O Tannenbaum: Interjections in video game localization

The other day I was proofing a dialog script translated by a German colleague of mine and had to smile a little when I saw that he translated “woah, hang on” with “brr, warte mal”. It happens quite often that excellent translators stumble over interjections and onomatopoeia. It usually means they were not as addicted to comic books in their youth as I was. Very...

No such thing as a free MMO?

I posted in February of 2009 a list of MMOs offering free trials to help out translator colleagues who had never played any and wanted to get into game localization. Interestingly enough, two of the games on the list will be F2P very soon (in noob language: free to play). Instead of paying a monthly subscription, the companies rely on microtransactions. Need a bigger bag? $3.50. Want to...

Game localization on the radio

I took a little break the other day from a rather large MMO project I am working on and decided to do some dishes. I turned on the radio and got to work. To my surprise, I heard the words “video game localization.” It was CBC host Nora Young interviewing Diana Díaz Montón from Worldlab, an agency in Spain. I enjoyed it and wanted to share the link to the audio stream and...

Saving trees and more

1. Ubisoft saves trees, scraps manuals (cnet.com, Josh Lownsohn) Ubisoft is just one of many game publishers to only make digital manuals available for the players. I say, good riddance. I still need to localize it into German. Especially good when renting console games from your neighbourhood game store. The booklets are missing anyway. On top of that, Ubisoft plans to deliver the...

Führer leaves WoW

If there were an award for the best continuous localization for an MMO, World of Warcraft would get it. While others release games without even the tutorial and tool tips localized (I am not going to point fingers, don’t want to suffer the Wrath of Kahn), Blizzard’s in-house localization team is doing a great job, year in, year out. Now they made a mistake . They translated...

NoScript for Opera, pretty please

Sometimes, proprietary is good. I have been using Firefox now as my primary browser since September of last year, and I was quite happy with it. It crashes more often than Opera and doesn’t come with everything I need (a few addons will rectify this) but overall it is a good tool for my work in video game localization. We localizers need to research a lot, be it in our target...