Safeguarding 30 Years of Legacy Across 10 Locales
When a franchise has been entertaining audiences for as long as 30 years, it’s safe to say that nearly every word of the canon has a history of creative intention behind it.
Honoring that history was one of the defining challenges behind the localization of Resident Evil Requiem across 10 locales: Arabic, French, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, European Spanish, and Latin American Spanish. The game introduced new characters, environments, and narrative material, but it also expanded a universe that millions of players already knew intimately. And a devoted returning audience like this would have strong associations attached to established names, items, locations, character voices, and even seemingly minor terminology choices, because these players had been influenced by years of exposure to previous titles.
For Terra’s team, localization, therefore, meant much more than adapting new content. Every decision had to feel at home within an established universe that preserved the identity players already associated with it. The challenge was finding balance: honoring what came before, without limiting what came next.
Building Upon 30 Years of Resident Evil History
Before our translation could move at scale, one question had to be answered: what should remain consistent with the franchise?
For solutions architect Sara Rodríguez, protecting continuity was the most relevant workflow challenge to solve. “Given the importance of this title and how well-known it is throughout the gaming community, our main concern was consistency with its legacy content,” she explained. That meant building the project around translated materials Capcom had already provided, as well as populating translation memories (TM) and glossaries before new content entered the workflow.
Terra’s solutions engineering and QA teams then turned that legacy material into a shared foundation. Client TMs were prepared for consultation and reuse, terminology extraction populated dedicated glossaries and term bases, and the QA team consolidated previous guidance into a project style guide that they updated as new linguistic decisions emerged. Within memoQ, language-specific QA profiles, automatic translation rules, segmentation rules, and import filters helped make that history usable in practice.
As lead multilingual QA manager Barbara Galdino put it, “Our overall approach prioritized prevention over correction.” The goal was to give linguists enough context up front to make the right decision, before any inconsistency could reach later stages of production.
Legacy, however, did not mean reproducing every historical choice. As these examples demonstrate, sometimes it seemed prudent to stay the course, and other cases were treated with greater flexibility:
- In Latin American Spanish, iconic terms such as hierba verde (green herb) and cinta de tinta (ink ribbon) remained closely tied to the franchise, while less-established or unnatural structures were given leeway to evolve toward more contemporary Spanish.
- In Italian, as linguist Veronica Faroldi detailed, previous games had established a convention of retaining many of their creature names in English, so the team followed that precedent for new creatures in Requiem.
The right choice for linguists depended not only on what sounded best in isolation, but also on what each term already meant within the established Resident Evil universe for that locale.
Localizing a Game That Was Still Changing
Legacy was only one side of the challenge for Terra. The other was localizing a game that was still evolving, since Requiem was still being developed while localization was underway.
Jessica Zamora Garrido, who worked from English into European Spanish, recalls translations that had to be revisited as additional context became available. Something as simple as two similarly named rooms could become complicated when later screenshots revealed that they belonged to different buildings and served different purposes.
Character references could be equally ambiguous. An English title like “the Operator” may not require a grammatical distinction, while Spanish can require gender agreement. Determining who the title referred to, and whether that character had appeared elsewhere in the franchise, could therefore mean the difference between a linguistic error and a lore inconsistency.
When context was missing, the safest response was not to guess, but to ask. Terra’s QA team established a centralized query system where linguists could raise questions as development progressed. Queries were reviewed internally first: existing references, previous titles, and other project information resolved most of them, while only those requiring the client’s input were escalated.
According to the QA team, roughly 90% of queries were resolved internally, leaving the client to focus on the 10% that required its visibility or decision. Unique string identifiers helped prevent duplicate questions, while approved answers were shared with the wider team so that each decision could be applied consistently across future batches.
This system became especially valuable when a single delivery generated more than 200 answered queries. Rather than resolving those conversations privately with individual linguists, Terra consolidated the decisions and shared them with editors at least 48 hours before final delivery, allowing one answer to prevent the same issue from appearing differently across multiple locales.
Turning Consistency into a System
With ten locales moving through the project, establishing consistency also depended on the structure of each target language. Character limits, for example, varied according to whether a language used full-width or half-width characters, while quotation conventions and other grammatical risks differed by locale.
Terra addressed these considerations by building language-specific QA profiles rather than relying on one global set of rules. Within memoQ, terminology checks and regular expressions (regex) automatically flagged deterministic issues such as unsupported characters, capitalization requirements, and other known, language-specific pitfalls.
Automation, however, had clear limits. It could verify whether an approved term had been used, but it could not determine whether a source string contained an error or whether a line made sense in a scene the linguist could not yet see. Those evaluations remained squarely in the human linguist’s purview.
Some technical requirements also fell outside memoQ’s capabilities. Alternative script lines could exist outside the main source text, while subtitle constraints depended on both character and line limits that varied by language. Terra’s teams, therefore, created internal scripts to validate alternative lines and subtitle requirements before delivery.
After the export, automated and manual checks also validated the localized files. A line that was technically correct or accurately translated still had to work within the game, whether that meant fitting and respecting platform conventions, or using an item name consistently. The result was a workflow in which automation handled what could be objectively tested, while linguists and QA specialists focused on context, interpretation, and knowledge of the franchise.
Making Horror Sound Like Horror
As essential as consistency is, it’s not enough by itself to make Resident Evil Requiem feel right across versions. To truly make the game succeed, localization teams also had to preserve the tension that’s so important to making the horror of the story work. What did that preservation look like?
- For Latin American Spanish linguist Alejandro Kochol, it often meant suggesting rather than explaining. Because Spanish can naturally become more expansive than English, shorter sentences and deliberate pauses could preserve panic or hesitation more effectively than fuller explanations.
- Italian followed a similar principle. “Players should spend time playing and feeling rather than reading explanations,” Veronica Faroldi said. For her, even punctuation could contribute to suspense: strong full stops could create tension without relying excessively on exclamation marks, while a carefully chosen synonym could make a line more unsettling without changing its meaning.
- Arabic linguist Saoussen Chaabani noted that Arabic presented different structural constraints, with some sentences requiring extensive restructuring to fit available space without sacrificing meaning. Repeated props and items also required careful editorial control when the same object appeared across different batches and contexts.
Character voice added another layer of tension. In Spanish, for instance, choices such as tú (informal “you”) and usted (formal “you”) immediately establish relationships, while vocabulary can distinguish an experienced agent from a scientist or a frightened civilian. Sentence rhythm can likewise show whether a character remains composed or is close to panic.
These nuances could not be reliably captured by automated checks. Linguists had access to character information, legacy translations, previous scripts, cinematics, and style guides, while small, dedicated language teams helped reduce variation between batches. When feedback showed that a locale needed additional support with character voice or legacy consistency, Terra adjusted the team and brought in additional language expertise rather than allowing the issue to carry into later content.
What Players Noticed
As with so many localization efforts, the most meaningful validation for our teams came after the game’s release, when players encountered the thousands of decisions that were made, without seeing the systems behind the scenes. In the end, feedback we received across several markets repeatedly connected localization quality with immersion.
Latin American Spanish gaming outlets and communities praised the localized text and its ability to preserve the tone associated with the series, with channels like LevelUp and Atomix highlighting the balance between franchise legacy and a more modern experience.
In Poland, reviewers described the Polish localization as one of the game’s advantages, which was particularly significant for a community that had been discussing the availability of Polish subtitles before launch.
Korean player discussions pointed to improvements in areas that had attracted criticism in previous titles, including more natural forms of address and stronger preservation of the original dialogue’s emotional intensity.
Arabic coverage was also positive, with ArabHardware describing the translation as clear and useful during exploration and puzzle solving, while noting occasional pronoun issues linked to the difficulty of determining which character the player controlled in certain contexts.
That feedback is valuable not because every decision was perfect, but because it shows where localization choices become part of the player experience.
What Resident Evil Requiem Reinforced for Us
Working on a franchise with this much history makes one thing particularly clear: maintaining consistency is not the same as refusing to change. Some word choices need to be carried forward because players have known them for decades, while others need to evolve as the game, the language, and expectations around localization progress.
Knowing where to draw that line requires linguistic judgment that’s grounded in both context and franchise knowledge, and that’s supported by workflows that can carry those decisions consistently across languages.
Much of that systemic effort is intentionally invisible. Players should not have to think about terminology management while searching a room or query workflows while listening to a familiar character speak. Ideally, they notice something much simpler: it still feels like Resident Evil.
