Lecture
Successful Presentations at LISA Suzhou
The presentation at LISA (Localization Industry Standards Association, see here) went very well. In the participant feedback forms, my presentation was the top ranked one for the Workshops, and only one of the plenary sessions (from HP) ranked higher than mine. Pretty good! Personally more important, this was my first trip to China in 21 years. My first localization agency —... »
GDC Localization 2010: Sony's Buzz Presentation
The Buzz presentation at the end of the Summit was the most energetic of the day. It was given by Vanessa Wood (SCEE - publisher), Sophie Krauss (Relentless Software - developer) and Fabio Ravetto (Binari Sonori - language vendor). Like most of the Americans in the audience, I did not know anything about Buzz. Buzz is a highly successful series of... »
GDC Localization 2010: Sony Online Entertainment
We all watched while Bioware gave us the in's and out's of how they handle large RPG localization. Two titles in one year with a total of just less than 1.5 million words. Wow! And they did a great job. (A Japanese version of the presentation is available here.) Now, let's switch gears. Imagine you have an MMO on your project list.... »
GDC Localization 2010: Global Spanish
Victor Alonso Lion and Diana Díaz Montón gave perhaps the most useful presentation of the day with their Localizing for the Global Spanish Speaking Community. The vast number of Spanish speakers in the world is daunting, made worse for marketers and localizers by the array of dialects. Victor and Diana did their best to synthesize all of the data. The... »
GDC Localization 2010: Winners and Losers
This post is about the surprising changes that came to light at GDC this year. The spectacular rise of Polish, and the disastrous fall of Spanish and Italian. The inevitable, short-sighted contraction of the language basket was indeed severe, but looks to be recovering. 2010 is a year of recovery for the Games Industry. The Great Recession hit with full force... »
GDC Localization 2010: Bioware Presentation
Ryan Warden and Chris Christou from Bioware gave a solid and stunning look at what takes place at their very large projects for localization. The summary of their presentation has already been well documented for the non-localization reader here. Read it now, if you haven't already. Some bits of data that weren't included, or came out in the question-and-answer period: Mass Effect... »
Game Localization Business
In this post, you can find the four primary slides created for our GDC presentation on the business of games localization. The biggest take-away from these slides is that localization is still in its early days. Companies are still relying too heavily on their home language markets. Between 20% and 30% of publisher income is from localized SKUs. Only relatively small... »
Translation Party
This is a fun exercise in the utility and accuracy of mechanical translation. Go to Translation Party and input a random sentence. I used the opening of Lincoln's Gettysburg address. The script then does an automatic translation of the English into Japanese. Then it translates the Japanese to English, then back again. It will keep doing this until the English... »
Google Language Tools for the Industry
Google Language Tools have been around for a long time now, along with other machine translation tools. Are they useful to the translation industry? The answer is indisputably, "Yes!", though possibly not in the way you'd think. First of all, the tools are essentially useless for production level text. The kind of gibberish they produce can glean basic information of what the... »
Game Localization Award
At the GDC Localization Summit, there was an extended discussion about having a Localization Award. After all, we all want to have great localizations, and we need something to promote good work, yes? As discussed, the problem comes from several angles: Who is going to judge for the award? While we may have a few individuals competent to judge three, four or... »