Freelancer Spotlight: Game Localization

Georgios Tziakos 

Georgios Tziakos is an English-Greek linguist splitting his time between Spain and Greece. He has been working as a translator, editor, LQA reviewer and language lead for 13 years, specializing in gaming/media, marketing and technical localization. He also offers UI/UX/internationalization consulting services to language service providers and end clients, often focusing on proprietary CAT tools and translation platforms. Georgios is an avid gamer and enjoys helping environmental NGOs translate their texts, as well as posting regularly on various professional and translation industry discussion groups on social media. 

Marius Mei 

Marius Mei is an English-Japanese-Chinese translator based in both Taipei and Shanghai, China. He has been active in the game localization field for over 23 years, working closely with many game developers, publishers and localization companies around the world. He has translated and reviewed more than 20 million words and managed several large, outsourced game localization projects. He is also a passionate gamer, indie game developer and published fiction writer. 

1. How long have you been a translator? 

Marius: Over 23 years, since 2000.
Georgios: I’ve worked as a freelance translator since 2010, so that would be 13 years now. 

2. What was your path into translation/freelancing? 

Marius: I am a gamer with 33+ years of experience, ever since I was a 10-year-old kid. The Chinese game market was very different back then. There were not many localized games, and very few Chinese games altogether. It was natural for us to play untranslated games so playing games with an English-Chinese or Japanese-Chinese dictionary in hand was almost a habit for some of us. The only translated gaming content we saw was mostly in handbooks and magazine articles. This content was very precious, somewhat making the translators celebrities for us. 

When the internet era began, we gamers would gather on forums discussing the games. We would translate related content to support those who could only read Chinese, sometimes even arguing about which translation was better. So it was only natural for me to turn my hobby into a career. In 2000, when I was still in college, I established my own translation business and started translating games and other content for local companies. As my experience grew, I got to work on larger localization projects with industry-leading game developers. 

Georgios: I started learning English early, thanks to contact with Greek-American relatives and an early exposure to books and computer games. When I found myself struggling with my chosen subject in college, I decided to take professional translation classes instead. Although I enjoyed learning how to translate many types of text I found that I particularly loved literary translation, so I approached several Greek publishing houses. It was tough going during the Global Financial Crisis, but my passion (read: nerdiness) for fantasy and sci-fi allowed me to break into the market and translate books ranging from Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn saga, to World of Darkness and Starcraft novels Next came a Master’s Degree in Translation at Cardiff University, which gave me a wider academic appreciation of translation theory, the humanities and social sciences. After that, I started specializing in gaming, technical and marketing translations. 

3. Why did you end up with a specialism in gaming localization? 

Georgios: Millennials who experienced the Golden Years of the fantasy, sci-fi and horror genres in Greece — a period spanning roughly from the early 90s to the early 2000s — know that it was also the heyday of table-top role-playing games; think Dungeons & Dragons. Coupled with the rapid growth of video games, this led to the emergence of a vivid subculture of geeks, nerds and metalheads that I also belonged to. I spent endless evenings, either on my own or with friends, exploring fictional worlds on-screen or in the amazing stories we told each other while role-playing. 

Since Greek gaming localization was practically non-existent back then, every rulebook and video game was in English, which further reinforced my love for the language and gaming itself. Thanks to all this, I soon discovered that I had developed an intuitive understanding of the multi-layered context found in video game texts, whether UIs, help files or fluff text. 

4. What does it take to become a successful gaming translator? Do you need to be a gamer to be good at gaming translations? 

Georgios: First of all, you definitely need to be familiar with video games as a genre. One can get to know the typical fictional settings used in video games by reading fantasy, sci-fi and history books, as well as watching relevant movies and TV shows. Basically, you need to know what the word ‘javelin’ means in a medieval combat simulator (pointy end first!) and a modern warfare strategy game (ka-boom!). You need to know what the iconic term ‘fireball’ means in fantasy and why it’s different from a firewall (yep, nothing to do with your router!). Depending on the project, you might also need to understand a number of obscure meta-references to famous characters, settings or games, or at least have cultivated a sixth sense that will prompt you to go and research all those things and not merely translate words literally. 

All this wouldn’t matter, of course, without an excellent command of both the source and target language and a lot of practise using them in everyday life. Being in touch with the two cultures, especially their unique pop cultures, allows a translator to convey colloquialisms, slang and literary language in the best way possible. It’s not easy for a single person to be able to handle translation of equipment in a cyberpunk game, a dark monologue in a neo-noir story and an epic speech in a high fantasy adventure. On top of all that, you still need technical translation skills to handle CAT tools, menu or button names and other UI elements. If you are still in doubt, make sure you ask comprehensive questions. I

think that being a gamer, or at least having been one in the past, is an enormous advantage for a gaming translator. It’s one of the things that serves as a foundation for the sixth sense I mentioned earlier, this intuitive feel for the meaning of the text you are dealing with. That said, I have met some gaming translators that did very well without having a lot of experience in gaming themselves. As long as you are willing to learn and do your research, trying out a few games to understand the overall common principles of gaming can be enough. Depending on the project, however, it might be best for a linguist with a lot of gaming experience to translate or review texts, or supervise and train other team members, so that everyone’s on the same page about a particularly demanding game’s terminology and voice. 

5. Which type of games do you like most to localize? And why? 

Marius: I love to translate games with a good story, cultural backgrounds or innovative game mechanics. So mostly all kinds of role-playing games (RPGs) and massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), or some brilliant indie games. What’s not to love when you can make a living while reading good stories or admiring elegant game designs? It can be a challenge when you bump into a knowledge blind spot or culture gap you just don’t understand while translating such games, but it is very interesting to try and find a solution. 

When I was translating the zh-TW version of a world-famous MMO game, for example, I was puzzled by the sentence: ‘Can’t tell his straw foot and hay foot.’ After one or two hours of research, I finally understood the meaning and background of the term, which gave me great satisfaction. 

I also helped with the zh-CN to EN-US localization of a popular Chinese action role-playing game (ARPG). It is a lot of fun translating concepts such as WuXia (Martial Arts) and XianXia (Immortals) that used to be exclusive to Chinese people into English. There will be more and more of these kinds of projects in the future. There are websites that translate Chinese web novels for readers around the world, for example. More Chinese games are also being published globally, including my own games, and I would love to continue working on such projects. 

6. Tell us more about a gaming localization project you are particularly proud of. 

Marius: I enjoyed almost every project I worked on. Localization of a well-known MMO game was my first big project. It was the largest zh-TW localization project at the time, roughly 6-7 million words, so the whole team was excited about it. I translated a large part of the story and skill-related content, as well as reviewing and polishing the whole project. Additionally, I made many friends and I would say that our work was appreciated by the players. That was a lot of fun. This job also provided my own business with the opportunity to work with Blizzard on many of their titles for quite a few years. 

Recently I completed both the zh-TW and zh-CN version of two indie games that were published by one of my favourite indie game developers. I really enjoyed them a lot. As a fellow indie game developer, I always love to translate this specific genre and give more people in the Chinese market an easy way to discover and enjoy these games. 

7. What kind of advice/tips would you give to your colleagues or other freelancers about this line of work? 

Georgios: I know we have all heard before how being passionate about what you do matters and I definitely agree with that sentiment. If you don’t have a deep interest in a subject, you will probably not be up for getting really familiar with it. But what I’d like to emphasize is that, in my experience, the value of being meticulous, conscientious and invested is even greater than one’s enthusiasm when it comes to professional video game localization. I’ve seen translators who are super-excited to work on a particular video game lack discipline and linguistic aptitude, which leads to subpar translations, even if they well-versed in the game terminology. 

Conversely, there are translators who just randomly ended up translating video games, and although they have great language skills, they do not really care that much about getting things right - probably because the jargon might end up being frustratingly hard to decode. So at the end of the day, I would recommend a balanced approach where one tries to educate themselves on gaming while also cultivating their language and translation skills. 

8. How do you see your role in the future? 

Marius: I really hope there will be more game localization projects in the future, preferably some large RPG or MMO with a great story, or a project that involves fiction/movie/tv-show localization. I wish to continue working on them as a translator or reviewer, and if there is a chance, I would be glad to manage such a project or try my best to provide some expertise where needed. 

Georgios: I hope I’ll always be able to work on video game localization! One of the things I’ve been noticing lately is a noticeable drop in quality, even in AAA titles. By now we have seen that machine translation (MT) requires extremely careful training and is best at augmenting a linguist’s skills and productivity, instead of acting autonomously. This is especially the case in translations that require extensive ability in both creative and technical aspects. 

I have been working closely with many partners in figuring out the ideal balance between machine translation post editing (MTPE) and MT-augmented translation and I hope to continue doing this important work. Also, video games can offer truly entertaining, beautiful and educational experiences and I am looking forward to localizing new immersive technologies that enrich the way we experience gaming, such as virtual and augmented reality!