Those were truly memorable times, during which I learnt a lot, met really great people from all over the world and got the chance to further develop my linguistic skills as well as a good sense of methodology. My translation experience at was enough to land me a position as a game localization QA tester in Québec in 2009, where I worked for a year and a half. How did you transition from being an editor, to being a game translator? I will never be able to thank those guys enough for giving me that opportunity as it was really the door opener to my career. Basically, good linguistic skills and a good command of English were needed for this job. My job was to upload whole catalogues of retro games (I picked SEGA consoles) to their database, which meant taking screenshots, writing game descriptions and mining information in English for many of them. Playing them taught me a lot of vocabulary and basically helped me speak English at a more advanced level than what school required from me.Īs a result, I followed some English studies at university and took my first steps in the business in 2008 with an internship as a junior editor for the biggest French video games website,, where I was a junior editor on their editorial staff. Localization was indeed not as important in the late 1990s and early 2000s as it is today, and many games just had subtitles, even menus, in English only.
They also played a major role in my learning of English (along with Metallica!), which might be worth noting for aspiring translators.
#Trainslation game professional#
I played video games for the first time when I was four years old (ah, sweet memories of Power Strike, Psycho Fox and Sonic on SEGA Master System), and they pretty much defined my whole professional life.
🙂 How did you become a Game Translator and Localizer? I’m also the founder and manager of a multilingual team of professional video game translators, Level Up Translation, which basically doubles the amount of tasks listed above. I spend my day typing, researching, thinking a lot, drinking liters of tea and answering e-mails. My job as a game translator consists of transposing the original experience of a game into my native language, that is, French. What do you do each day as a Video Game Translator? He explains what a translator does, how he got started in the job, and what it takes to succeed as a game localizer. Today I’m speaking with Damien Yoccoz, the founder of Level Up Translation in Basse-Normandie, France. Others took matters into their own hands and made “fan translations” to distribute to other players using dial-in bulletin-board systems (BBS).įortunately, game localization has become so affordable that publishers release each game in multiple languages so players around the world can enjoy their creations. Some players learned a second language like Japanese, solely so they could play rare unofficial imports. That is, unless the developers translate their game into a language you understand, using a painstaking process called localization.īefore the 1990s, if you didn’t speak the language, you simply couldn’t play the game. That means unless you learn Japanese, French, Mandarin, and a dozen other languages, you’ll miss out on thousands of awesome game experiences in your lifetime. Hundreds of new video games are created every year, but unfortunately, most are made by developers who speak a language you don’t. Damien Yoccoz: “Speaking two languages doesn’t make you a translator any more than having two hands makes you a pianist.” To read the others, visit Which game job is right for you?. The following article is just one of over 30+ interviews with professional game developers.
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