Localizing Your Game's Marketing Content to Acquire Global Users

When game publishers decide to expand into new markets and need to promote their games in unfamiliar regions, they find they need to localize the game itself as well as associated marketing content.

Global success is about personalization. To captivate users, publishers need to communicate in their language to connect with them at a personal, cultural, and emotional level.

What are the main requirements for game marketing content localization?

The objective of marketing localization is to grow your business abroad (and revenue in a new market, of course), which you do through presenting content that is culturally relevant to the target region.

Localized game content must:

Be informative and persuasive, effectively describe the game, and motivate users to download it.

Be creative, enabling it to stand out from competitors and leave a lasting impression.

Reflect your brand's style and tone of voice.

We conducted a small poll among game marketers and others involved in game promotion. We asked them, "What are the main requirements for marketing translations?" Here are the results:

As you can see, the majority of marketers expect the translated materials to be high-quality, accurate, and aligned with the company's tone of voice. To do that, you need expert linguists with experience localizing games. Even though you may want to do this quickly, it's a mistake to rely on machine or AI translation tools since they often struggle to adapt text to local nuances, which is critical for resonance with your target market. Check out our article where we ran an experiment comparing AI and human translations.

Game publishers must be willing to pay more for translations done by native-speaking linguists, ensuring that localized marketing materials convey the exact ideas and emotions but in a manner specific to each target market.

Picking your translation service

What's the best way to get this type of content completed?

The main difference between localizing the game itself and its promotional materials is that translating marketing content often needs to be done quickly. Also, the volume of marketing text is typically not large enough to justify reaching out to a translation agency or localization partner, either due to minimum order requirements or the urgency of the task because doing so requires setting up contracts, projects, processes, and teams. In such cases, online translation services are the best option since they are designed to handle small and urgent tasks.

Localizing different types of game marketing content

So, what kind of marketing content needs to be translated? Once again, we turned to game marketing persons with a question:

Let's look at these individually and examine each one's complexities. You'll find the solutions for these complexities at the end of the article.

Game updates

The majority of urgent translation tasks are related to game updates and communications about them.

Translating game update messages is essential for fostering a global gaming community. It ensures that players from diverse linguistic backgrounds can fully comprehend and appreciate new features, fixes, and enhancements. Clear communication enhances the overall gaming experience and contributes to a more inclusive and engaged player base, ultimately boosting the game's success internationally.

The main complexities in translating game update messages are:

Contextual understanding

Consistency with existing translations (terminology, style, etc.)

Technical details (translations should be accurate, ensuring all technical details and changes are clearly communicated to players)

Timelines (game updates can be frequent, requiring quick turnaround times to keep all players informed simultaneously)

In-game texts

This type of translation is the second largest part of urgent tasks that game promoters have to tackle. Altering in-game text, addressing overlooked untranslated phrases, and handling other textual modifications fall within the realm of QA testers rather than marketers. Nevertheless, these urgent translation tasks significantly impact marketers' work. As the release date approaches, it becomes urgent to tackle these texts.

The main complexities in urgent translations of in-game texts are:

Speed

Contextual understanding (without sufficient context, ambiguous terms or phrases can be mistranslated)

Quality assurance (any errors found after release need to be addressed quickly, requiring an agile response from the translation team)

Technical constraints (urgent translations often need to fit existing UI elements, which can restrict word choice and phrasing)

Consistency in terminology and style

Communication and collaboration (effective communication among translators, developers, and testers is harder to manage under time pressure)

App store updates and ASO descriptions

Enhancing app store pages through localization significantly increases game downloads. The process involves adapting keywords, titles, descriptions, screenshots, and videos. Developers who manage numerous games may need to swiftly update store descriptions for multiple products, often resorting to various translation APIs since maintaining an in-house team of translators might not always be the most efficient solution.

The main complexities in translating ASO descriptions and store updates are:

SEO considerations (inserting relevant keywords into the translated text to maintain search engine optimization)

Character limits (adhering to strict character limits imposed by app stores, which can vary by language due to differences in word length)

Market adaptation

Persuasiveness (crafting persuasive and engaging descriptions that capture the essence of the app and attract users)

Marketing messages (press releases, posts, etc.)

When creating their home-market messaging, marketers thoroughly analyze their target audience to determine the most effective communication strategies and messaging. Likewise, when translating marketing materials, it's crucial to capture all the nuances of the message and employ language that resonates precisely with the audience. 

Presentation styles may also vary across platforms. For instance, you might see gaming slang on social media versus more formal language on a major gaming site. Providing the translator with comprehensive context is important to make sure they can achieve the right style in the translation.

The main complexities in translation marketing messages are:

Maintaining the brand voice

Cultural sensitivity (being mindful of cultural nuances to avoid misunderstandings or offense, which can harm the brand's reputation)

Technical constraints (character limits for some platforms, formatting)

SEO and keywords (adapting SEO strategies to fit local search behaviors and preferences)

Speed (translating marketing messages quickly to keep up with real-time marketing campaigns and social media trends)

Message integrity (ensuring that the translated message accurately reflects the original content without losing its intended meaning or impact)

Multimedia content (translating accompanying multimedia content such as images, videos, and infographics while ensuring that all elements are culturally appropriate and engaging)

Ad texts (localizing advertising campaigns)

Tailoring ads to specific locales enhances message effectiveness and boosts game downloads. Many user acquisition managers resort to machine translation, often via APIs. However, machine-generated texts don't meet quality requirements. On the other hand, hiring native-speaking marketers for each campaign can be expensive.

An optimal solution for extensive advertising is online human translation services with APIs that connect to your systems, simplifying automated, high-quality translations across multiple languages without the need for an extensive local marketing team.

Additional marketing content that requires translation includes:

Banners: when localizing banner texts, you have to consider potential character limitations. In certain languages, the translation of an advertising phrase may occupy more space due to variations in word length.

User reviews: these boost customer confidence and offer additional insights. While many platforms use machine translation for large review volumes, doing so isn't always ideal. Machine translation often falls short when it comes to accurately conveying human emotions, which is a crucial aspect of reviews. However, using machine translation (MT) and post-editing (PE) by a professional localizer can get the job done. 

Visuals: when creating visual content for new regions, be mindful of variations in how colors are perceived and cultural preferences for characters. Localizing such content is about more than just translating text. The visuals need to be adapted, too.

Solutions for translation difficulties:

Provide translators with the context (screenshots, comments, etc.) that will help them to make the translation more accurate.

Give translators the necessary documentation, including terminology and style guidelines.

Indicate the tone of voice and text category.

Specify the required length of the translated text.

Use an API to automate the order process and make it seamless and fast.

Use a glossary to maintain translation consistency.

Entrust your translations to native-speaking linguists to make sure that all cultural and linguistic nuances are considered.

Utilize the proofreading option.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, marketing localization personalizes content for local users. To achieve that personalization, you need translation accuracy, brand alignment, respect for cultural nuances, and adherence to technical constraints. These are all best handled by professional gaming linguists.

When trying to balance cost, speed, and quality, the focus should always lean towards the latter. After all, providing high-quality translations and conveying the right messages in each language is crucial to effective marketing campaigns, growing your user base abroad, and maintaining the company's brand in new markets.