6 important tips to facilitate Macromedia Flash Localization

Starting with  Macromedia Flash version MX2004, the tool supports unicode, which was a major change for Flash localization projects. With MX2004 or higher versions, Flash content can be localized in virtually any language. 

There are some interesting articles in the Macromedia database itself:

http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/basics/flash5_localization/

http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/languages/flashlocalization/

Basically, these tips should be considered when developping a Flash project that would be/ could potentially localized in the future.

1. For all your projects: Organize the content! Take special care to have available all source files like images, etc that could contain text (i.e. pst for images, with separate layers for text and image).
   
2. When possible externalize translatable text utilizing Flash's XML support or text file 'includes'. Try to allow for an externalization of the content in XML as much as possible. XML files allow for an easy localization and usually do not give problems in re-importing for creation of the localized versions.
   
3. By all means, avoid hard-coded translatable strings, font information, or other localization specific parameters in ActionScript.
   
4. Avoid 'breaking-apart' static text objects into vector graphics.
   
5. Of course try to accommodate as much room as possible for text expansion.  Also related to the content layout, if there are multiple sentences, anticipate that the translate text could be written in a different way. (i.e. If English has 2 sentences, maybe the German version will have 3 sentences to better express the idea). 
6. If translatable audio is present, think that the length of the audio could be longer too.

By the way drag you mouse on the embedded flash movie on top of this post. It's an amazing piece of "Flash Art". If you are reading this through RSS, try this time to visit the original page to see it.

Microsoft presents Fable II at Pink Noise facilities

Microsoft has presented today Fable II at Pink Noise Studios. A full set of journalists, including 3 national televisions where present at the event. It was a real honor to host this event.

Participants witnessed a live recording of a "Fable II" advertisement and were able to question Microsoft and Pink Noise teams, including actors and artisitic directors that worked on the game localization. 

Fable II is a game with a powerful artificial intelligence engine, this implicated a big challenge for the dubbing: when a major character in the game is shown from infancy to maturity, the actors needed to modulate accordingly the voices. 

Fable II was also a major challenge for the Pink Noise Localization team.

A few data to give an idea of how big the job was for localizing this interactive fable:

• More than 300 000 words to translate (30 times a standard film)
  
• More than 200 characters dubbed by more than 50 actors
  
• About 250 Studio hours of recording (10 times a standard film)

The game will be released worldwide, end of October 2008.