(06-08-2015, 07:10 PM)hauntmedoitagain Wrote: Localization should not and does not have creative input on a video game whatsoever. It's the equivalent to asking someone in accounting for an opinion on a movie's theme over the director or scriptwriter. Simply put, it's irrelevant. Their job is to translate things and nothing more.
Localization actually doesn't just translate, if they translate at all. Localization fixes the mistakes a non-native speaker would commonly make or retreads the entire text for graphical implementations from different characters, etc.
E.G. : A textbox that fits the English phrase gets wrecked in the German translation because there's not supposed to be a line break and the German version requires one.
I've worked on ONE project where we technically had input over the game's lore because they asked us to fix the immensely broken English. Sadly, we were told to remove all of the original flavor from the game (to the point where I doubt all but one of my edits actually made it into the game proper) late in the project's cycle. It's funny how our localization team wanted the game to keep its flavor and kept rewriting stuff so that it remained with less text until they told us otherwise.
So yeah, respect your localization team. Most times, they care just as much as you do. Especially in this one since they're rolled into one office apparently.
