Dubai – DeafCat Studios

How Easy is it to Localize Chinese Video Games into Arabic

DeafCat Studios — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 11:09:37 +0000

Is it easy to localize Chinese video games into Arabic? Over the years, the team at DeafCat Studios gained in-depth experience in video game localization. That’s mainly due to working on global titles such as FIFA and Battlefield but also working with the smaller titles and mobile games.

Our process at DeafCat Studios has been tested and optimized to produce a top quality product quickly and efficiently. This is also true when we localize Chinese video games into Arabic. Recently DeafCat established an operation in China and has recruited Chinese speaking team members that help us close the cultural gap between our team in the middle east and China. The added value of having native Chinese resources on our team is that they understand the intricacies and specificities of the Chinese culture and they can relay very well our ideas and thoughts to the client et vice versa

Whether the video game is massive or tiny, the localization process is pretty the same and can be summed up into four distinct categories:

– Linguistic (this includes translation, diacritics and adaptation)
– Audio (VO recording of in-game lines)
– Marketing Asset Localization (Localizing all marketing assets such as trailers and producing customized content)
– Quality Assurance (language quality assurance as well as game testing.

With our current set-up and our new representative office in China, we are now more than ever capable of servicing a bigger Chinese customer base, while at the same time simplifying the process of localizing Chinese video games into Arabic; A process that might seem difficult to most Chinese clients especially due to the language barrier.

Check out our podcast below to learn more about localizing Chinese video games into Arabic:

https://spoti.fi/3IrjNTA

How Can Chinese Startups Reach Customers in the Middle East?

DeafCat Studios — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 13:23:09 +0000

Bringing your idea to life in a start-up is an exciting yet challenging endeavor. Putting long hours to make it work and overcoming obstacles becomes your daily bread and butter. When things finally start to pick-up, so does the need to generate revenue. And if your target audience is in the Middle East, you will quickly realize that the biggest barrier to entry will be the cultural difference and mainly the language.

Generating leads to your business from the MENA regions requires you to have a very good communication plan that can resonate with your target audience. However, what works in China, doesn’t necessarily work in the Middle East et vice versa. For that reason, localizing your ideas in Arabic will bring you closer to your target audience and intern grow your business.

So what does localizing ideas mean? Well, let’s assume your startup is in the gaming industry and you are developing the next best selling game. Your game plot has been thought of in Chinese and all your marketing assets are also in Chinese, so in order to sell your game to an Arabic target audience, you will need to localize the game itself and all its assets into Arabic and also create new original marketing materials to support your campaign. Your social media posts, website and all other digital assets have to be localized in Arabic. Interviews have to be subtitled and gameplays have to be dubbed into Arabic. Therefore, having an expert partner in localizing video games into Arabic such as DeafCat Studios is key for your success.

Want to learn more about localizing ideas, listen to our podcasts here:

360° Video Production in Dubai and Beirut

Deafcat Studios — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 13:16:08 +0000

Video Production

Yes it is finally here! We are proud to announce that DeafCat Studios now have the capacity and resources to produce 360° Video Production and cater to both the Lebanese and UAE markets. Now brands, publishers and advertisers in Beirut and Dubai can produce 360° videos quickly and affordably. F&B, retail, real-estate, event organization, travel and tourism industries can now showcase their businesses in a fantastic new way. These 360° Video Production are guaranteed to capture your audiences and increase your brand equity.
One of the most powerful content formats ever created, 360 has been at the beating heart of visualize since day one.
360° video is one of the most powerful content formats for user engagement. It transports viewers to the center of a narrative, giving them a highly immersive experience of a real-world or custom environment. With major platforms like YouTube and Facebook supporting the format, your 360° content has the potential to reach millions.
Interactive video is currently seeing wide adoption on campaigns from international brands, music videos, TV and entertainment, sports, corporate training, the travel industry and more. With the lowest barrier to entry of any VR content, brands can reach a massive audience of 2 billion smartphone users who can enjoy 360° video even without a VR headset.

Arabic dubbing, Quality vs. Price!

Deafcat Studios — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 20:22:00 +0000

For the past couple of weeks, my team an I have been negotiating an Arabic dubbing project with an Indian film TV station based in Dubai, which got us to do a calculation exercise that I thought I’d share with you.
It all started when we got approached by an Indian TV station who was looking to partner up with different recording studios in Lebanon and hence get the best out of their investment. They were looking for studios that can provide them with recording services in Arabic, and more specifically Syrian dubbing for their Indian movies at the lowest cost possible and they sent us a request to quote them accordingly.

A few things we learned from this exercise:

1- Syrian talent prefer to get paid per scene instead of hours.

2- On average, there are 200 scenes in a 100 min Indian movie and an average of 15 main actors in each movie.

3- Client likes to go with a fixed price per movie when it comes to dubbing into Arabic.

4- The cost breakdown for an Arabic dubbing project are as per the below:

Cost of actors.
Dubbing director.
Music and effects track creation (M&E).
Mixing and mastering.
Script translation into Arabic and adaptation into the Syrian dialect.
Studio time.

When we came back to the client with our quotation, we were surprised to find out that our cost was 20% higher than the other studios. 20% was our profit margin, and hence we did not understand how the other studios could afford to take on the project and still make profit. So we had to re-assess the project scope and re-do the calculation a couple of times and every time, we realized that if we charged 20% less we wouldn’t be making any profit and since it was a fixed cost, we would actually loose money if the Indian movie had more scenes than the expected average.

After doing a couple of tests, we figured out that the only way to cut the cost is by reducing the price of all the recording services and especially the costs of the dubbing director and the M&E track creation. Consequently, less time would be spent on dubbing direction and the M&E track creation which would reflect directly on the quality of the final product.

In fact, in order to make sure that we were right, I asked the client to send me a demo of an Indian movie dubbed into Arabic that has been produced by another studio that charged 20% less than us. I looked at the video and indeed, there was a major difference in quality. Basically, the lip-sync was way off and the M&E track was all over the place and that made perfect sense since in order to get a proper lip-sync and M&E track both the dubbing director and the mixing engineer need to spend a substantial amount of time on the job which was out of the question, since more time means more money and a higher cost.

Bottom line, I believe that quality should never be compromised for price because when you have a high quality product, your audience will be more engaged with your movies and hence would come back for more.

DeafCat Studios will provide you with the highest quality Arabic dubbing services at the lowest rates possible.

Arabic E-Learning Project

Deafcat Studios — Sun, 28 Dec 2014 19:27:24 +0000

So it seems that E-Learning is a multi-billion dollar industry, and we had no clue. Well that’s until we were approached by a very cool client who was tackling this growing sector in the Middle East. Apparently, big corporations in the MENA region and more specifically in the GCC (UAE and Saudi Arabia), invest a lot in their HR departments and encourage employees to take extra curricular educational lessons to improve their knowledge and skills. That’s where my client’s company plays a bridging role between international educational institutions and regional companies by providing E-learning solutions in Arabic for employees. We provide him with high quality recording and mastering for the Arabic scripts.
Not to mention that the whole team at DeafCat Studios is very excited to work on these e-learning projects for two reasons:

1- They allow us to cater to a relatively new e-learning industry in the Middle East.
2- We are actually learning from these courses… for free.

VO request from Dubai turns out to be quite challenging

Deafcat Studios — Sun, 28 Dec 2014 19:14:48 +0000

Technically, voice over (VO) projects are quite simple to do. However it gets a little bit complicated when the delivery date is very short and when the script is not available. The last voice over project I got from a small production house in the United Arab Emirates (Dubai) and it was quite a fun challenge where I had to do script writing of 7 short videos (reportage) to which the main protagonist was a French guy speaking in English. That alone took quite a lot of time because I couldn’t understand what the French guy was saying in English. It was funny but the team and I did it.

After that, we had to translate the script from English to classical Arabic and then we had to find out the right talent to do VO. After recording the scripts, the mixing engineer did a fantastic job mixing the voice over with the original audio track so that all the videos had a uniformed master track. Taking on small projects like that is always fun because you never know what you might expect but most importantly because the studio can cater to the needs of smaller production houses with limited budgets.