Navigating Ethical Dilemmas in Localization: Insights and Solutions (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Have you ever encountered major ethical dilemmas while localizing and how did you navigate them

Speaker 2: with your team? That's a great question. Sorry, but that's a good one. I don't think I've worked on a product that hasn't had ethical dilemmas. It's one of those things where they're often innocent. People who are making the content don't know everything about other cultures. I don't pretend to know everything about other cultures. They'll build something and they think it's cool and then it comes to us and we take a look at it and go, this is maybe not the best idea. It's not that uncommon for it to happen. What we usually do when that comes across our plate is we take a look at it and we try to build a document explaining why this is a problem. If it's minor, it's something that we might just directly talk to whoever designed the content. But if it's something more significant or we think it might have legal repercussions or significant impact on sales or something like that, then we would definitely draft something up that we would then bring up as a concern to the team at large and try to find a solution from there. And usually it's resolved. It's a matter of discussing things. The designer is usually not so gung-ho about something that they wouldn't make changes to it. And there's compromise that there are always to be found. The only thing we need you to change is this little thing over here and then the problem goes away because nobody's going to associate it with whatever it is. But yeah, I think it's fairly common and it's just a matter of discussing it with the things. The issue is if it happens too late and it doesn't get caught and it goes live. But thankfully, I think that's only happened sort of once for us, for me, a long time ago on Diablo 3 during beta. We hadn't noticed it, but at some point I guess somebody had taken the cover of the Quran and placed it as the cover of one of the books inside the game. And if you play Diablo, you can click on the bookshelves and all the books fall off onto the floor and you can't have the Quran on the floor. So that caused a little bit of an uproar. And it was fixed as soon as we were notified. But that's something that sometimes will slip through the cracks.

Speaker 1: Now, to be fair, when the books fall on the ground, they're like this. Very, very small. So that's having quite a keen eye for detail.

Speaker 2: And for sure, the artist didn't realize that he had grabbed the cover of a Quran either, right? So it was completely an innocent mistake that happened to fall through the cracks. But since then, we put things in place to make sure those types of things don't happen.