Video Games
The Video game industry (often referred to as 'Interactive entertainment') has become one of the main industries in the last decade, with an estimated value of $65 billion (Reuters, 2011). The game 'Call of Duty: Black ops', generated sales in excess of $650 million in the game's first five days, which set a five- day global record for the sales of any movie, book or videogame.
Full localisation involves translating:
- Graphic user interface (GUI)
- In-game texts
- Multimedia content (videos, songs)
- Help files
- Printed documentation and packaging
- Related websites
Role-playing videogames, particularly web-based multiplayers (often referred to as Massive Multiplayer online Role-Playing Games or MMoRPG) such as the recently published Guild Wars 2 (picture above) require huge localisation projects, usually necessitating the translation and localisation of several millions of words.
These are generally translated as soon as the texts are created, so the translation stage is in place prior to the game being played by technical and linguistic testers. This allows localisation teams to detect translation issues at the same time for different languages, and later on supports the aforementioned simultaneous shipment.