Brand Equity

Let's take a look at the Star Wars license. Working on George Lucas’ baby means dealing with millions of fans whose expertise and subsequent attention to details (may they be praised) you won't be able to deceive.

You can't invent planet names or choose to translate "light saber" other than "sabre laser" in French or "sable láser" in Spanish (though in the first trilogy it was "Espada de luz"). The French public is used to "Dark Vador" and not "Darth Vader" whether you find this ridiculous or not. "Death Star" is not literally translated for all languages (it is "l'étoile Noire" – black star - in French).

Ensure your vendors hire people who are either already familiar with the IP (specialists may be required sometime), or are properly trained. Have them gather as many references as possible -- comic books, movies, books, web sites etc. -- to ensure no stupid mistake will go unnoticed: you don't want to end up with "L'Étoile de la Mort" ingame.

Pay attention to spelling and pronunciation of important names. Fans will pin you down for a lot less than a double e missing in "Wookiee".

Once your vendors are done gathering local "official" translations, put together a multilanguage glossary that will be submitted to your licensor (unless he already has provided you with his own). Most of the time licensing and consumer product departments are overwhelmed with work and have very little time for preparation, so by doing this, you pass on the responsibility to your licensor to check the accuracy of the assets you are working on, but at the same time you help them. Let's take a look at Figure 1

Figure 1

Figure 1: Multilanguage spaceships glossary

In this example, I have listed each country's official term for spaceships used in-game. You can see that Millennium Falcon has two different translations in French (an overlooked mistake in the first trilogy’s dubbing). Request approval from your licensor. They're the ones who should know or decide which to use.

Movie Tie-Ins

As soon-to-be-Lord Vader Anakin Skywalker says, "This is where the fun begins." If your game is tied to a movie release, you will be dependent on a few (and not lesser) assets to localize your game in a way that respects and resembles the movie. Moreover - and this is not breaking news - license deals are tough on developers and publishers. Your negotiation latitude with your licensor is relatively small, to put it mildly.

Movie licenses are expensive to buy (around six figures), and your licensor will be awfully busy finishing the movie and dealing with worldwide post-production. Chances are they won't be able to arrange their production and post-production schedules to accommodate your own. Your room for maneuver will be a little different whether the movie releases worldwide or at different dates (a staggered release), and depending on how well the contract has been negotiated, and if those dependencies have been discussed and organized beforehand. Let's take a closer look at movie / game dependencies:

Local style and artistic choices: Your game might feature some lines taken from the movie (beware: animation movie scripts are usually locked at a very late stage) and of course you would like the lines to be (translated) the same (way).

Some characters may speak with accents that will also require local adaptation: some things work for English but not for other territories. In the U.S. version of Finding Nemo(Disney / Pixar 2003), Jacques the hermit crab is French and of cooorse he speaks wiz a verry heavy French accent. For some pretty clear reasons, it didn't make any sense to keep it that way for the French version of the movie, nor for the French localized version of the game. So Jacques was given a south of France accent (Marseille) that kept the character's specificity and "cuteness".

It's rather important, especially for kids' products. Voices that do not match or blunt discrepancies will break immersion. I recently managed the localization (13 languages) of a line of games based on a CGI movie for kids, and accents were different in nearly all territories.