The Chinese gaming market has become saturated, so it's no surprise that domestic game companies
are looking to go global.
The founder of ByteDance, said, "China only has one-fifth of the world's internet users. Going global is
a must.
For any company looking to make a name for itself, expanding globally is a logical move, but cultural
differences and language barriers can be daunting for many businesses entering international markets
Today, we share the best practices for launching Chinese games in the Western market. This article
will discuss the challenges you might face and the most effective ways to tackle them.
Where to Start
The most common approach is to gain fans by translating marketing creatives. This method requires
translating the app store descriptions (or Steam pages) and screenshot texts for the markets you want
to enter
In most cases, the first goal for game developers looking to go global is the most promising
countries—English-speaking countries, Germany, Russia, Brazil, and so on.
Once you see the acceptance of your game in certain markets, you can proceed to full-text localization.
And that's where the challenge begins.
Common Localization Challenges
From Chinese to English and other languages, we have compiled five main challenges and ways to
overcome them.
Challenge No. 1: Context Matters in Chinese Grammar
In the world of game localization, context is king.
Context typically refers to providing translators with project descriptions, screenshots, style guides, and
glossaries.
Why is context so important? Because languages have different grammatical structures, and without
some background information, it's often difficult to make accurate translations, which is where context
comes into play.
A well-known example: In a game, the plot involves deities from Western and Chinese mythology. Due
to the lack of context explaining gender, the issue that may arise in translation is that some deities end
up in same-sex marriages
Many readers think this is the author's twisted sense of humor, but it's just a result of missing context.
This usually happens when developers only send Excel spreadsheets containing isolated words and
phrases without any other context.
Remember, a phrase without context may not provide enough information for an accurate translation.
Word forms and inflections can also be an issue. Let's take the example of "You found 300 coins."
Most likely, the translator would translate it in this form: "You found $AMOUNT$ coins."
In Chinese, whether it's 1 coin or 300 coins, the text will be "coins." However, in Russian, for example,
the word "coin" can have three different forms depending on whether you are talking about 1 coin, 2
coins, or 10 coins. If the translator doesn't know what $AMOUNT$ means, they cannot perform an
accurate translation.
Challenge No. 2: Ambiguity of Chinese Characters
Chinese is a semantically rich language, and each character has multiple meanings. This means that
without additional contextual notes, it can be challenging to translate game terminology such as
weapon, spell, and item names in a way that fits the cultural background.
Skill names are often based on idioms, and while a direct translation may sound beautiful, it can be
hard to understand the actual function of the skill. Moreover, while idioms in Chinese are only 4
characters long, they can result in very long phrases in English
Take "背水一战" as an example; its literal meaning is "fighting with one's back to the river." A direct
translation in English is too long and unclear.
Additionally, due to cultural differences, Western players are not aware of the origin of this phrase, so
a direct translation of "背水一战" would not make much sense to them.
Fortunately, in this particular case, a translator came up with a concise and understandable English
equivalent: "Last Stand."
Challenge No. 3: UI Issues
Chinese characters are concise and elegant, allowing you to fit a lot of information on the screen with
just a few characters. However, 2-3 Chinese characters can turn into 20 words in European languages
Thus, another typical issue: inappropriate translation. For example, take common game terms like
"combat power" or "battle force." To shorten translation time, translators often use abbreviations like
Might/BP (Battle Power).
English might be the most compact of the European languages. Other Western languages can be
more challenging: Spanish, German, and Russian words can be 25-30% longer than English words!
Therefore, when localizing a game from Chinese (or English), it is essential to make the interface
scalable, leaving room for longer words in other languages.
Challenge No. 4: High Cultural Content
Games created based on traditional Chinese culture and history are inherently difficult to localize
because they often contain a lot of explanations about Chinese culture, which Western players may
not be familiar with, leading to confusion—like Black Monkey King, Romance of the Three Kingdoms,
Journey to the West, etc.
So, these types of games are also specifically created for domestic players based on Chinese culture
Let's look at some examples of how to solve these problems.
In the game "Divine Demon Continent," there is a series of quests heavily reliant on Buddhist and
mythological background knowledge. For Russian localization, developers had to choose to remove
these quests and replace them with a different set of quests that are easier for Russian gamers to
understand.
In another game, there are four divine beasts—Azure Dragon, Black Tortoise, Vermilion Bird, and
White Tiger—that constantly appear in the game. These references would be completely lost on
Western players, so developers ultimately simplified the system.
Challenge No. 5: Cultural Differences
This point is also an unavoidable issue in localization, often revolving around different cultural
interpretations and sensitive topics. This means that it may be necessary to adjust certain visual
effects and adapt storylines.
Let's look at another example:
In the Russian localization of a domestic game, there was a Mother's Day event where players were
supposed to collect flowers. The problem was that the number of flowers was even, and in
Russian-speaking countries, even numbers of flowers are reserved for death, sadness, and funerals.
Secondly, in another game, the Nazi symbol was used on a flag, which naturally made Europeans
uncomfortable. In that game, it was meant to represent the Buddhist swastika, not the Nazi swastika
(they look a bit different), but the similarity is too close for comfort.
There are also other sensitive topics. In some games, you might see girls dressed in revealing
clothing who almost look underage, such as certain Japanese anime characters. This is unacceptable
both domestically and in the West, and the game would not pass review.
Another potential trouble is copyright issues. You cannot use trademarked characters and heroes from
Western pop culture.
In terms of visual style, there is a significant difference in taste between Asian and Western gamers, so
sometimes it makes sense to redesign the appearance to make it more appealing to Western
audiences.
Additionally, for Westerners, Chinese interfaces often look too busy and complex, so you might want to
create a cleaner, more spacious interface for your global release.
Chinese Steam Games
There are more and more popular Chinese games on Steam, some of which are only available in
Chinese, such as the indie games "Taoist Sim" and "Ghost Valley Eight Desolations." These games
have English store pages
There are already many English reviews praising the games and requesting English versions. Each
game has sold over a million copies; imagine how popular these games could become with
high-quality English translations!
When the English version of "Gujian 3" was released, sales quadrupled, skyrocketing from 280,000
copies to 1.3 million copies.
