Loek van Kooten, MAYour game cost millions to make.
Your localization budget was whatever was left over. You picked the cheapest vendor. They routed Japanese through English because nobody on their team reads Japanese. They ran Chinese through a machine and had an intern "check" it. Korean was an afterthought bolted on two weeks before launch. Day one. Steam reviews. "机翻，非常糟糕。 " Machine-translated. Absolutely terrible. Your million-wishlist game. Your years of work.
Judged in six characters by someone who can tell the difference between a translator and an algorithm in the first sentence. CJK is not a checkbox on a feature list. Japanese has three writing systems, context-dependent readings, and honorific registers that change the entire tone of a character. Chinese has homophones that turn a heroic quest line into a joke. Korean has speech levels that, if wrong, make your NPC sound like it is insulting the player.
You would never ship a game with placeholder art. Why are you shipping it with placeholder language? We specialize in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. Three language families, one focus, thirty-one years of getting it right. loekalization. com English · 日本語 · 中文 · 한국어 · Nederlands