6533b830fe1ef96bd1296cde

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Ergonomics of tools usage for video game localisation: a user survey

subject

description

This paper presents some of the results of two online surveys addressed to professionals working in localisation and video game testing, respectively. The aim is to analyse the ergonomics of CAT tools usage for game localisation by contrasting the data with current business practices and common linguistic bugs. The first survey, which received 620 complete answers from freelance and in-house professional localisers, was conceived to gather information about business practices as well as the tools they use in terms of project management software, terminology databases, specialised corpora, CAT tools, etc. The second survey received 550 complete answers and was addressed to linguistic testers to collect data about the problems they usually encounter when they review the localised versions, as they are the last line of defence before the release of a video game and have access to a WYSIWYG environment. The cross analysis of both questionnaires shows that the most common bug found during the linguistic testing phase is the one usually referred to as “Text overflows, overlapping or truncation”, a problem that arises from an unnatural split between text and image that is specific to video game localisation.https://actraductologie.org/journal/issues/