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 Features
Localizing Brands and Licenses
 3. You Don't Own the IP, and it's Already Well-Established
Scheduling
Again, if you’re the licensee, the contract is your gospel for the organization and approval process. Your producer or executive producer should be able to tell you whether or not localization is submitted to your licensor for approval, and if so to which extent. Everything is doable as long as appropriately scheduled.
Here is a short list of items / assets that affect your schedule, and over which your licensor might demand to have partial or full control:
Asset Translations. Very big companies have policies that you must abide by (however strange they may seem). Buena Vista Games, the interactive subsidiary of Walt Disney, will ask for any reference to existing religions to be removed from your game (forget about "oh my god" and so on). You will have to get rid of those in English and in other languages.
If your licensor wants to go over translations, these review times and the subsequent back-and-forth sessions need to be accounted for in your schedule. A topnotch licensing coordinator (who will review and possibly copy edit) can't seriously check more than 10,000 words a day. Add some time difference and other variables (your licensor teams being swamped with work not being the last) and your integration process might be considerably slowed down.
Casting. Suppose your game is based on a famous TV show. Your licensor may demand that you use the same local actors (and often same voice directors if not studios) to dub your game2. That may be very well doable (clear the "who's paying for this" issue beforehand), except that dubbing a movie or a TV show and dubbing a game is quite a different experience for actors, voice directors and studios.
Game dubbing is a tricky exercise, as performers and engineers have a lot less information, as opposed to movies for which they obviously have...the movie. If you can, send someone from your team who knows both content and game mechanics to attend the U.S. recording sessions so that he can explain context and various functionalities. Having a very good and detailed audio script is an excellent thing, but you want to trust humans better than documents.
A simple omission in the script – or the recording studio forgetting to print a hidden context column – and your hero ends up saying “Man, I really can’t see a thing!” with a normal tone while he’s supposed to shout it from a chopper. This cannot be fixed in a studio: your lead actor has to come back for a retake (of course you always find out at a very late stage).
This also explains why you need the U.S. audiobase to be done before you start recording languages. Your game and audio designer or script writer do not have the super powers to attend four or five simultaneous recording sessions. The local studios will mirror the US audiobase, which comes in very handy, especially if something is unclear in the script or if keepers haven’t been chosen yet and there are a few versions of the same line (projection, volume, tone etc.).
In other cases, the IP owner might want to approve local castings and keep the upper hand on final choices. Send all samples on time and kindly request quick (and detailed) feedback so that you can proceed with booking. You need to give dates, but remember to keep some buffer.
Since the profile of your contact may vary greatly from one company to another, favor live casting (as opposed to already recorded samples stored in agencies’ databases). It's a tad more expensive, but way easier to test if actors fit roles. With the help of the game designer or creative director, select three or four lines typical of each character’s range of emotions. Once lines are translated and recorded by agencies (usually three or four actors will audition per role), you can then edit a few together to appraise chemistry between actors sharing a lot of scenes.
Audio Approval (on all localized recordings). This approval step may be awfully time-consuming, as your licensor contact will have to listen to all cues (there may be thousands of them only for scripted scenes). Plus, before you deliver these files, you will need to go through all alternate takes and perform a bit of editing (a basic cut and clean) and / or split your raw session into several folders and subfolders in a suitable format, so that people who are not sound Jedi can listen to the recordings.
If your licensor insists on approving the recordings, suggest they send a local representative to attend recording sessions. Unless his attitude is totally counterproductive, the rep will be able to approve each recorded line on site and prevent the process from stretching unreasonably. Typically, you want to favor parallel approval, as it saves a lot of time.
Build Approval. Some licensors will ask to test localized builds and demand some linguistic bugs and / or polish be done before it's submitted to first parties. Most likely, this will come at a very late stage (at which point you won't be able to do much) and will duplicate already identified (if not already fixed) bugs.
Remember, your licensor might not care at all that localized versions do not meet the usual quality standards or are off brand equity, but it's not in your interest to be careless. Your goal is to successfully localize a game and sell as many as possible. If you work on a notorious brand, you deal with a very solid fan base all over the world that already has a whole set of enshrined references. This leads us to our next topic, brand equity.
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This is also valid for English or other “original” version.
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