Essential skills:Creativity and adaptability,the ability to deal with technical issues,familiarity with gaming terminology and thedifferences between platforms. Gamestranslators must play games. Qualifications:MA in Translation, preferablyon a course that includes audiovisualtranslation and games localisation.Professional experience:An in-house jobwithin a games company is preferred.Companies such as Blizzard and NCsofthave in-house translation teams; most havelocalisation testing departments. Useful websites:For in-house work trywww.aswift.com and www.datascope.co.uk.Games companies' websites often publicisevacancies, and there are LinkedIn groupsdedicated to jobs in the games industry.Essential reading: The Game LocalizationHandbookby Heather Maxwell Chandler.OUT OF CONTEXT: Blizzard's fantasy role-play game Diablo III (above). In Tales ofMonkey Island (right) the word 'Save' wasgiven in Spanish as Salvar, not Guardar18 TheLinguistAUGUST/SEPTEMBERwww.iol.org.ukCREATIVE TRANSLATIONSilvia Ferreroon the challenges for localisers, as gamingexpands into diverse markets and on to new platformsGames localisation, despite being a fairlyyoung industry, is acquiring more popularityrecently, perhaps because the games industryis growing faster than any other entertainmentsector. This is a positive change and it meansthat there is more information than everavailable for those interested in the profession.So what makes games localisation differentfrom other disciplines, and what specialisedskills are needed on the part of the translator?The first thing that needs to be consideredis the huge variety that exists in the gamesindustry. In a few years, games have evolvedvery quickly and the stereotype of young malegamers no longer applies. Companies areconstantly branching into new markets andreleasing products that defy the traditionaldefinition of a videogame. There are gamesyou can sing along to, games that help you tokeep fit and even ones that teach you how tocook. And then there is the social gamingboom, which is popular with women, who nowmake up nearly 50 percent of gamers.This variety requires a lot of adaptability onthe part of localisers. Some games, includingflight and driving simulators, contain verytechnical vocabulary, which can be extremelyhard to translate. Other games, such as fantasyThe rules of the gamerole-playing games (RPGs), require a lot ofcreativity, as translators encounter the strangeforms of speech of orcs, elves and pirates. Andthere are also extreme cases -pop culturequizzes, for example, with questions about TVshows, songs and celebrities -in which thewhole game has to be transcreated so that thecontent reflects the local culture.For these reasons, localisers have morefreedom in the games industry than in anyother field. They can adapt character names tosuit the local culture, convert an accent into atarget equivalent, or make a character speak ina particular way for characterisation purposes.After all, games localisation is not abouttranslating words, but translating experiences. Games companies areextremely protective.The translator oftenhas to work withoutseeing the product GETTING STARTED

Vol/51 No/4 2012AUGUST/SEPTEMBERTheLinguist19CREATIVE TRANSLATIONcoin' or 'You have won a bronze coin'. Yet thissyntax is not going to work in manylanguages. For instance, in Spanish Hasganado una oro monedais incorrect; oroshould appear at the end and be preceded bya preposition: Has ganado una moneda deoro. Since the syntax has been programmedinto the game and cannot be altered, in a caselike this it would be useful to translate the firststring as Has ganado una moneda deandleave the last cell empty, or just with a fullstop. However, this is only a very basicexample and challenges of this type can bemuch more difficult to solve.To make matters worse, concatenation canbe combined with variables to create everytranslator's nightmare: _#T1 _#T2 _#T3, where_#T1 is an adjective, _#T2 a weapon nameand _#T3 a type of ammo. This might result in'Infallible lacerator bullets'. Here, the translatoris dealing with both gender issues and syntax.In order to avoid many of these issues, thereis a case for games localisation companies toget involved in the process earlier and assistdevelopers with internationalisation, ie,creating a product as culturally neutral aspossible. Early involvement can help flag uppotential issues sooner, give translators moretime to put their questions to developers, andassist in sim-ship (simultaneous shipping of thegame across territories). But it is not without its drawbacks: earlyinvolvement means that the game code hasnot been finalised and therefore that thesource language is likely to undergo manychanges. Those constant updates can bedraining and time-consuming for the translator,even with the use of an online system thatflags up changes and allows for translations tobe updated in the cloud.Testing timesOnce a game has been fully localised, it goesthrough a quality assurance process known aslinguistic testing, or localisation testing.Testers should check the game thoroughlyand see all the text in it, before reportingmistakes such as typos, missing accents, textthat overflows its allocated space etc. Theyshould also check that the translators haveused the platform-specific terminology, asmost of the hardware components arecopyrighted and have approved translationsthat have to be followed to the letter. For thatreason, it is important to use professionaltesters with a keen eye for detail, who knowexactly how to look for mistakes in the game.For players to engage in the action, theoriginal feeling of gameplay must bemaintained, but this can suffer as a result oftight translation deadlines. It is not uncommonfor games to be split between three or fourtranslators per language, especially when theycontain tens of thousands of words. Even ifthere is an editor to oversee the whole project,it is quite easy for the game to lose some of itsstrength and flavour as there isn't usually timeto unify differing translation styles.Secrets and embargoesGames companies are extremely protective oftheir products, and the translator often has towork without having seen the product at all,despite signing all the necessary confidentialityagreements. Some clients go so far as toprovide only the game title and the platform itwill be played on. Fortunately other clientsprovide a bit of background information and,if the translator is lucky, the design documents.This lack of information becomes an acuteproblem when attempting to translate stringsof words. When faced with a single word, withno context at all, it may be impossible todetermine gender and number, whether theword (eg 'pause') is a verb or a noun, or evenwhat the word means. 'Bat' in a hidden-objectgame could refer to an animal or a baseballbat, for instance. Similarly, it can be hard tomake the right choice in a dialogue if thetranslator is unsure who the character is talkingto (formal/informal, singular/plural, feminine/masculine). The translator may not even knowwhether the game will be dubbed or subtitled.Another common problem is the lack ofspace on screen. Languages such as Spanish,French and German tend to be 20-30 percentmore verbose than English, so it can be hardto stick to the character restrictions, whichoften only take into account the length of thesource language version. This is especially trueif the game is developed in Japanese.On mobile phones even less text can beaccommodated, yet these games havebecome very popular. Somehow the translatorhas to find a way of conveying the meaningof the original without using indecipherableabbreviations -abbreviating 'Sound options'to 'Sound' rather than, say, 'S. op', wherethere is space for just five characters.Endless variablesVariables are used often in games and canpose endless problems. These are codes thatwill be replaced by terms or values, forIt may be impossibleto determine gender,whether the word is averb or a noun, oreven what it meansinstance 'You have won a %d'. In manylanguages, this simple sentence has to betranslated differently depending on thegender of the object that replaces '%d'. Inthe case of a car the translation in Spanishwould be Has ganado un (coche); for a coin,it would be Has ganado una (moneda). Acommon strategy is to use a colon: 'You havewon: %d'. It can be trickier if the variable isreplaced by a name -for example 'Welcome%d' (Bienvenido/a%d). In this case, thesentence could be rewritten in a neutral wayto avoid gender issues: 'Hello %d' (Hola%d). Fortunately, some developers are starting tointroduce code that allows the translators tocater for gender and number variations.Otherwise, a little creativity is better than usingbrackets to cover the different alternatives (asin Bienvenido(a) %d).Concatenation can be even morecomplicated. In the games localisationindustry, this means combining severalseparate strings to form a sentence. Thetranslator might find themselves having totranslate the following table:EnglishSpanishYou have won a Has ganado una goldorosilverplatabronzebroncecoin.moneda.When combined, the results will be 'Youhave won a gold coin', 'You have won a silver