Subtitles are Enough and Other Stories - Research Report
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What Russian players think makes a good localization: research report Anastasia Kosareva, Demid Tishin Barcelona 2015
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Transcript of Subtitles are Enough and Other Stories - Research Report
What Russian players think makes a good localization: research reportAnastasia Kosareva, Demid TishinBarcelona 2015
Session outlinePresentation• Research background, goals and design• Overview of survey respondents • Summary of responses• Focus group: hypotheses and key findings• Summary• Lessons learned• Future steps
Discussion• Application scenarios
Why research?• Establish communication with end-users• Identify bottlenecks in localization production• Improve workflows on dev side and loc side• Improve image of localization vendors in
gaming community
Objectives
• Publish research summary for all stakeholders as widely as possible
• Involve publishers in discussion• Update own work instructions and loc
specification defaults
Design• Open survey on a major gaming portal– www.riotpixels.ru– 1800+ responses– 95% responses gathered over 1 week
• Representative focus-group– 100 respondents matching publicly available
player distribution reports (gender, age and platforms)
– Respondents with more detailed answers were preferred
– Inductive analysis– Hypotheses testing
The respondents
Do they care?
Localization depth
Voiceover
RU voiceovers they love
Best voiceovers, 100 respondents
RU voiceovers they hate
Worst voiceovers, 100 respondents
And the winners are…
Best voiceovers (net score) 100 respondents
Text localization – fluency
Text localization – accuracy
Text localization – design
Fan or official?
Focus group research
Pains
Mentions of localization issues, 100 respondents
Gains
Mentions of localization merits, 100 respondents
Some hypotheses we checked• Gamers with a higher proficiency in English prefer to play games in their
original language – confirmed• Women are more sensitive to gender-neutral address – not confirmed:
both men and women dislike it• Mobile gamers are more tolerant of errors than PC gamers –
controversial: close-type answers show that language fluency is equally important in the two groups, but mobile gamers were 4 times less active naming loc issues in open answers. Could be explained by less text in mobile games
• Hardcore gamers are more tolerant of gaming slang – confirmed • RPG gamers are less sensitive to abbreviations – not confirmed. Most
sensitive: simulation / tycoon players, least sensitive – arcade & puzzle players
• Hardcore gamers are less sensitive to memes – the opposite correlation shows. Could be explained by bigger immersion of hardcore gamers
Summary• Good localization is important for UX, but it’s not the decisive
factor in player's loyalty• Voiceover is appreciated – provided there’s a language switch,
and voices sound natural and match characters• Subtitles are crucial, and should match video• The majority of Russian players read all in-game text• Mistranslations are common and irritating • Bad fonts, truncations, abbreviations and gender-neutral
address all spoil UX• Russian players pay attention to text fluency, spelling and
grammar• Realisitic speech registers are crucial for UX• Swearings are generally appreciated, while gaming slang and
memes are a thumbs-down• Players lack means to give feedback on loc
Lessons learned• There’s little or no correlation between age /
gender / language proficiency and core responses
• Focus on correlations between platforms / genres / time spent on gaming and localization preferences instead
• Double-check questions for clarity• Use rubrics instead of open-type questions• Sampling – use multiple / general survey
platforms (Facebook?)
Future steps Involve publishers in discussion • Create a mailing list • Distribute research summary for all
stakeholders as widely as possible July 2015• Update own work instructions and loc
specification defaults • Initiate a wider-scale research• Project facilitation meeting:
Las Vegas QA & Loc Forum Dec 2015• Prepare and circulate a best practices paper
What can we change?• Give loc vendors more time • Give loc vendors more context (builds, please :)• Enable efficient communication between dev
and loc• Develop common requirements to localization
quality experts • Dev: go deep with loc engineering – language
switch, fonts, text resizing and grammatical tokens
• Loop back to loc vendor for overall check before release
