(RED) Charity Aims For Goal In 16 Languages French, Italian, Portuguese, Vietnamese

Games are no longer relegated to large consoles and arcade games. They surround us in our everyday technologies online, phones and even in cars and planes, making long trips enjoyable. The purpose of games has also expanded from recreational use to educational, charity and business as well.

With FIFA world cup around the corner, (RED) charity developed an online soccer video game to engage worldwide audiences through a major portal and also raise funds for its cause combating AIDS in Africa. Since its founding by U2’s Bono in 2006, 5 million people have been impacted by its HIV programs and it has received large publicity. The game will be played inside Facebook as well as Yahoo instant messenger.

Hired by Sapient Nitro, JBI Studios worked to localize the online game’s audio into French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Korean, Bahasa Indonesia, Vietnamese and multiple flavors of English, Spanish and Chinese. As the commentator voice was crucial to the gaming experience, especially in soccer where the various TV announcers’ “GOAAAAAL” call is as much part of the experience, the key element for this project was casting the right voice talents.

Besides sourcing the appropriate voices, timing recordings to multiple and moving on-screen graphics was the second challenge on this audio localization. Interactive games authored in Flash and other applications allow original audio files to be replaced with localized ones. For this to be seamless and avoid software re-engineering, the timeline is key. In this case the game was prepared in English but with a global audience in mind and had significant buffer built in to accommodate multiple languages.

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