Capcom have published an interesting blog post on their community site about the localization of Dragon’s Dogma into various languages. There are over 42,000 lines of dialogue in the game, Capcom say, and around 20 hours of voiced dialogue across 400 characters.
Since Dragon’s Dogma is a fantasy-themed game, say they decided to take a “high fantasy” approach with the characters’ speech patterns. The English text for the game was heavily influenced by author, George R.R. Martin, and unlike most games, instead of being translated from Japanese, Dragon’s Dogma is being developed simultaneously into six different languages.
Since localization and development are being done in parallel, this allows the game’s localizers to work with the devteam to cut down on line limits, since Japanese requires less screen space than English, which in turn requires less space than other European languages.
