North American Localization

[playtonicrarevival]

Wow, does this toy box look great. Brings back a bunch of memories of the glory days of the buddy platformer. I can't wait for the finished product. One thing I would suggest is making the conversion from British English to American English when localizing the game. Especially for the sake of small children learning how to spell words like favorite, theater, and vocalize for the first time. It really breaks the immersion when having to double check dialog for "spelling errors".

[Crownless]

Or I suppose we could just teach our children that other parts of the world spell those words a little differently. Guarantee if they spend any time online, they'll come across those words spelled that way.

Honestly, I prefer the dialog as it is. It seems like a silly change considering it's perfectly readable.

[ReturnRare]

After a couple Professor Layton games Nintendo said "screw it" and just gave everyone the British English translation for the later titles. It makes sense because the games take place in England anyway. The same thing happened with Xenoblade Chronicles. Nintendo of America wasn't going to give us the game until fans started a movement called "Operation Rainfall". Since those cool cats at Nintendo of Europe already had a translation in the works Nintendo of America decided at the last minute to give us that version and kept all British-isms. If anything it made the game even more unique. All the characters had British accents, dungeons had floor 1 labeled as "Ground Floor" and then numbered the floors starting with the second floor being called "Floor 1", and the British way of spelling was kept in tact.

British spelling doesn't hurt anything. If anything, it adds flavour.

[karashata]

I'm quite alright with them sticking with British spelling, we here in Canada use the British spelling for a lot of words already anyway.

[Yavga]

[IronSammet]

PLEASE do not localize (localise!) the dialogue. I absolutely love the way it is.

[moritasan2040]

Yeah, localizing an already English game is pretty pointless. Should they also remove the British humor and the British words?

[Lufkin]

Well, in that case, there should be a Canadian English localiz(s?)ation as well! /s

[ShanPen]

First you take "Where's Wally?" (Waldo), then "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" (Sorcerer's), and now you're going after poor Yooka-Laylee?!? When will you people be satisfied?!? (I'm just kidding ).

But really, if you see the alternate spellings enough, you get used to them and then you just automatically adjust. For example, as someone from Australia where we use British English, I read your initial post and was wondering why you included the word "theater" in the list, because when I read it, my mind automatically corrected it and I actually saw "theatre", until I made a conscious effort to look at it and notice the different spelling of the E and R being swapped around. I actually never knew the word was spelled differently in American English until you said it. I did know about the other words you mentioned, but as Crownless mentioned, that's because I see the alternate/American spelling of those words so much that I can read either spellings and it's not jarring at all.

[dotEXE]

I'd prefer a mix of whatever English (or other language, or hieroglyph) is necessary to portray the intended character's personality.

[Volvagia]

[Exaskryz]

What did Rare do? I swore they kept British spelling and jargon for the NA release, as they should.

No need for everything to be Americanized mate. That loses some o' the charm.

[Tamashii7]

I'm fine with the British spelling. It adds to the game's personality and charm.

[NPChilla]

[chameleojack]

No offense, OP, but "think of the children" has rarely ever been a good reason to change anything

[Yavga]

[BanjoThreeie]

[Yavga]

Fair enough. It's just OP's stance in this seems awkwardly egocentrical and kind of insulting.

[John Enigma]

Although I'm Puerto Rican (I was raised speaking American English), and I have certain viewpoints on localization, I think that localizing this game would be completely unnecesary.

It needs to have its original (both literally and figuratively) English language, and it needs to have its original, zany, Rare-like humor.

I had a good laugh when I saw the dialogue of Banjo-Kazooie. It was really fun.

[Xellos]

I doubt that Team 17 would bother with localizing Yooka-Laylee into American English when the game is already written in British English by default. Not to mention the massive amount of work involved of translating Y-L in French, Spanish, German, Dutch (I wish), etcetera - leaves no room for such a trivial option being included in Yooka-Laylee. Also, it's very tempting to post a certain classic moment from The Simpsons that's about that statement of yours, OP.