Hello and welcome to another Side-Quest episode of Talk This! It’s Dangerous to Podcast Alone! This time, we talk about Emma’s choice of topic. How do video games get translated and localized? What does localization even mean? We generally focus on bringing games over to English rather than English into other languages, but there’s some tidbits of both.
As always, you can listen to our podcast basically anywhere you want. Check it out on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Pandora (or head over to our episodes page for even more options). Or just listen below!
The Topic
How is a game translated? How has that process changed from the ye olden days to now? What does it mean to localize something? What are some unique challenges that video game translators face, and how do they tackle those challenges?
The Actual Discussion
We talk about how maybe having one man translate your incredibly long epic game from his cabin in the woods is not the best idea. We also talk about how having a ginormous team translate your incredibly long epic game is not the best idea. It’s really all about balance. We talk about the difficulties of translating around censors and of translating words with no clear other-language equivalent. Basically, we wonder how on earth translation ever gets finished at all.
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Enjoy the episode! Tell us which ten words of Japanese you recognize in the comments or on social media. Make sure to check out last week’s episode and look forward to next week’s where we’re talking about Big Brain Academia and Daemon x Machina.
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