Video Games Digital Stores and Localization
With technology becoming more advanced, we can see digital sales are higher than ever before. Within the gaming industry, digital sales have become one of the leading metrics when it comes to profit. Years ago, most people, including gamers, would scoff at the idea of having their games in “the cloud.” Now with the internet […]
Video Games: Virtual Immersion and Localization
In Other Worlds Many pieces of art and entertainment, like literary works, movies, or paintings, depict worlds in such a way that readers or spectators feel like they are in that world. This phenomenon is called immersion, and it’s also part of the experience of playing video games. We will outline here how immersion works […]
Women in Localization: Perspectives from Japanese-to-English Localizers
If you ask the average outsider to picture someone who works in tech or video games, chances are they’ll picture a man. This may be especially true in relation to content from Japan, where women struggle to have their voices heard in the male-dominated workforce. Yet more and more women are becoming involved in tech […]
The Linguistic Art of Transcreation in Video Game Localization
Localized video games would not be fun to play if they used direct translations. Word-for-word translation has its place in certain fields, but interactive entertainment is not one of them. Localizing video games calls for a freer, more creative approach to translation, and that’s where transcreation makes its mark. Rather than merely substituting one word […]
Age of Empires and Localization Project Management
Some weeks ago, I downloaded Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition to re-experience again this outstanding real-time strategy (RTS) game I first played when I was 12 years old, in a demo edition Windows 98 included. But many years have passed since that day, and neither I nor Age of Empires remained the same. So […]
How Localization Made Crash Bandicoot a Success in Japan
Breaking Cultural Barriers for the Win When developing a video game in almost any genre, you have to do some deep thinking, not only about the game’s mechanics and aesthetics but also about its possibilities for localization. The question is: How do you develop a game that can break through cultural barriers and have the […]
