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 Features
Localizing Brands and Licenses
 2. You Own the Franchise (Yeah!)
You have a successful IP, and you're working on a sequel. This is also known as a franchise and it's the easiest pattern, as you already have experience and solid material to work with:
External Resources
The vendors (localization agencies and / or freelancers) who worked on the prequel are familiar with your game and brand equity. If you are happy with their work, contract them again. Nothing beats a good localization agency that knows your brand and understands how you work (tools, processes etc.). You don't have to explain things from scratch: you already have a routine.
On their end, they will probably contract the same translators, voice directors and actors for recurring characters so that you don't run into style / voice consistency issues.
- Example 1: Recurring characters that interact have customary ways to address one another. They may use a nonformal form (i.e. "tu" in French) or a formal form ("Sie" in German, "Usted" in Spanish). Keeping the same style is important. A knight can't address a king the way he addresses a fellow horseman. On a side note, cultural differences between formal form and nonformal form are widely different from one language to another. Let your local agencies decide what's best. They usually know their market pretty well.
- Example 2: Your new game features video excerpts from the prequel, perhaps in the form of flashbacks. You don't want players to realize that you didn't use the same actor, so try to stick to the same voice range. Example 1 is also valid here: you want characters to speak the same way to one another if you recycle video or audio material.
If you decide to go for a new vendor, send a localized version of the previous game before the new localization begins. They will probably come up with a pretty long list of questions that will hopefully cover all potential issues.
Internal Resources
While preparing, collect post mortems and other post-release memos that list difficulties met during the prequel production, whether they were specifically localization-related or broader. You need information on the engine and other peripheral tools your team will have to work with for text and audio integration. If you can get your hands on this material early enough, there will be time to voice a few recommendations and suggest improvements if necessary.
Key People
Key people might include the localization coordinator or project manager, lead integrator (the person in charge of formatting the text assets for translation, integrating them back and debugging all text related bugs), sound designer, linguistic QA coordinator, data management lead, producer, and/or associate producer. If you don’t know who they are, check the credits: people are usually pretty adamant about having their name and position accurately spelled and described.
If you're a publisher, gather all prequel foreign reviews you can get your hands on so you can assess the localization quality. Asking for your local brand manager's opinion is also a good idea, because they might have casting suggestions and insights ("The main character got terrible reviews last time, so we would like your Italian vendor to hire a new actor", "We think hiring this famous TV actress will bring a lot of PR exposure" etc.). Their input might also influence the type of localization that will be signed off on eventually ("The game sale potential in the Netherlands is too small, so we recommend a subtitled version only.")
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