Localizzare un videogioco richiede più che semplici competenze linguistiche. Bisogna affrontare milioni di parole, registrazioni audio e sottotitoli video. Assicurarsi di mantenere la coerenza ed essere efficienti nel tempo è un compito difficile e non sarebbe possibile senza l'aiuto della tecnologia. In questo talk esploreremo quali strumenti e tecnologie giocano un ruolo fondamentale nel processo e avremo una panoramica dei diversi ruoli necessari per garantire il raggiungimento della migliore localizzazione possibile con il minimo sforzo umano e ottimizzando i tempi. Evento in collaborazione con la community di Women Tech Maker: https://developers.google.com/womentechmakers

1. Videogame localization & technology:
how to enhance the power of
translation
Cristina Anselmi
MT & Translation Technology Manager
Electronic Arts

2. About me
● Linguistic background
● 10+ years video game localization industry
● Focus AI & Machine Translation
● Google Women Techmakers Ambassador
● Women in Games Ambassador

3. Agenda
1) What is localization?
2) Type of text & challenges
3) Tools & techs needed
4) The use of AI
5) Job profiles in video game localization
6) Q&A

4. What is localization?
Adaptation of content from one culture to another, taking into account not only
the language but all aspects, to make sure it fits perfectly to the target culture.
Translation Localization

5. Korea & Japan

6. Not publishable in Japan

7. China version

8. Islamic countries

9. Types of games
Free-to-play
PC/Console AAA
Mobile Games

10. Free-to-Play
● MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game) online role-playing games
often PC, in which the aim of the game is to face missions, with a lot of content to be
translated and infinite updates
● The parts to be translated are usually Objects, NPCs (characters) names and
descriptions, Missions names and descriptions, dialogues
● Much attention to the names of recurring characters and objects, as the game is free with
in-app purchases

11. PC/Console AAA
● Extremely strong titles in which many rules must be respected (e.g. guidelines,
compliance terms)
● Depending on the game there is more or less text, but they certainly have a large part of
dialogues, character names etc
● Depending on the game the translations must also be correct from a historical point of
view

12. Mobile Games
● Character and space limitation
● Huge presence of variables and tags (es. %Player name)
● Short strings, catchy names and lots of puns

13. Marketing & co
Everything related to the game, blogs, promotions, news, newsletters, landing pages, websites

14. Parts of text
On screen: text that appears on the screen, everything that can be read
Subtitles: audio or onscreen subtitles
Audio: spoken parts, voice over or audio recordings

15. Text challenges
● Variables and tags
● Character limitations
● Lip sync
● Terminology consistency

16. Tools & technology

17. ❖ CAT tools: Computer Aided Translation tool is a software that assists the translator to
optimize time and consistency.
❖ TMS: Translation management system is a system designed to manage the localization
and translation of language assets.
❖ CMS: content management system to store all in-game text strings with integrations
with TMS and CAT tools.
❖ TMs: translation memories, a collection of previously translated content to get matches
to ensure consistency and translate faster.

18. The role of AI in video
game localization

19. Machine translation is the process of using artificial intelligence to automatically
translate text from one language to another without human involvement.
Machine Translation
● Faster
● Cheaper
● More volume
● Can also be used for
UGC

20. Language model to be able to estimate the quality of a system without having an output as
reference
• QuEst, one of the first open-source QE frameworks, relies heavily on linguistic and
textual features.
• The QUETCH framework consists of an artificial neural network that is capable of
learning QE features from raw textual input only. However, it is only adapted for
the word-level task.
• deepQuest It provides two different neural ML architectures and it is significantly
faster to train than comparable models.
• OpenKiwi It contains four ML architectures that can perform quality estimation at
different levels of granularity, a number of pre-trained models, and various ways
to change data and experimental settings.
Quality estimation

21. • Accessibility: with STT and TTS technologies you can improve the player
experience by providing a more accessible content
• In-game chat: avoid stopping to play to type your message while playing
• Script transcription: saving time for text transcription for localization
• Voice over generation from script
Speech-to-text & Text-to-Speech

22. • NPC dialogue generation based on gamers prompts
• Text string generation and localization
• Revision and adaptation of content
Gen AI

23. Localization professionals
are not just translators

24. Video
artists
Audio
artists
Data
engineers
LQA
Testers
Localization
Engineers
Project
managers
Data
Scientists
Designers

25. Thank you!