#188 Volume 31 Issue 2 March/April 2020

Would you introduce yourself?
Diego Cresceri, founder and CEO of Creative Words, a localization company based in Genoa, Italy. Besides running my company, I am currently serving on the board of directors of ELIA.

Where do you live?
I live in a small and (too) quiet village right in the middle of the so-called industrial triangle of Milan-Genoa-Turin in Northwestern Italy. Our office is based in Genoa, and that’s where I am planning to move soon.

How did you get started in this industry?
I was lucky (and determined) enough to start an internship as a translator when I was still at university — I graduated in interpreting. After six months I eventually started managing small translation projects and I fell in love with project management, which is what I did for the following three years. Due to one of the company founders leaving in 2008, I was offered the role of partner, and I became the chief operations officer. In 2016, I felt the urge to start a new adventure and that’s when I founded Creative Words.

Global Revenue Forecaster

CSA Research, an independent market research firm specializing in the language service industry, has released the Global Revenue Forecaster designed to provide predictive business analytics tailored to a company’s business and vertical for the revenues to expect from different languages.

CSA Research https://csa-research.com

Lingoport Suite updates

Lingoport, Inc., a provider of software internationalization tools and services, has released updates to its suite of software that include connectivity to additional translation management systems and a redesigned dashboard.

Lingoport, Inc. www.lingoport.com

KantanSkynet Manager Console

KantanMT, a subscription-based machine translation service, has launched KantanSkynet Manager Console, a post-editing platform that uses AI to determine the quality of translated texts and will automatically route low-quality texts to professional translators for improvements.

KantanMT http://kantanmt.com

TBX Exporter For Excel

Translation software company Pairaphrase has developed a Microsoft Excel add-in called TBX Exporter, for the conversion of .xls, .csv or .xslx files to a TermBase eXchange (.tbx) file.

Pairaphrase www.pairaphrase.com

Game Developers Conference

March 16-20, 2020, San Francisco, California USA

UBM LLC, www.gdconf.com

XTM LIVE

March 19-20, 2020, Silicon Valley, California USA

XTM International, https://xtmlive.com

7th International Conference on Public Services Interpreting and Translation

March 26-27, 2020, Alcalá de Henares, Spain

FITISPos Group, www3.uah.es/traduccion/en/psit-conference-2020

Poems from the Edge of Extinction
An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages. Edited by Chris McCabe. Chambers, 2019. Hardback, $21.98. 336 pages.

Poems from the Edge of Extinction
An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages. Edited by Chris McCabe. Chambers, 2019. Hardback, $21.98. 336 pages.

Localizing Employee Communications: A Handbook, by Ray Walsh. XML Press, 2019. Print, $24.95; Ebook, $19.95. 258 pages.

Localizing Employee Communications: A Handbook, by Ray Walsh. XML Press, 2019. Print, $24.95; Ebook, $19.95. 258 pages.

Localization Business School

It was right in front of me, but I failed to seize the opportunity to make it big in gaming. I just did not see or believe in its future. Some 30 years later, my older son uses Minecraft to test AI and my eight-year-old builds his own worlds in the same game. I challenge you to play it and not fall victim to the same universe’s sense of humor.

In 1988, I tested games for the then-leading computer magazine in Germany, 64er Magazin, published for users of the Commodore 64. I walked in and out of game developers’ offices. One of them, Rainbow Arts, even donated a free version of their marquee game, The Great Giana Sisters, to readers of my book. The soundtrack for the game has become one of the most popular video game soundtracks of all time. In 2015, an HD remake of the game was released for Nintendo DS.

Off the Map

Back in the “old days” of software creation and distribution (and I’m talking around the time period of the early-to-mid 1990s) most software was distributed on CD-ROMs and DVDs as packaged products that were physically shipped to specific markets. The producing company had the ability to specifically target their products to whichever markets they desired, and in the event that one of their product versions ended up in a non-targeted locale, they could rely upon a certain degree of plausible deniability. In other words, if the software’s content was not culturally or geopolitically compatible with a local market, and the product was not intended to ship there, the company could blame it on the black or gray markets and lessen their accountability.

But in the present, it’s not only the issue of digital distribution that has changed the dynamic of content creation, but also the rise of social media — the enabling of instant, targeted feedback from anyone, anywhere to any content producer. In this often-harsh environment of knee-jerk reactions without context, creators’ intentions have become mostly irrelevant. General discussions and mostly-civil disagreements around issues in early online forums have now mutated into full-blown culture wars, chiefly fueled by tech companies like Facebook and Twitter that make their profit off the clicks derived from this phenomenon. While there remain occasional pockets where people can have constructive dialogues, many have been siloed into online echo chambers that reinforce the inclusion of like-minded people while severely excluding those who think differently. This in turn has created highly toxic online environments where anything and everything is seemingly offered up for vitriolic debate — from religion to politics, from the latest game release or Star Wars film.

ocalization for gaming doesn’t come cheap. But there’s too much competition from local, regional and global developers to shortchange the requirement for local cultural and linguistic resonance. With companies such as Amazon, Apple and Google launching their streaming services to compete with the likes of Microsoft, Sony and Tencent across all devices, localization won’t be taking a back seat anytime soon for gaming producers. And there are four essential categories that allow you to leverage data to convince executives to boost language investment in your latest franchise.

However, executives require hard data before backing an investment proposal. What criteria should you use to make these budgetary decisions? Here are examples of the four classes of essential data that travel and leisure companies should consider to boost language support.

1. What type of localized experiences do your gamers prefer?

o you already work as a translator and want to localize video games. You love playing them, so why not? But are the skills you use now transferrable? It’s not like the American Translators Association offers a certification for playing Mario Kart in Finnish, so what do you need to know in order to get the job?

ocalization quality assurance (LQA) is generally a service that third-party contractors are brought in to handle. There are different aspects to this, as well as different projects, and you never know what kind of supporting documentation you’re going to get. In some cases, QA testers only get the actual game or program they’re supposed to test; other times, they get a whole packet of information to accompany it. Both ways can work. But if that’s true, why bother sending anything at all besides the test build?

had just started as a localization project manager when I moved to Tom Clancy’s The Division, the first title released by the Snowdrop game engine in 2016. The first task of the localization taskforce was to develop the full pipeline, which would determine how all UI text was created and dealt with — a very rare opportunity, as game engines are not often developed from scratch.

There was a text database, but it was not connected to the game. All in-game text was hardcoded, embedded and scattered everywhere in the code. We had a few months to set it all up for the first playable version that required localization, an internal milestone that marked the end of preproduction and the start of the real production phase of the game.

The Snowdrop philosophy is centered around flexibility, fast iterations and empowerment of the developer to create content as free of obstacles as possible. In this spirit, the main request from the developers in regard to localization was to remove the intermediate steps for creating text. Traditionally, someone from the localization department is in charge of curating the database and creating all text on demand, as the features are designed and content is created. This had also been our experience from previous games developed at Massive, World in Conflict, AC Revelations and FarCry3.

achine translation (MT) has been a hot topic for a while, especially since the rise of neural machine translation (NMT). The output quality spike is finally shaping solutions to deal with ever-increasing volume and accelerated demand, remarkable even for the prudent gaming industry. Electronic Arts was an early adopter and gained some insights along the way.

The great spike in MT output quality can be dated back to 2016 when Google launched its neural system (GNMT). This technology has come a long way since the introduction of clumsy rule-based MT or even the improved statistical MT dominating the scene from the 1980s. Google was a pioneer providing easy access to NMT back in 2016, claiming that in some cases, human and GNMT translations were nearly indistinguishable.

MT technology has been available to the game localization industry on PCs for over 25 years without much success. Any technology that affects the traditional role of translators is not adopted easily, and MT was for a long time regarded as a standalone solution that would replace translators’ roles, instead of a way to assist them with work.

Despite this, with some tweaking and research, MT has proven to work well in many areas: online catalogs, customer-created content and “gisting,” where understanding the general meaning is the main goal. For video games, however, we need to account for gamers’ expectations — which are rightfully quite high.

ideo game localizations are unlike any other translation job. In addition to translation, there’s tone, story adaptation, context-dependant conversation and endless player interactions to consider, not to mention the sky-high expectations from seriously devoted fanbases. But localizing a game is also incredibly rewarding when you’re given the creative freedom to try new things, and especially when those things go right. And that’s just what happened when we localized LEVEL-5’s Yo-kai Watch 3 in 33 weeks.

Yo-Kai’s deep, deep history

n the last decade, the gaming market in China has experienced massive acceleration. According to market intelligence firm IDC, Chinese game revenue ballooned from 18.5 billion RMB in 2008 to 214.4 billion RMB in 2018.

Growth in the mobile gaming market is also booming. In fact, mobile gaming revenue hit 133.9 billion RMB in 2018, comprising 62.5% of total gaming market. This rise can be attributed to increased internet access via phone data and wifi, especially important in rural China where most people rely on smartphones.

In 2018, China comprised 23.6% of the global gaming market, with 626 million players in China — almost half of the Chinese population. As overseas game creators and publishers continue investing in the Chinese market, this growth presents huge opportunities for game localization and testing.

So how do you break into this lucrative market? Here are some tips on entering the China gaming market and things that can help you establish your footprint.

ender-related issues in video games are undoubtedly a topical issue, and one that has been widely discussed, particularly in light of events such as Gamergate, a campaign of targeted harassment toward women in the video game industry which exposed a side of the gaming community that had previously been hidden.

The perception of gaming as a “boys’ club” has endured since the inception of the medium itself, and while currently game developers tend to cater to a more diverse audience by being generally more inclusive — not only toward women but also toward minorities, the LGBTQ+ community and so on — it is undeniable that during their, by now, several-decades-long history, video games have had their fair share of issues with gender representation.

In 1985, in the iconic Super Mario Bros, a mustachioed Italian plumber passed through numerous hoops and stomped on many enemies to, naturally, rescue a beautiful princess who rewarded him with a playful kiss on the cheek once she was freed from the evil Bowser. The damsel in distress trope, while certainly not new in literature or in art in general, is embodied in Super Mario Bros, a game where the player literally saves a damsel that is in distress. Countless examples can be found of negative gender stereotypes in video games, from The Legend Of Zelda to Resident Evil, but it’s worth noting that gaming companies themselves didn’t shy away from presenting gaming as a hobby geared toward young males: the most famous portable game console of all time, the Game Boy, has the word boy in its name. You can’t get much more literal than that. And yet, contrary to what the public perception might be, girls and women have always been an audience for video games. They may not have been the intended audience initially, but they were an audience nonetheless. In 2019, according to a report by Newzoo, women accounted for 46% of gaming enthusiasts, so it is now evident that the female audience is interested and engaged in the medium.

early a decade ago, I wrote an article for this magazine in which I argued that we should focus our efforts on solving the biggest technical content problem around: personalization.

Back then, my argument was this: unless you provide a personalized technical documentation experience, you aren’t delivering what consumers require, regardless of what languages they understand.

The stakes are high. Getting content wrong means missing out on new revenue streams worth $1.7 trillion to $3 trillion, according to an estimate by McKinsey & Company analysts.

When you make it inconvenient for consumers to find the information they need, they’re likely to turn to a web search engine or a virtual assistant for help. While searches sometimes lead to the information consumers require, they don’t usually yield the results consumers expect. And they don’t always find you or your content. Instead, consumers may discover content published by competitors.

Much of the information consumers seek about your products and services isn’t readily available to them. The content they seek does exist, but is far too often hidden from their view.

ML and XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) are often used for transporting text between systems, especially content systems and translation systems. But even though they’re great formats, there can be issues. The file format specification might not have been fully understood, or perhaps a user is trying to do things with these formats they were not intended for.

The technical project manager or localization engineer then might have to spend some time explaining to the client what a translatable file should look like or what a translation tool would expect from a specific file format. They will need to be able to spot the issues, understand why they are issues and potentially communicate this to non-technical employees on the customer side.

From my many years of practical experience finding the mistakes and making files behave in translation tools, I would like to share some of the most common issues I have seen. It might help someone provide their customers with some help on how to improve the translatability of their files.

Takeaway

It was a beautiful fall day, and I was sitting in the living room with my roommates in Mexico City in 2008, where I was studying abroad. The TV was blaring and we were discussing lucha libre, or Mexican wrestling.

I lived in a private dorm near the hospital district and had roommates from several Mexican states: Veracruz, Oaxaca and Puebla. I was the only one from the United States, and am Salvadoran-American. There was only one real foreigner there, a French exchange student named Nico who hailed from Nantes. He listened to us and then, in an amused voice, he flatly explained that Mexican lucha libre is from France.

We protested his claims. How dare he imply that lucha libre comes from France?! It was probably a relic of the pre-Colombian era! It was a Mexican version of wrestling! No way was lucha libre from the same culture that brought us romance and croissants! Baffled, we teased him quite a bit and started to Google lucha libre. The common room where we hung out got quiet.

Our annoying roommate was right.

Lucha libre arrived to Mexico via the French, but the sport has Greco-Roman roots and has existed since around 3000 BCE, according to historians. Like anything else, the sport evolved quite a bit, but it wouldn’t have existed without Napoleon III and his failed mission to take over Mexico.