Archive for March, 2009

Back home in Southern California. Ahh, it feels good to be home—the right coffee mug, comfortable office, wicked-fast internet connection, hard-wired to the company server. Ahh, the good things of life! Not to mention family and friends! Today, I'm going to scribble down a few of the general overview notes on the GDC Localization Summit. I may get a few things... »

I'm still at GDC. Meetings, dinners, conferences, walking the expo, talking to people—life is busy! I'll get to posting about this next week, once I have had a chance to process... »

The Localization Summit is over. 75 of the biggest names in game localization in one room. Pretty cool! The keynote speech was by Jaime Gine, Vice President of International Development Services for Electronic Arts. This man is in charge of EA's $50 million annual budget to localize their games. And he does. I saw his work in Hungary last year, where... »

I'm at GDC in San Francisco this week. I love GDC. Even before the demise of E3 in 2006, I always preferred GDC. It was at GDC that I bumped into Bill Gates (2001, during the launch of Xbox), as well as stop Steve Jackson in his tracks for a twenty minute conversation about games, the FBI and EFF and other... »

Next week, I will be in San Francisco for the Game Designers' Conference. The first day will be devoted entirely to localization issues. I will have a lengthy report. Until then, here are a few more reports from around the world. HUNGARY: In the city where I live over 1000 people lost their job because a major firm closed down.  Besides that,... »

Last week, the world was abuzz when Hillary Clinton, the new US Secretary of State, presented her Russian counterpart with a Reset Button that was famously mis-translated. Instead of reset, the word used means to Overload or Overcharge. What an outrage! Americans don't understand other languages! We've known this for years! What's your (or, rather, since I am an American and... »

We do not offer public reviews of our translators. Ever. It won't happen. Yes, we do like you (those of you who are good and meet your deadlines). No. No reviews on Proz.com or Translatorscafe.com or Craigslist or anywhere else that is publicly available. Why? Imagine a bad translator (who is not aware of quite how bad he is). And he's awful.... »

This morning, my new professional blog was published and linked in the New York Times. We've been posting stories of the economic crisis from some of our translators and other contractors. The morning, Freakonomics decided it was a story worth reporting. We'll try to post more stories later this week. And I do hope that our Internet connection can handle... »

More notes from outside of the US on the economic crisis. ITALY (Milan): “My sister's boyfriend, who graduated in IT last year, finally found a job 4 months ago. Unfortunately, despite what they initially promised him, they've already reduced his contract from one year to 6 months. Also, the Northern part of Italy has been always the more active one, always... »

I'm creating this post largely as a reference to point contractors to when various business issues come up. For anyone else, this will largely be a rather dull post. CONGRATULATIONS First of all, congratulations for working with Apogee Communications! Apogee is a quality-first company working in the videogame industry. We offer a range of services for our clients, including translation/localization, graphic development,... »