectives and also to share consultancy conversely for us localization experts it's essential to meet with you early to understand how to adapt our processes our tools to your needs and most most importantly to determine together the most appropriate pipeline that will suit the needs of your game so this traditional waterfall model would be best suited where the full game is already in development where the source script and audio is already well underway and where there will be minimal fragmentation of assets needed

so in practice this means after meeting our development teams pre-alpha localization is done during the alpha phase with a view to deliver the majority of the localized localization assets by the bitter milestone at which point our localization qa colleagues will take over for the first sweep of localization testing before we all move into the pickup session so traditionally we have also followed this pipeline and we still do for many of our titles however where our developers have adopted more agile processes and where the source assets remain unfinalized a lot longer we really needed to find [Music] a different approach and that different approach was realized through this pipeline so this one is a more iterative model

that we use to match the development processes whilst still retaining localization efficiencies on such a model localization so translation audio services and localization qa for the testing effectively become one team and we will be collaborating really extensively on each of the rolling localization cycles so as you can see the tasks are completely identical to the previous waterfall model but the sequencing has been adapted to match the development processes and the way the development are building their game so here it is our ingredient number one towards efficiencies is for the main stakeholders to actually meet early

in order to determine together the most appropriate pipeline for the needs of your game so one of the other challenge that we usually face is to gate and get all the main stakeholders to work towards the same efficiencies without all developing adult processes adopt tools that will certainly benefit their own process but will completely disregard the process of their calling departments so at sie we do so through one common tool our localization asset management system so lamps is a proprietary tool that has been developed internally it's a cloud-based system for source and localized text audio and subtitles it has in fact become a central repository

for the majority of our games for the source and localized assets and with it it has really become a point of convergence for all the various disciplines in localization so the reason why why lamps has in fact become so popular with our dev teams it is we call it because it is flexible it's integrating with whatever workflow has been agreed upon and most importantly it is integrating with the development team's existing tools so let's explore the top features of what a localization tool should display to support and promote effective localization starting with the most crucial and basic of feature allowing access

to all the various disciplines involved is the cornerstone of all the steps and improvement that we are about to discuss today so if you take nothing else away today please remember to make a priority of this for the next localization tool that will you will build by or use and if possible take this further by allowing or by using a tool that will support multiple different file formats so that all the teams involved can all work in the best of their process yet still do so in harmony with lamps there is no risk of array overwriting assets because the tool will prevent the tester for instance to of to update some strings should the

translator already be busy working on it transparency on what lines is being worked on by um means no delay no unnecessary duplication of work between tester translator and so no unnecessary costs so once our access is granted where can start in our nest and as we have seen a lot of disciplines and a lot of people will be involved in your localization process and often in our industry we are likely to be working with people scattered all around the globe so the tool that you build by our use should really help to ease the communication between all the various disciplines keeping everyone on the same page regardless of

your geographic location so at sie we allow searches and display configurations to be saved and shared and this means that you can be sure that someone who is on the other side of the world will see the exact same results as you are say on a project developer based in europe wants their localization partners in america or japan to work on very specific sets of strings by sharing their display configurations with their colleague departments the the assets coverage will be identical for everyone and there will be no risk to work on

incorrect or outdated set of strings and most of all there will be no time wasted on back and forth and back and forth of email knowing what to do yeah so as we know translation is underway and with it comes the eternal problem of the context when translating any size of projects there are bound to be queries and without the visual support terms can really be open to interpretation so take the word fire for instance so make sure that the tool you go for has a system to allow these questions to be asked

in the question in the context of the text very fair to so for us this means an integrated q a system where our translators can ask their queries and developers or production can answer almost instantly we even sometimes get our functional qa tester to answer these questions because this will save a great deal of time to our developers and we also allow these replies to be images because one image can say a thousand words or 1 300 in our localized versions so with this system there are no unnecessary spurious bugs by testers the testers gains really more awareness of the choice of wearing of the translator and there seems to be more respect

overall between translator and a tester so now once your assets are localized and because our european languages are typically 30 percent longer than our source english you should expect that the localized assets will be different to the source english i know that's the gdc insight that you've paid for so for this reason make sure that you can communicate the constraints on text length restriction and audio technical specifications ahead of the localization phase and ideally make sure that you can enforce them through your tool so the simplest thing to have to start with would be to have a character count

you can take this further by allowing for a line count and further still to allow different character limits for different character sets then you can move that feature along to the audio by by checking simple file properties and in fact you could look at any other aspects of the audio such as the bit depth the sample rate the duration of the volume in any of these cases the tool should really make it easy to identify where your localized assets are not compliant with your source assets and should ideally report or alert the stakeholders for the corrective actions to be taken and the issues to be resolved and if you want to get really fancy

you can even enable your tool to automatically fix these volume issues so our last our lamp system will check the text length restrictions and the audio technical specifications upon upload of the localized assets within our tool for instance so should the audio assets be mismatching with the with the source the system will report the issue and send a notification to the various disciplines or stakeholders so the time saved here is significant because we do not have to wait for manual checks by either our development teams or by the localization project managers the

testers the translators because the discrepancies in compliance will be notified notified upon upload of the localized assets within the tool by the system and the fixes will be pretty much instant whether by your localization vendors or by the tool itself so now taking the thoughts on you a little step further we are going to be looking at subtitling so it will be a great help if everyone involved in the process can make changes to the subtitles both to the text and the timing so really it could be through some simple markup in the translation or it could be splitting the subtitles into their own entity

the key thing is that it should really be nice and simple for the right people to go to and change but again this builds on having that centralized accessible system for collaboration for us at sie the rough id is that our lamb's team has set up a ui that uses the waveform of the audio file to end sliders to get the timing just right really quickly so unfortunately there is work here that i can't really talk about too much because it's patent pending for our lamb's team but what i can say is that the immediate benefit observed is time and cost saving so until dawn for instance

our subtitles were automated at 93 percent meaning that neither the developers not the translators not the testers needed to take any time at all to manually split the subtitles out because the tool did that itself and that really represented a great cost and time saving now not forgetting the fans of reporting out there whatever localization whatever approach you will take to your localization tool varies or there are certain things that you will want your tool to be able to tell you how far have we got how much more do we still have to localize so going beyond the reactive reporting what you might

want to see is proactive reporting reports that your system will be providing will be providing you without you necessarily having to go and request it each and every time so exactly what that looks like is entirely up to you it could be a box a message or a good old-fashioned email so if you think uh back a few slides and i hope you were paying attention um i spoke about saving and sharing particular searches so these actually form the backbone of our automation of our automated reporting users can use any of their searches or any searches that have been shared with them to create report subscription then lamps will email

the report of their choosing for the search of their choosing in the layout of their choosing and at a time and frequency so or we can also use the data to create visualization to provide at a glance reporting this one being for our programmer specifically so talking avex has been the cornerstone of improvements before remote access should not just be limited to people for for the for your localization tool you will want to either build or make sure it has a an api that you can use as a developer this will give you

a range of options and opportunities for improving the efficiency of your system integration the localization the localization testing this service mentality also allows allows for integration into other systems and open them some really interesting possibilities one of these possibilities has been to enable lamps to support our streaming video tool so let's look at the short demo clip so the concept on that one is that by using the unique string id or simply searching for the string

the testers are really quickly able to navigate to the particular asset watch the relevant recording footage and verify this asset while still retaining the context additionally you can also see a graphic display of the playstation controller on screen so the the testers know what buttons are being selected at the time the assets are playing meaning they can really verify whether the the text and the action are actually matching so automation for localization has been extremely successful at playstation and we continue to invest in refining our capabilities in this field and in fact

development and refinement are really high on our list of priorities for the future and we have already outlined priorities for the future starting with our tool we are in the process of implementing a validation tool for the naming conventions so as we know getting our text rights in the game is important but getting the naming conventions right is actually essential so i will not go too much into it because chris will be talking about it a bit further during his poster session in 15 minutes in the overlook 2018 if you're interested to know more now with any new hardware

new challenges emerge and in vr we are addressing the player much more directly than ever before to create some really truly immersive experiences so to maintain that we must make sure that the player is spoken to appropriately so even lamps we will allow the use of variants so that different versions of one same line can be provided and by variance we mean either male female even young old really quite a wide range so in a sense our devs control the variants that their title will be supporting lums as a system becomes the enabler and the translator will be free to choose

to use this as and when the expertise require it is right to do so for localization services we are hoping that our translators in future will be able to verify their own translations in game much more systematically in order to really catch inconsistencies and incorrect meanings mistranslations and really clean their scripts to make them as immersive as creative and as emotionally engaging as possible we are also wishing to improve on audio volumes in future and by potentially centralizing the audio mastering service

for all languages in one studio so this should enhance the quality of the immersive experience for those titles where volumes could create issues and finally we're also looking at having embedded project managers at our dev teams whenever and wherever this is required by our developers either kick off time or training on lamps this will be to really be able to support our development teams as effectively as possible for our tools for our localization testing the tool support and automation like the video capture solution that we've seen before already allows us to reduce the amount of localization testing the test sorry the amount of testing that the localization testers

have to perform within the game and in future we expect that this testing effort will be further reduced and will turn more into validation and verification of the localized assets so the benefits will be reduce costs reduce time and better utilization of our lock expert teams with our tools and automation efforts we can also map the bugs in the game and this might help to identify bug clusters and makes it easier to actually investigate the root causes of a bug in addition we can also map the paths testers have taken through the game and this is really super helpful for

coverage and for progress tracking purposes linking this data into lamps we will also be able to visualize the data which will help see progress at a glance and then the project leads can use this to prioritize testing so in conclusion if you take nothing else away today please remember to meet to meet with your luck experts early to so they can draw an efficient plan of action adapted to your needs then invest in a tool any tool because with it the opportunities towards efficiency and quality will become

endless for this to happen though please remember to empower your localization partners let your localization expert teams access the tools so that we can manage the localization and deliver what you need when you need it and in a manner that will be most effective for you finally for the localization testing use the potential of the tool and go as far as validating and automating your localization testing for maximum efficiency so thank you very much for attending this presentation today i hope that you enjoyed it um i'm not sure whether we will have any time

for questions yeah we've got but yeah we've got a time for one or two questions before we all move on to the poster session of chris where i will be going more in depth into the tool features so i will invite nadine and chris to come up on stage if we have any questions if you want to join me may i go first matt whiting lionbridge game services very interesting talk i wanted to ask chris how do you instrument your games so that you can do the automated uh the automated audio testing or the the the testing you were showing up there on the screen where you can see where the lines are displayed what the controls are being pushed and so forth

so uh that does place a very very slight burden on the dev which is always something we're trying to avoid but because this is tied to their engine and what's happening at runtime there's a little bit of work for them to do but all it requires is for them to just output a little debug string indicating we're here we're displaying this particular sort of identifier of line at this time and then everything else is handled by that video capture service that's kind of picking up on what's happening to the pad what's happening to other things it just sort of annotates the video to say at this time you can see the string okay come and have a look and check it's okay all right thank you so i see this is a great tool um i see that it's proprietary um so does it uh is it only open to games that have a relationship with that are going to be launched on playstation or are you guys also opening this to maybe

you know like a pc games and also like for the version that basically uh you know if we use this tool we produced a localized version is that going to be restricted only to be published on playstation or you know does it become uh the properties of the developers okay so that's that's a little bit above my pay grade to make any kind of formal announcements on so um i will i'll speak historically it's only ever been used for titles that we are developing or publishing uh ourselves i see that might change in the future but i'm i'm not going to stand here on video and say that because it's too much i understand i think it's just if this tool is available i think a lot of people will be very very interested okay great tools thank you just wait outside of the checkbook and i'll be i'll be right over a couple questions um one do you guys

manage art assets in there in your tool like if there's signs that need to be changed from english to other languages um we we have done once uh but that's only because that's what that particular project required the system can do it it's quite happy to it is kind of agnostic as to what the actual asset is that it's looking after all it really cares is there is this item that needs to exist for these languages i will i will track it and make sure that it exists and if the text required from that changes i will prompt somebody that they need to update that asset as well be it audio texture or even a 3d model and anything should in theory be possible and then my other question was do you does this support all the languages like you chinese like analyzing the audio files for you know non-figs languages i know you showed a japanese example but i didn't know if that covered

everything uh yes yeah it should it should cover all real languages and also fake ones as well cool thanks more a general question than related to the tool but yeah with the process becoming structured like this with tools keeping track of changes and so on do you think we will arrive in the point where uh localization edits up happen also post launch because it used to be that we had the game on the disk and that was the game now we are in a world where you have the disk and then you have the day one patch and so on and so on localization usually never changes there's new stuff but if there were if there's a mistake in the code it will be fixed in the patch if there's a mistake in the text it's unlikely that it will get changed at least historically do you think we might get to that with time and tools yeah okay so um

i think that that is already something that does happen and please feel free to correct me if i'm wrong but it's because of the uh the combination of the access and the empowerment because in order to change that text all it requires is the tester to notice it's wrong and if they're within the video toolkit to be able to change it there if they're looking at it directly in lambs just to make a change there that will go into the next build of the game whether that is the gold master and only one patch and without the need of a new submission it's just normal in the flow of the patching uh yes yes okay thank you very much for attending and please come along with us to chris's poster session if you're interested in more in-depth tool features thank you

you