How We Localized Brigador

One of the lesser discussed aspects of Brigador: Up-Armored Edition but what has had a subtle impact on its reach is its localization, so we’re going to take a look at how Brigador was localized from a technical and linguistic standpoint, and what sort of challenges were posed by doing so.

📝SOME THINGS TO NOTE

For those unfamiliar, the term “localization” is often used interchangeably with “translation” – for our purposes when we refer to localization we are talking about the process of both translating a text from its source language into its target language (e.g. from English into French) AND having that translation make sense in the target language. Another way to think about this is localization is not a verbatim, or literal “word-for-word” process of translation – it is the communication of the message of the original text using the target language. We will look at a few examples of this later on.

Second, Brigador was never conceived with localization in mind. The game runs on a custom engine and spent several years in development, first appearing as a closed alpha in 2014, then Early Access in 2015 followed by the initial 1.0 release in June 2016. That whole time it was only ever in English with a very simple menu system. Between 2016 and the 2017 Up-Armored Edition re-release, however, the game was localized into five languages: German, Russian, Japanese, French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese and several more languages would follow in subsequent years.

Third, the word count of Brigador: Up-Armored Edition sits at about fifty thousand words, which, very broadly is about 200 hours worth of work for a single translator, not counting however many hours editors would spend going over the work.

Lastly, we were extremely fortunate to be able to work with some absurdly talented translators without whom this article would not come to be.

🚧THE TECHNICAL HURDLE(S)

Remember how we said Brigador was never conceived with localization in mind? Here are a few important things you need to be aware of if you ever intend to localize a game that doesn’t have any sort of localization:

• What fonts and alphabets are currently supported by the game’s engine?

• What are the character limits in the user interface?

• Is there any text that gets used in multiple places?

In order for Brigador’s localization to be a success, we needed to answer the above questions, but before we can even do that, part of the game’s engine had to be altered to allow for interface language switching to even happen. For those more familiar with computing terminology, the localization for Brigador is a form of shimming to integrate a set of translation libraries.

In more plain terms, everywhere you find text in Brigador – with the notable exception of “hard” art assets like signage in levels or on some loading splash screens for certain locales – behind the scenes all of it got ripped out of its original spot and replaced with a string. For example, instead of this equipment entry’s title and body:

EMP Grenade

Launches a small yield EMP warhead at low velocity in a high arc. Detonation temporarily disables shielding and drive mechanisms of all vehicles in the blast zone. Anti-grav units with overloaded drives are known to plummet into the ground and nearby friendlies, and radio communications are also rendered inert for a duration.

Particularly effective when used in tandem with artillery or high hull impact munitions.

-Efi

In their place now sat:

abilities.special_ability_emp_01.name

and

abilities.special_ability_emp_01.description

Or visualized side