On the Witcher 3 and Arabic localization Standards
Why you shouldn’t take everything players say at face value: Exhibit A.
One of the most critically acclaimed game localizations in the MENA region, The Witcher 3, was recently updated for the Remastered edition.
Despite the remastered localization having its fair share of grammar/technical issues on the Arabic front, the halo effect of it being MENA’s first venture into RPGs with full localization is still going strong, as shown in the juxtaposition between the weirdly enthusiastic Reddit post about a regressed localization and the forum post criticizing it below.
In some of my earliest writings on localization, I actually touched on why TW3’s localization is so beloved despite being only ever so slightly better than average—in less ceremonious terms, I touched on why it’s Arabic gameloc’s sacred cow.
Fusha Registers in Arabic Game Localization—What Succeeds, What Fails, and Why
“Switching to a translator’s POV, you’ll quickly notice that TW3’s localization is slightly better than average. It’s as far from being terrible as it is from being incredible. About smack dab in the middle for most of its runtime.
All in all, it does the job well enough, but it’s nothing to write home about.
So how come it garnered so much acclaim that players swear by it to this day?
That may in part have to do with the era it was born into.
Since the Arabic localization scene was in its infancy, players didn’t have much other decent localization to go off on. Serviceable localizations were considered good, and the good ones were considered great.
CD Projekt Red, in a sense, were considered luminaries simply because everything else was shrouded in darkness.”
And in the 3 years since, my take has kinda been continuously vindicated. As expected, it only took a few serious RPG Arabic localization attempts to eclipse Witcher 3’s “Excellence”, which wasn’t that high a bar to clear.
We don’t even need to venture far into AAA territory, Capcom’s Monster Hunter Stories is one of the recent examples that come to mind.
Frankly, I’ve always gotten the ick about the aggressive glaze TW3 got—which would be acceptable if it were only coming from people who don’t know any better.
But every Arabic localization paper also seems to think the breadth of the region’s excellence and interesting localization anecdotes is consolidated in a slightly above mediocre RPG loc. Okay. This is why I stopped taking Arabic loc research seriously lmao.
Sorry, got too evil there. But it’ll be interesting to see how opinions on The Witcher 3’s Arabic localization evolve in the post-dark ages era of Arabic localization.
On our website, we have this front and center: “As player standards rapidly mature alongside this market, expectations shift. What once passed for acceptable can quickly turn into an overnight embarrassment.”
We’re already seeing the region’s standards rapidly evolve, the bar for what is acceptable rapidly lift. And I couldn’t be more excited to see how it’ll all unfold.
By Seif Chaib.
Originally posted on Linkedin.