The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters is a second chapter in The Coma series from Devespresso Games. When we started translation of this project, we haven’t worked on previous part. And that meant that we should be careful with terminology. Players got used to The Coma world, so any change could cause a conflict.

But, when we closely studied previous translations, we noticed that there were some inaccuracies in translation. Both games originally are Korean, but script is written in English initially. That is why names for other languages were translated from English. It’s wrong because Korean names should be localized from Korean language, and many countries, for example Ukraine, have their rules of transcriptions from other languages.

Here are several examples from this game:

• Name and surname order: 박미나 → Mina Park → Park Mina).
• Hyphen usage: 이다현 → Da-hyun → Dahyun).

The other interesting thing is that Coma world shares similar terminology and some concepts of another Devespresso game — Vambrace: Cold Soul. That is why it was significant to connect both games terms.

When we started working on the project and played early versions, we noticed that sometimes word flow is not as natural as it should be, also there were several typos, grammar style issues. We gladly helped to fix these things up. Moreover, these fixes often resulted in full text rewriting to fit other places. Now all puzzle pieces fit, and we have clear picture of The Coma world.

The Coma is interesting in terms of localization. Main characters are students of high school Sehwa. And their manner of speech is different — from intelligent students to typical school bully. That is why it was crucial to use teen slang. Our translators worked hard to create proper wording, so we saved character’s individuality.

Also, game has built-in comic-style cutscenes. Comic is another type of art/literature, and its text structure has own rules, especially in onomatopoeia — the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. That is why we used each language standards in writing these cutscenes.

Early Access text and approach we’ve chosen was a small challenge for our team. Text was rewritten a hundred times or even more. And we constantly delivered localization in short time. It is possible with proper process handling and useful tools as our CAT-tool. Of course, it’s better to have finalized text version before localization starts, but we prove everything is possible.