Game translations are not supposed to be literal. As the characters in your game change their costumes for different regions, their dialogues must also reflect their personalities. Translations along with other design modifications must go side-by-side to create a gratifying game experience for your target users.
If you are a language service provider managing game localization projects for international clients, you must have the right localization strategy in place. From investing in the right tools to hiring the best resources, you have to be mindful of how you are approaching the localization project to produce satisfactory outcomes for high-end clients around the globe gaming localization services.
Managing High-Quality Video Game Translations For Your Clients
Clearly Define Each Project Scope
Make sure to begin your translation project with clear thoughts and straightforward goals. When you’ve defined your project objectives and have a roadmap to achieve your goals, it’ll be easier to stay focused. First of all, depending on the scope of a particular project in hand, you must allocate sufficient resources that may be required by your translation team down the line.
At this point, you also have to define your KPIs and performance evaluation criteria for your video game translation services. Moreover, it is important to calculate your budget and set a realistic deadline for each task. A well-defined project scope helps you develop a robust translation project strategy that will help you achieve your project goals seamlessly, and keep your teams focused on your specific goals only.
Establish Optimized Task Workflow
How you have organized your translation task, whether it is manual or automated, has a lot to do with your overall translation efficiency and team productivity. If you are a professional translation agency, you must invest in a reliable translation tool that comes with automated translation management features.
Working through a professional TMS platform can help you effectively streamline your translation operation and enhance the speed of translation operations as well. It will also reduce chaos and allow your game translators to work in a well-organized digital work environment. A translation management system will make your translation process agile and help your translators manage more work in less time. However, it is important to get your TMS platform from a reliable service provider. You can also customize your TMS tool features as per your business needs.
Hire Native Translators Who Also Play Games
Getting on board well-trained and experienced translators is the most important step when it comes to delivering high-quality translations. Your translator should have a native-level language understanding of the target language; moreover, s/he should be someone who likes to play video games.
It will allow your translators to understand the impact of translations and how to make them resonate with players’ communities in the target region. When translators are gamers themselves, they very well understand the game terminologies and the right expression to translate them. It allows them to better pull off the translation project.
Get All the Contextual Details from Clients
No matter how much effort your translation team is putting into the translation project, it is not fulfilling the requirements of clients, all your efforts go in vain. That’s why you must have established proper communication channels between you and your clients to seamlessly convey all the requirements. So, make sure you have clearly understood the requirements and the context of translations.
It will help you generate more relevant and quality translations. Moreover, you can prepare translation glossaries for every project that will help your translators generate consistent translations in terms of their tone and style. You can also ask your client to attach brand glossaries with other requirements to give you clear insights about your game vision and how they want the translator to approach the game translation.
Don’t Ignore Text Dimensions in Different Languages
Your job is not just to translate video game content from one language to another. You also must make the newly translated content adjusted to the localized video game design. It got a lot to do with understanding different text dimensions and writing styles.
The translators should be mindful of the design changes that might also occur as a result of the translation taking more space than the original text. Or, maybe the scripting style of language is different from the source text. So, you have to be very careful about text dimensions while managing video game and website localization services for your global clients. Working with different languages also impacts the overall design and layouts of your game. That’s why translators must be aware of the design changes that are also likely to occur as a result of language translations.
Do Proper QA Testing
In the end, maintaining quality is the most critical and challenging aspect of translations. When dealing with the high-end client, simply providing in-time translations is not enough. You must ensure high-quality, relevant, context, and consistent translations fulfill the required criteria of your client.
To ensure that, you must do proper QA testing on your translations both manual and automated. Manual translations are done by human translators. On the flip side, for automated proofreading, you have to use a professional QA testing tool that will evaluate the overall quality score of your translations and also provide suggestions for improvements. You can combine both manual and automated proofreading techniques for translation quality assurance. It will allow you to speed up the editing process and generate high quality video game translations.
Conclusion
Being a professional language service provider, if you want to build a good reputation in the global translation industry, it is important to uplift your craft and deliver desirable results for clients.
Following the guidelines in this article, you will be able to handle your translation project effectively. When you have proper localization research and strategy in place, you can easily get more high-value clients to work with you.
professional LSPs must focus on optimizing their translation workflows and creating an infrastructure where things can proceed seamlessly. It will make it much easier for your translators and other localization teams to manage everyday translation operations effortlessly.
