On the official website for the Western release of Blade & Soul, Brett Jaxel, a member of the Blade & Soul localization team touches upon how NCSoft are making an effort to properly localize the game, rather than simply translate it into English.
“As writers, our goal is to provide the best in-game experience for any and all players,” Jaxel writes. “We also want to ensure that Blade & Soul isn’t simply ‘translated’ into English, but is presented in a way that will be accessible to all western players while simultaneously preserving the unique East Asian setting and lore of the game.”
Jaxel says that all the appropriate locations, characters, items, and skills have been renamed, and that he is currently primarily working on rewriting quest dialogue, along with a host of other writers and editors. One of the challenges of doing this, he has said, is running into characters or situations that reference very specific Korean or East Asian folklore that the team isn’t familiar with.
Jaxel also talks about the humorous aspects of localizing the game.
“While naming the locations, item, and NPCs of the world of Blade & Soul we came up with several amusing names (at least I found them amusing),” he says. “Through the voting and feedback process, several of these made it into the game such as ‘Ploggles’ (a race of frog-like creatures), ‘Grassquatch’ (a grassy sasquatch… as one might expect), ‘Justa Cave’ (a cavern that may or may not hold an underground fighting ring), and ‘The Merry Potters’ (a crafting guild that specializes in pottery).”
He continues: “The ‘Tree Fellers’ is our name for the woodcutters’ gathering guild, just barely beating out other suggestions such as ‘Wood You Believe’, ‘We’re Stumped’, and ‘Gituda Choppers’. A few other honorable mentions that didn’t quite become our final guild names include: ‘For the Halibut’ (fish guild), ‘Boulder Dash’ (mason’s guild), ‘Herbin’ Legends’ (herbalist guild), ‘Nice to Meat You’ (hunter’s guild), ‘Stoke Blokes’ (coalminer’s guild), and ‘We Can Dig It’, ‘The Underminers’, ‘Totally Loded (mining guild)’.”
Judging by some of those names, Blade & Soul is going to end up with a rather whimsical localization that’s actually a little bit reminiscent of Dragon Quest. That’s never a bad thing, especially considering that so many MMOs have very little effort put into their localized releases.
