#games localization

How Games Localization Services Can Help Your Company?

Do you know how thrilling and challenging game localization is? Let’s talk about this with Alain Dellepiane, English to Italian game localization director.

Please tell a few words about yourself. How did you get into game localization?

I started as a game localizer ten years ago. I was in England looking for an employer that might need my language studies and I became a localization tester at Take 2 interactive, now mostly known for its labels 2K Games and Rockstar Games.

Initially, the whole localization unit was made by me and a French colleague, so for more than two years I had the chance of editing and testing pretty much everything they published. That summed up to 24+ different titles, an average of one per month, providing a great exposure and learning experience.

Meanwhile, I studied for the IoL Diploma through a distance learning course, which jump-started my freelance translator career once I came back to Italy.

In 2007 I moved to Tokyo for a project and roughly one year later I joined forces with two other translators, becoming a sort of PM/editor/translator hybrid.

What is the most challenging and most rewarding part of your work?

As a freelance game translator, no one really minds how you achieve your results, as long as they are fine. You are free to experiment any kind of literary, technological or management approach: if your text matches expectations, no one will say a word.

This gives you the freedom to gradually evolve your own work style and it’s really rewarding.

However, expectations are constantly evolving too. Being the translator for Tomb Raider in 1996 and in 2013 may nominally be the same job (and localization budgets and schedules are probably not that different) but expectations have undeniably grown.

So the freedom and experimentation we mentioned is also a necessity. What was a neat little trick yesterday, is your bacon saver today and may well pay your rent tomorrow.

Sometimes it feels like a constant rush to keep up, and it can get a bit tiring.

Can you recommend some best practices (and/or tools) for proper game localization?

Well, there are as many different approaches to this job as there are translators, and I can’t seriously boast mine as The Right Way To Do Stuff. But I can share the most promising paths I found.

One is Quality Assurance.

Yes, translation is a lifetime struggle for truth, beauty and love, but -in my experience- clients are mostly concerned with getting the damn thing out in a decently working state.

Every time your text is too long, a tag is broken, a menu is referred to with the wrong name, someone has to go and fix it. And it’s usually the same person that will provide the final feedback on your work!

Hopefully, there are many QA tools out there giving you super-human error spotting powers, like finding a single wrong digit among thousands or spotting an inconsistency with a translation done five years ago by someone else and so on.

Personally, I always allocate the last hour before delivery for a quick check with Xbench and no matter how careful we have been, it always spots some little thing. It’s almost annoying!

I guess no one would deliver a translation without running the spell checker first. I now feel the same for QA: it’s that helpful.

The second (and hopefully more inspiring!) path is learning how games work, and use that as a reference for your translation.

Think about movies; a translator knowing a little bit about moviemaking -from script structure, to acting styles, to film cutting- will undeniably offer more effective dialogues, as they will understand the underlying goals and mechanics of what they are working on. I truly believe a good game translator should do the same. And that means knowing games as a player, but also as a developer.

To make an example, consider this episode of the Extra Credits web show about the “Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics” paper on game structure.

At first sight it seems completely irrelevant for a translator, but under the surface, it’s a goldmine of very practical guidelines for any string of text.

What tone should I keep? What kind of terminology should I use? How much can I characterize? It’s all written there, and it’s just 5 pages long!

To make another example, we have been recently involved with a classic one-on-one fighting game with a strong online community.

The most natural approach for a translator would be to focus on lore, characters, and bombastic move names. Like in a book.

Instead, we got in touch with a game journalist who specialized in that specific genre, we double wrapped him in NDA and then worked together in order to shape the core glossary together.

And that paid back in spades, because under all the flamboyance, online fighting has a set of codified rules and techniques that isn’t far away from an international judo championship!

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that translators should embark in long-winded academic research in fields that aren’t strictly theirs. But I do believe that we are part of game development and involved in all aspects of it. From game design, to writing, to audio… if it’s ever written or said, it’s for us. Knowing more about the other fields of game making and understanding how they work essentially boils down to being a good neighbor!

Incidentally, researching localization tools and getting in touch with other fields of the game industry is my mission as a Vice-Chair of the Game Localization SIG of the IGDA, so feel free to join its mailing list if you are interested in hearing more about it!

What would your advice to translators who want to get into game localization?

The big catch-22 is that few people will take you in… unless you already have game localization experience.

It may seem unfair, but this is a young field. There is some consensus on what a professional translation should look like, but we are far from having rules set in stone.

In other words, this is a job that must be learned by trial and error, and precious few can afford to wait for you to do it.

Given my background, it’s not surprising that I see localization testing jobs as the best path, as they give you a great experience and a solid reference for the CV. However, you will also need to be young (ideally under 30) and ready to move abroad (ideally you should already be in countries like England or Canada for the interview!)

Understandably, not everyone can do that, but you can still build some experience on your own.

Take the Humble Indie Bundle 8 that went on sale a couple of weeks ago. It came with 11 titles, 3 with official FIGS translation and one (Dear Esther) you could translate yourself. Great exposure, for less than 6 dollars.

If a potential candidate tackled a challenging translation like Dear Esther and linked a Youtube playthrough on their CV, I would probably check it out even if they have no professional experience.

First of all because it would allow to quickly judge their skills in context, but most importantly because it would prove the most vital skill of all: getting things done.

All your career, you will double as a problem solver. New genres, new platforms, new tools, you will always have to analyze problems, break them down to their essential pieces and come up with a solution. Show that you can do it and you are halfway there.

Good luck!

As a translation superhero, what superpowers would you have?

The Amazing Power of Sleep Deprivation :)