Last pair of eyes on source text One pun to rule them all Developers should see each of their translators as an extra pair of—extremely picky—eyes. During the translation process, not only do they read the source text, but they analyse each sentence carefully. They have to get the meaning absolutely right. Is there a […]


I recently had the opportunity to sit on the jury at a game translation competition. At the end of the text file was the string:                                                 [“WIP”, “WIP”], One team decided to leave the string in English because “we played the entire game and this string doesn’t appear in the game”. These days, when we […]


When tasked with the translation of a game, in the best-case scenario, the translator will receive a build of the game, along with screenshots of the screens that are difficult to reach – like error messages or strings that appear after several hours of gameplay. But what if this is not the case? Will this […]


While translating words that have a direct equivalent in the dictionary is already a pretty complex task that involves choosing among synonyms and paraphrasing the word that will perfectly match the tone and meaning of the source, what about neologisms? Games are peppered with original places, items and character names. So, what should the translator […]


This article was originally published as a guest post on Marianna’s blog (1Up translations) and is the French counterpart to her article about German translation, that was also published here “Accents and Dialects in Games—Yay or Nay?”. In video games, we get to meet characters who are larger than life, caricatures of real people. They dress in a […]