Dos and Don’ts of Turkish Game Localization For Developers and Publishers

It’s no surprise that Turkish has been one of the fastest-growing game languages in the last couple of years. There are 45+ million gamers in Turkey and Turkish is the native language of the vast majority of the country’s population. Proficiency levels in English, other Western European languages and Arabic are extremely low in Turkey. Consequently, whether a game is localized (well) into Turkish is one of the deciding factors in whether a game becomes popular in Turkey.

Despite all of this, a publisher may decide to forgo Turkish localization, assuming that it may be difficult on the developers’ part to implement the language. While Turkish does have a few quirks that one needs to be mindful of, implementing it is actually not difficult at all, as long as the developers follow the basic guidelines below and the publisher works with a seasoned Turkish game localization team.?

The Alphabet ??

Turkish uses a Latin-script alphabet and is written LTR (Left to Right). Therefore it is not that different from Western European languages in this regard as one might expect!?

The only difference you should be aware of is the existence of 7 unique characters (and their uppercase counterparts) in Turkish. As long as you make sure that your in-game fonts can display the characters below, you are good to go!

Auto-Capitalization Issues (a.k.a. “the Turkish i Problem”) ??

Observant readers might have already guessed what “the Turkish i Problem” is by looking at the image above. Unlike English, “dotted lowercase i” and “dotless uppercase I” are different letters in Turkish. This may cause issues if your game uses auto-capitalization.

For example, the translation for “Noble Horse” would be “Asil At” in Turkish. If you were to use auto-capitalization to display that string in uppercase letters in some parts of the game, the string would be displayed as “ASIL AT”, which would be a nonsensical mount name, meaning “The Actual Horse”. ??

To overcome this problem, you either need to avoid auto-capitalization and instead have separate strings for lowercase and uppercase instances of phrases, or implement an auto-capitalization rule to accommodate the Turkish i problem.

Splitting Sentences ??

Most localization specialists would ask developers not to split their sentences into separate strings. The approach of splitting sentences into multiple strings that would be displayed in a fixed order in the game (known as string concatenation) causes problems during localization for many languages, and Turkish is one of them.

The following paragraph may sound a bit technical if you are not a linguist, but bear with us for a moment (or jump ahead to the next paragraph if you would like).

Turkish is an agglutinative language, meaning that new words are formed by adding suffixes to nouns and verbs. Moreover, translators may want to add suffixes to variables in strings as well, but this is often impossible because the translator cannot know what suffix to use without knowing what word or number the variable will display during the game. An experienced localization specialist has ways to work around this problem though, so this is not something that developers need to worry about. Also, the word order in Turkish is quite different from English, as the Turkish word order in a basic sentence is Subject-Object-Verb.

What you need to take away from the paragraph above is that when an English sentence is translated into Turkish, the resulting sentence often needs to have a completely different structure and word order.?

This is why splitting the sentence “You Gifted %s Gems to %p” into multiple strings would be making life extremely difficult for the poor Turkish (and most non-Turkish) translators since you would be limiting their options in building the sentence structure they would like. However, if that sentence is stored as a single string, it would be a simple task to translate it into Turkish for an experienced localization specialist.

Text Length ??

While not really a major or Turkish-specific issue, it would be good to keep in mind that Turkish translations are often slightly longer (in our experience 10% to 20%) than their English counterparts.?

It would be ideal if the game’s UI can support slightly longer text, but if there are very strict character limits that absolutely must be adhered to, capable localization specialists can often find ways to stay within those boundaries without losing any meaning in translation.

Finally, here is a checklist to sum everything up!

Checklist

? Don’t use auto-capitalization. Alternatively, adapt your auto-capitalization rules to accommodate the Turkish i problem.

? Don’t split sentences into several strings.

? Do make sure your fonts support Turkish characters.

? Do keep in mind that Turkish sentences may need to be slightly longer than their English counterparts (but don’t worry too much about it).

? Do leave the rest to Turkish game localization experts, like our specialists at Locpick!

Ready to take the next step? Contact us now at [email protected] and let's localize your game for the Turkish market and beyond!