So What’s Next? Progress, Editing, and Blog Posts

In our January blog post, we announced reaching 100% translation and 70% editing for Tales of Destiny 2. In our February blog post, we discussed our work on the quiz book. Did you know the quiz book is a whopping 5,631 strings of text? That’s 5,631 text boxes, not sentences. One string alone could be several sentences. Let’s talk about that!

This is our progress! Here you can see how many strings of text are in each portion of Tales of Destiny 2; how many have been translated, localized, and/or proofread; and the statistics associated with those numbers. As of March 24, our overall localization editing is at nearly 86%, while proofreading is just over 81%. While the percentages themselves don’t seem hugely different, when considering just how many strings of text the game has, this is actually quite a bit! So we have made great progress since January, and we continue to work through the game (including at the very moment we were writing this post).

With this month’s post, we wanted to provide not only this update but also a bit more of a glimpse of what progress looks for us on the Lumina Tales team, what progress will continue to look like as we balance other obligations, and how we’ll be using our blog moving forward to ensure we can still reach our goal of a release this year.

1. BEYOND TRANSLATION

Of course, on paper, translating a game means… simply that. Translating the game. However, we at Lumina Tales feel very strongly about ensuring that our patches go beyond that and are at the highest quality possible despite not being an official localization. This means ensuring characters sound natural and alive, the text does not alienate English-speaking audiences (e.g., puns and jokes), terminology and names are consistent throughout the entire script, there are no grammatical or typographical errors, the text follows our internal style guide, and the patch is without other lingering issues.

Outside of the programming side of things, after text is translated, it is passed on to our editors. The editors on the localization side of things work with this text first, paying attention to the aforementioned issues. Once those editors finish, the text is then passed on to the editors in charge of proofreading to filter out anything that remains. The localization/proofreading part of the conga line is where we are right now!

When the editors finish and our numbers hit 100% across the board, we will be passing the rest to our programmers for insertion and then begin the internal QA testing process to filter out anything else that remains prior to release. We have some fun things in mind to do with the community when we reach the QA phase, so please look forward to it!

2. AVOIDING BURNOUT

We felt burnout was important for us to address in this post as well. This is a passion project through and through that our team members are all doing in addition to juggling their real-world jobs, hobbies, and general lives. Some of those jobs and hobbies include translating, writing, and/or editing too, so it can get tiring! For this reason, pacing ourselves has long been important and continues to be so that Tales of Destiny 2 gets all the attention and care it deserves and everyone is happy with what they are doing.

Progress has been steady and consistent with the help of scheduling. While some members of our team work best in bursts, others do prefer having a specific number of strings that they work on each week so that they are able to edit at a consistent pace without needing to suddenly step back for a while. We have found this to work excellently for us, hence the significant progress we have made since our initial announcement in May of last year and even since just two months ago!

3. OUR BLOG MOVING FORWARD

On the note of avoiding burnout and ensuring that work on Tales of Destiny 2 itself is consistent, we will be changing how we update our blog moving forward. Since making our announcement last May, we have made one blog post every month. It has been fun keeping you all in the loop, reminding you that the project is alive and well, and providing you with a glimpse of just how things work on our team. We still have lots of topics we can’t wait to share with you all. There may or may not be a blog post about commas, apostrophes, and the Chicago Manual of Style in the future (spoilers: there will be).

That said, the finish line for the text of Tales of Destiny 2 is in sight, and we would like to focus on that and allocate some of our blog-writing time to it. With this in mind, we will be shifting to a bimonthly blog schedule instead. So you can look forward to our next post being in May instead of April! We hope you can understand, and we look forward to talking about something new and having more updates at that time!