🚀 go-pugleaf

Bowyer Jeff writes:
 >      1. Most discussions on INSOFT-L about localization have
 >         concerned text.  To what degree are graphics localized
 > 	in a program?  For example, if an American-produced program shows
 > 	a street scene in New York, does it become a street scene in
 > 	Kakegawa, Japan for the Japanese version?

On the internationalization projects I have worked on we have
done very little localization of graphics.  Of course, all the
stuff I've worked on has been computer games and no attempt was
made to translate the settings -- in _Heart of China_, for
example, the action takes place in China, Kathmandu, and France,
for the most part.  In _Red Baron_ the setting is the World War I
front.  In such cases translating the scenery would also require
rewriting large parts of the text or would completely undermine
the rationale of the game.

In some cases, though, we have done reworking of graphics.  One
of my favorite examples is in the French/German version of _The
Incredible Machine_.  The US version has special game pieces that
appear on certain holidays as parts you can use when constructing
machines: a heart-shaped balloon on Valentine's Day, a
jack-o-lantern on Halloween, and a Christmas tree on Christmas
Day.  For the French and German versions I changed the pumpkin
into a French or German flag that appears on the appropriate
national holiday.  The flags still act like pumpkins, though --
they just fall and bounce off of things :-).

Much of the reworking of graphics in games I've worked on,
however, involves changing text that is drawn in a background.
Particularly in games like _Heart of China_ or _The Adventures of
Willy Beamish_ important game clues were in things like graffiti
painted on a wall in a scene, pictures of maps, or signs.  These
were translated into the appropriate language or redone to be
consistent with game text.

A non-language-related localization problem came up recently in a
forthcoming foreign-language version of a game.  The game is an
air combat simulator set in the World War II European theater,
and is being localized for German.  Many historical photographs
are used in the game manual and game graphics, and since they
depict World War II Germany many swastikas appear.  Apparently
the German market research our localization team done has led
them to believe that the appearance of the swastikas would be too
controversial or offensive to Germans and the swastikas are being
edited out of the German version.  The box cover painting for the
game also depicts a German bridge that is now a peace memorial,
and the mayor of the town where the bridge is threatened to sue
if it was depicted on the game box that would be sold in Germany.

I would be interested to hear comments from German readers about
this.  I am not currently working in localization programming for
the above-mentioned project but your feedback might be useful to
our localization team.

 >      2. Has any work been done to internationalize graphics?  For
 >         example, if only one small portion of a large graphics image must
 > 	be changed to suit each locale, can it be done efficiently?

This would be very easy to do if the large image was drawn in
parts to begin with, particularly if it consisted of a background
with overlays.  A localized part would just be added to the items
that are already drawn over the background.

Often, however, a background is a fully-rendered screen that is
loaded from disk, and in those cases our typical solution has
been to create a version of the screen for each language.