Mobile Entertainment

One of my favourite games of all time is The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask for the Nintendo 64. The game boasted innovative new ideas, excellent characterisation and great level design, but best of all Nintendo handed it to some plucky young Brit, who fully localised the title for the UK market.

He didn’t just correct the spelling either. He also used quintessential English terms, such as ‘blimey’, for added authenticity.

This small effort from Nintendo did not go unnoticed; N64 Magazine praised the localisation in their review and it was great to enjoy a product that wasn’t perforated with missing Us, American colloquialisms and Zs instead of Ss.

Sadly, this didn’t set a precedent. Not even Nintendo itself repeated the feat and the majority of software released in the UK from non-British developers and publishers is littered with American spellings and terms.

This may sound like the ranting of a pedantic gamer, but as a teenager I really didn’t know what ‘wait for the Fall’ meant while playing through Harvest Moon.

Early last year a mobile phone dating game arrived in the office. It had been out in North America for some time and was now being prepared for the European market. The brief was to translate the game into the French, Italian, German and Spanish languages and the specialist translators did a great job of just that.

Yet, when the game was finally available to download from operator portals, I discovered that the UK version had not enjoyed such attention and as soon as I was asked to ‘call Mom on the cell phone’. I turned it off. Most European countries got a fully translated game for their wait; UK gamers merely got the same code as American gamers, only a year later.

It may seem largely inconsequential, but it would not have taken me long to read over the text file and translate all American terms into English. When I worked for a localisation firm I was constantly requested to do such tasks for in-game mobile manuals, so why not the game itself?

In September, a deluge of mobile Christmas software flooded my in-tray, all from foreign developers who accepted the fact that UK Christmas traditions varied, often drastically, from their own. I was required to change names as commonplace as Father Christmas, and the questions and answers found in quiz games often needed altering entirely.

Perhaps it’s time for publishers and developers to accept that differences exist between similar languages as well.

There is a vast selection of excellent localisation and translation companies out there, and the majority of them have an English language specialist on staff. They can also do far more than just improve spelling and grammar. Stylistic changes and turns of phrases can all be incorporated, to give your product an authentic feel, no matter what the nationality of the gamer.

And who knows, maybe my next favorite (sorry, favourite) game can be played on a mobile phone.