The benefit of being an editor is that you’re always reading something. With a bit of luck, it’s something interesting or useful; if you’re really lucky, it’s both. The articles in this issue were both, from Kate Edwards’ column on Gamergate to Mike Hedley’s article on age ratings to Sarah Calek’s overview of translation in Iceland. After reading these articles, I made actual changes to my own life, the most obvious of which was planning a trip to Iceland.
The second most obvious was spending my free time writing a satirical dating profile referencing gaming culture and age ratings as part of an ongoing social commentary project I started on relationships and reality. (“Hobbies: Trolling internet forums and YouTube videos… Describe your perfect first date: Lara Croft comes to life as a reward for me winning the game and thanks me for freeing her from her two-dimensional prison. She shows her appreciation by doing Adult 18+ stuff to me… Then she asks me about my relationship with my father.”)
Whenever anything work-related inspires me to greater creativity in my nonwork life, I take it as a good sign. So you can tell that I am extremely pleased with this particular collection of articles, to the point that I want to give copies of this issue to my nonlocalization friends as sort of an easy introduction to localization. Because, you know, most people have heard of video games, and it’s easy to grasp the complexity of translating one to another language. We have a new column addressing this very thing, Scott Abel’s “Content Matters,” which in this case is an interview with localization voiceover expert Todd Resnick.
Within our industry there is always room for improvement, and Rolf Klischewski has written an explanation of how existing tools handle gaming texts, with suggestions for an ideal games localization tool. Chloe Swain addresses a topic we’ve never covered before: shutting down online communities, in this case international gaming communities. We have additional articles on machine translation and games, on games translation competitions, on how freelance translators can improve their relationships with translation agencies. There’s more as well; as always, we crammed as much as we could into these pages to give you a wide range of learning opportunities and perspectives.
Learning about new things can be quite inspiring, at least for me. I hope you enjoy this issue as much as I did.
