Warlords Battlecry III Diary #8
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Years ago, on Warlords III (the first game we translated), we never thought about all the different font characters, grammar requirements, and extra space for text in other languages, and so, when we first discovered that we had to produce some foreign versions, we had to rewrite a large part of the game to get it to work! Now, we think about it all the time. Warlords Battlecry III has been the easiest game so far to localize. So easy in fact, that I can create the French and German versions myself, no programmers needed. It helps that I speak another language (Italian), and have been in charge of localization for the last four games, so have also picked up some "fantasy" French and German words. I may not be able to ask a German what time of day it is, but I can almost certainly tell him that there's a Goblin in his Castle!
With Battlecry III, the programmers had already Unicoded the game, and provided tools to extract and replace the text. So, all I had to do was extract all 65,000 words of text into an Excel spreadsheet, send it off to the translators, wait for it to come back, and put it all back into the game. Sounds simple enough, but of course, nothing is ever that easy! The translators always have questions - like the word "scales". What context does this have - scales on a lizard, or scales that weigh something, or scaling a wall?
