Does Localization Help Immersion, or Just Break the 4th Wall?

Hi friends! Today, we're revisiting the subject of localizing graphical content in video games. We talked a little about HOW we localize graphics in our previous article, and now, we're going to expand on WHY we do it, or why we DON’T and let one of our linguist colleagues take center stage…

Let's start with the most vital aspect: immersion. When we localize a game, our primary goal is to maintain immersion for players from different cultures. If we didn't translate text-based graphical elements such as billboards, road signs, and place names on a map, some of the game's magic — the immersion — would be lost. Take, for instance, the Dead Space iconic tip on how to deal with mutants. If you’re not good with English, you will probably lose in the very first encounter. And would a subtitle translation fit here when even the HUD elements are immersed in the game?

Immersion is the key, so, on the other hand, we do not translate anything that bears a strong cultural context for a particular scene or environment. Take as an example the Soviet era propaganda posters or environmental junk objects. They convey the mood and make the universe more believable even while their meaning itself cannot be understood by the majority of players!

But imagine the notes and dossiers in the brilliant The Signifier would be localized instead of making you switch to black overlay and the text pop-up. Would this help a player to stay better immersed in the investigation through the surrealistic memories?

Imagine you have a text-rich, narrative-driven game chock full of great characters who all keep handwritten diaries or jot things down in notebooks. Such as the stunning (and not at all creepy) visual novel Doki Doki Literature Club+, jam-packed with realistic-looking scribbles, doodles, notes, poems, and much more. All those little sketches in the margins are essential for showing how the characters change and grow over time. Ignoring them during the localization process would be a real disservice to players.

We talked about the game Neo Cab in our last article. Today, we've got Ramón Méndez González , our Spanish team leader and a brilliant localization specialist, to share his opinion on how important it was to localize graphical assets within the projects they worked on, including Neo Cab and Cyanide & Happiness.

Take it, Ramon!

“In Neo Cab, the main character's diary is key to understanding her personality and ideas. It's like a window into her soul. Everything in it is either handwritten or drawn, so if we hadn't translated those elements or just added subtitles, it would have really broken immersion.”

“Cyanide, on the other hand, is packed to the brim with jokes — not just in the text, but also in the backgrounds, which contain important information for progression.”

Sure, it would have been great to localize everything from the ground up, but that wasn't realistic for that project, so we only translated elements that could be placed in the environment as text and contained important information players needed to progress through the story.”

That's all for now. We hope you enjoyed this brief overview of one of the most intricate parts of the craft of game localization.

Do you have a favorite game whose localized graphics revealed another layer of narrative depth to you? Let us know in the comments below!