Episode Transcription

MELISA: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Open World. I’m Melisa, I’m here with Lara and Ale.

LARA: Hi!

ALEXIS: Hi, everyone!

MELISA: And today we have a little different of an episode. So what we did is ask our community what they wanted to hear, what they wanted us to talk about. And after a few days of voting, the people spoke, and the topic that was chosen is culturalization. So this is what we’re going to talk about today. And it’s a term that we use a lot in the industry and sometimes it’s mixed up with localization. So how would you guys define culturalization?

LARA: For me, culturalization is taking that little step forward from localization because it’s just a little bit more than just localizing our content, because we know that localization, it goes with words, with everything. But culturalization just makes it more of the culture, more of the target culture. You can see things that, yeah, maybe I localized these texts, but this is offensive in my country. You know? That’s just an example. So it has to be rewritten or it has to be rethought or… I don’t know.

ALEXIS: Yeah. I mean, it’s tailored even more to the game, even regarding current events or news that are relevant to when the game takes place. It’s taking a step further.

LARA: Yeah, it’s taking a step further in the meanings of, I don’t know, making something more accurate or something more relatable because maybe, if I have this joke and I localize it, right? Maybe the joke doesn’t have the same punch if I add my culture into that joke, you know what I mean?

MELISA: Absolutely.

LARA: So it’s just like, yeah, it’s taking that step forward from localization and trying to own that content that you’re trying to localize.

MELISA: Absolutely, and it makes me think of our episode about Spanish from Latin America and Spanish from… European. If you haven’t watched it…

LARA: Please, go watch it. We explain a lot about the differences and how to appropriate your own language.

MELISA: Exactly. And how can these cultural differences, in the case of, you add that step of culturalization, how can that change a video game?

LARA: Well, in the case of video games, it changes because sometimes you have this absolute great idea of a video game, but you don’t realize. I don’t know, for example, in Fallout, you don’t realize that cows are sacred in some religions in India. And in the Fallout series, you have a two-headed cow that you can actually shoot and kill. So it’s just like, that had some sort of repercussion over the culturalization part of it, because maybe if the game was culturalized for that specific market, you can remove the cow entirely. I mean, it’s just like you can remove it. Just it won’t be as offensive as it looks like right now. Even though it was not the intention, of course. It is unintentional, right? But because only one person cannot know all the cultures that they have in the entire world. So that’s why I think also it’s so important, because you do your research and you try to make your game for that specific market.

MELISA: Absolutely.

ALEXIS: Yeah, I mean, also it’s taking into account the symbols, body language, gestures… even hands, I mean. In Japan, fictional characters like, I don’t know, Crash Bandicoot has five fingers instead of four, like it has in America. Even Bart Simpson has four.

LARA: Yeah. It’s amazing because I remember seeing pictures of the Simpsons, and in this side of the country… in this side of the world, we have four fingers for all of the characters, but in Japan specifically, they have to have five. And it looks so weird.

MELISA: It’s so interesting. Yeah, definitely.

LARA: And another example talking about Japan is that, in Fallout, you have a gun that is called The Fatman and the name has been changed. This is not like a major change of the entire history of the game, but it has been changed because it was too close, it was too relatable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so they had to change it for cultural respect and everything. But yeah…

ALEXIS: But it can get extreme, like Far Cry 3. I mean Far Cry 3 was completely banned from Indonesia because the local authorities thought, they weren’t that wrong, but the game makes it as if living in Indonesia was a living hell. So they don’t think that that’s appropriate for their culture, for their people, and they banned the game.

MELISA: Yeah, so I think culturalization must be like really important to avoid these type of things from happening, like when you have your game banned from a country, and you want to reach that audience and, you know, sell your games in those countries. So in that way, would you say that culturalization is a market enabler for video games?

LARA: Yes and, at the same time, I would love to add that culturalization for me is that little step that you’re taking to take care of your community. Because you might find some things offensive. I don’t know, I’m thinking, if you’ve seen the latest episode of European Spanish and LATAM Spanish, I mention this Grim Fandango character that is supposed to be evil, right? And he was Argentinian, and the depiction of the Argentinian character and how… It didn’t sound right. It was just like, “Um…”

MELISA: Yeah, it’s like a stereotype…

LARA: Stereotyping. Yeah, you could’ve done your… I know it’s a really old game, but I think you could’ve done your research. I mean, it’s a matter of researching or having a diverse team on your own team so you can see different perspectives or in which ways this can be offensive. So to open these kinds of discussions between the teams and make the game go into a very much interesting direction, I believe. Another example that comes into my mind regarding culturalization and laws is that, for example, there was a law in Germany that prohibited every single thing that had to do with Nazi propaganda. So when you have, for example, the game Wolfenstein…

ALEXIS: Yeah, you can’t even show Adolf Hitler’s mustache.

LARA: Yeah. Or the Nazi symbols and everything. But then, when the law got removed, because I think they removed that law, the game was patched so that everyone could see how the game was in the rest of the world. So it’s just like, it is a constant thing of changing, of making the game more suitable.

MELISA: And adapt it to different…

ALEXIS: As the world changes, I mean, video games should change as well. I mean, culturalization is a market enable… a market enabler, sorry, if you think about it as a tool, you know, in order to better reach the market that maybe the game that you originally made has things that just don’t see eye to eye with, with an audience, you know? But it’s a tool.

MELISA: Like a tool to avoid disasters.

LARA: Yeah, and as a translator, I believe it’s so important to be, like, the gatekeeper of your own culture and flag the things that you believe are going to be offensive on your culture or on your language. I believe it’s so important because it’s going to deliver a better experience, and maybe the client is going to be thankful for your input.

MELISA: Yeah, so culturalization goes beyond just language, right? It can be a lot of things in your game, so it’s kind of a bit more like a holistic kind of view of your game in general, how it impacts different cultures, different, like, geopolitical situations. And I think our point in this episode is also just to bring awareness again to a topic that is really important in our industry.

LARA: I believe also what is really important in terms of culturalization is context, because, without context, how can you culturalize something, right? And we have, I believe, as translators, we can culturalize things in a way, but sometimes we don’t have the chance to change completely or an entire video game, right? So sometimes we have to adjust things as we can, or maybe the client doesn’t want that, so we have to take also that into account. So, as a translator, we want to be, like, the gatekeepers of our culture and everything, but also taking into account what the client says, the content…

MELISA: Having enough context for sure.

LARA: Enough context is just… Yeah, absolutely.

ALEXIS: I like that expression, the gatekeepers of our culture. I mean, in order to do that, you need a clear communication with your client so that they’re satisfied with what you’re bringing to the table.

MELISA: Yeah, and it shows that you really care, right? About your work.

ALEXIS: “Hey, this is not gonna work.”

MELISA: Yeah, because you want the game to be successful in the market that you want to…

LARA: Absolutely. And talking about context, because imagine what kind of culturalization you could do if you had enough context and if you knew your culture. Then you can maybe transform this into transcreation.

MELISA: Yeah, that’s another term that is quite used in the industry. And, yeah, like transcreation, culturalization, and they all refer to different aspects…

LARA: Transform… Yeah.

ALEXIS: Yeah, not translating, transforming into something that makes sense in the target language.

LARA: Exactly. I’m just thinking, when the first thing that came into my mind is, we all know Pikachu, right? But there are other Pokémons that have changed names in different countries, in different languages. There are a lot of examples of this.

ALEXIS: Well, just to name one, Lickitung, that we all know in Spanish is also Lickitung, in German, he’s called Schlurp, like the onomatopoeia. Or, I don’t know, the first three legendary Pokémon. I’m gonna mention the first era because I lost after Cyndaquil, Totodile and Chikorita.

LARA: We’re too old.

ALEXIS: I’m too old.

LARA: Even though I played Pokémon Scarlet, I don’t know why I’m throwing myself away from…

ALEXIS: But I don’t know where to start if I… It’s fine, let’s talk about it later. For instance, the first legendary birds Moltres, Articuno and Zapdos. That’s clearly, like, one, two, three, you know? But actually, in Japanese, the names are Freezer, Thunder and Fire, straightforward names with the elements with which they attack, right? Like, the legendary bird of thunder, Zapdos.

MELISA: Yeah, and it definitely, of course, has to do with the culture, what they think will impact…

ALEXIS: Be appropriate.

MELISA: Yeah, exactly, like people will, you know, get it a bit more if it’s more straightforward, maybe. Like, you know, all of that has to do with the culture, the country that they’re targeting.

LARA: Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes, not taking these extra steps as a developer, right? Because, as a translator, I believe we all do this, we all try to gatekeep our culture and everything, but sometimes developers don’t take this extra step. And sometimes there is like some bad and negative information or, like, repercussions with that game. Maybe you even kind of have legal problems with this too. And I believe you want to avoid that at all costs. So maybe your game that is doing so well in America will not be properly done if you want to launch it in Japan. I don’t know.

ALEXIS: You need to make some changes that are things that don’t actually impact the game, but they’re gonna work best, they’re gonna be better.

MELISA: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s what part of culturalization also, what’s known as, like, the proactive and reactive culturalization, which depends on the moment in the process. And there are certain things that you can think when you’re planning your game, you know, you can think, “Ok, these aspects, I can change them a bit around so that people…” Because you already know you wanna ship your game to different places, so you think, these things can be culturalized and they can connect a bit more with the target audience. What types of things do you guys think can be adapted?

LARA: To me… Yeah, there are some things. For example, there’s no need to adapt everything, because I know you might want to keep the essence of your game.

ALEXIS: Yeah, you’re gonna lose something in the process.

LARA: And you’re gonna lose something. But to me, the things that have to be changed, the things that could be prohibited because of religions or insulting or offensive, or goes against any laws. So to me, those things have to be changed.

MELISA: That is more like the reactive side of…

LARA: Yeah, that’s more the reactive side of things. For example, if you have a game like Far Cry 6, right? And you want to create this cultural immersion into the game and to let you know that you are in Latin America, that it’s today and you are in Latin America, you’re in 2023 in Latin America, the first thing that comes into your mind is the music. Because, for example, for me, that’s the best case, because whenever you get into a car with Dani and she turns on the radio and she starts singing with the radio, all these Spanish songs and all these… I mean, at least for me, that I know, Gente de Zona, all these bands that are so welcoming and from Latin America. The level of culturalization that they have done to make things culturally appropriate for that game is just, to me, amazing. I cannot believe how… how is it possible that you make me feel like I was at home.

ALEXIS: On that same spirit, I think it’s a constant that we mention Ubisoft as doing many, many things right.

LARA: Yeah.

ALEXIS: Like keeping the players in mind first. But I also remember some cultural aspects that were taken care of with absolute love in the latest Assassin’s Creed games. I mean, in Odyssey, they worked with Greek actors with actual insults that they used back then. And even in one game before that, Origins, one of the key elements of the story is Bayek finding some stones in a certain form or shape help him remember things and has some visions that each of these stones represent constellations that were meaningful for the Egyptians, even back then. So all of those things that are from the developers themselves, are so well-thought-out, you know? And that’s what I appreciate as a gamer.

LARA: Yes, absolutely. And sometimes you hear music, for example. I just… When you hear, for example, the radio in GTA 5, you are transported into the place, you know? And… yeah, I love it because they took like normal songs and, for some reason, your brain now is attached to that memory, and you’re like, yeah, I’m driving my car into the highway like… It’s so good. I mean, when the culturalization is taking part in the development of the game, you can really tell.

MELISA: Yeah, exactly, because there’s these, like, tools that you can plan ahead and then connects really well with your audience.

LARA: Absolutely. We had last year Kate Edwards, she worked on Age of Empires. If you haven’t seen that episode, please go check it out, because, when she talks about culturalization, she takes it to the absolute next level because she’s a genius. And when she explains about the maps and how that could be culturally inappropriate, you start thinking, oh, my God, this is not… good. I mean, you have to make it good. That’s what she does for a living, she just goes researching culture everywhere. So yeah, maybe also it would help having a diverse… I know I always say the exact same thing, but for me it’s important to have different perspectives of the world because it will make the game more rich and more beautiful, in general, right? Like, it is going to hit that spot.

ALEXIS: On that same note, one of the things that is important to have culturalized is what gamers see in the stores, right? The message that comes to them before they buy the game. And even the currency that they buy the game in.

MELISA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The marketing content, I mean, how important it is culturalization, transcreation in marketing. I think that’s already really established, as well.

LARA: To me, it’s just simply, to make like a conclusion of this, it’s just do your research. If you want to get to a specific market and you think that the content that you have is not going to be suitable for that market, please do your research. Have a diverse team. I think everything could be so beautiful like that, it could flow so well. And, yeah, it could avoid disasters, to be honest with you. It could avoid you losing money, too.

ALEXIS: And it can make you earn far more fans.

MELISA: Exactly. I think people will definitely appreciate you going the extra mile, it will have a positive impact, we can assure you. Thank you so much for watching or hearing this episode. And if you wanna know more about culturalization or you have any questions, please let us know. We’re happy to hear… we’re gonna be reading all the comments. And yes, that’s it. Thank you so much. Bye, everyone.

LARA: Bye-bye! Thank you!

Episode Transcription

LARA: Hi, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Open World. Hi, Ale. Hi, Meli. Today we have a special guest with us, Olga Petrova. Hi, Olga! It’s so nice to see you here with us. Thank you for joining us.

OLGA: Hi! Thank you for having me.

LARA: It’s a real pleasure. Like, we are really excited to have you.

MELISA: Yes, thank you so much for joining us, Olga.

ALEXIS: Olga, for everyone that’s watching us, can you please introduce yourself, provide some background on your experience on video games localization, and a little bit about your journey?

OLGA: Yeah, sure. Once again, thank you for having me. I’m super excited to be here and share a little bit about what I know about localization and what keeps me going, for more than 15 years already, going on 20, I think. Yeah. I’m mostly in project management throughout my career, managing teams and projects and video games localization. I have participated in localization of over 200 games, roughly. Triple A titles, MMORPGs, mobile games. So when I started, I was just a freelance translator, so I actually took the full path from being a freelance translator to being a professional. And I was lucky to have worked on some of the most successful projects in the gaming industry from…

ALEXIS: I was gonna ask you if there was any OP that you’re most proud of or that was very successful.

OLGA: So big companies like Activision, 2K, Capcom, Bethesda, Rockstar, I did projects for those.

MELISA: Dropping names.

OLGA: Yeah, I know. And then, yeah, so I used to work for a big… for the largest original publisher in Russia, and that’s when I got acquainted with big names. And then I moved on to work in the development studios, where I was able to do some influence on the development process and become a localization advocate and evangelist. Yeah.

ALEXIS: Yeah, it’s needed. It’s needed. Especially in indie studios. I started…

LARA: Not only in indie studios, but yeah. It’s just like…

ALEXIS: Everywhere. I remember one of my first steps in the video game industry was to be a localization something, you know, advocate, consultant or whatever in an indie dev studio.

LARA: Yeah. Yeah, it’s really needed. And you can tell when someone puts into the game localization early in the stages because you can tell that everything runs smooth, the localization is perfect, all the cultural aspects are taken into account. So, yeah. That’s awesome.

ALEXIS: Sorry I interrupted you, Olga.

OLGA: Oh, that’s okay. I couldn’t agree more to everything you guys are saying. Yes, it’s extremely important. And I’m, like, I’m still… It’s hard to believe that in 2023, we’re still talking about why we need localization to be a part of the game development, right?

LARA: Oh, my God. Yeah.

MELISA: Absolutely. That’s why I think it’s so important what you were saying. And since we’re already talking about this, I hope it’s okay, I’ll ask you the next question, which is very related. And that’s, what are some common challenges that arise when localization is brought in too late in the development process? And how can these challenges be mitigated?

OLGA: Yeah. Where do I start?

MELISA: A lot to say about this.

OLGA: Yeah. I sometimes call localization a Cinderella of the game development. We rarely get invited to the ball.

LARA: I love it!

MELISA: I love it. That’s so funny!

ALEXIS: Can I use that? I’m using that. I’m sorry, I’m using that.

OLGA: It is true. For a lot of companies, we are the least favorite stepchild, and it is what it is, right?

LARA: And we are so important. Like, come on. How? How can this happen? We’re like… We’re like Cinderella, you know? And you’re inviting us like… No, there’s no way.

MELISA: If you invite us, we’re gonna make an impact. Just saying.

OLGA: Yeah. Maybe drop a shoe or two. But yeah, in all seriousness, just, I think, for the most part, it’s never intentional. It’s just because the developers don’t know better and they just don’t think about it when they start their journey. So… bringing us late in the process essentially cost you. And you end up doing a lot of reworks, a lot of changes or just accepting a quality in localization that is… that is lower than what you have in English or whatever original language your game is created in. So you might be telling a joke that, when it is translated, will not get understood by most of the players who don’t speak English. You might have a puzzle in your game that a person who doesn’t speak English won’t make any sense and will leave them confused. Um… Your user interface might not support text expansion and it will just end up playing font size Tetris when you try to put in the translated text in that small box. What else?

MELISA: These are great examples. They’re very practical, like, very to-the-point ways to know how, like…

OLGA: It’s like, I am a manager, but I’m always very close to what I’m working on. So that’s also one of the things why you have to have localization people on your team. They will spend time, they will invest and make an effort to get your game. They will be on your side. They will be protective of the product that you as a developer are creating, and they will try to make it as good in other language as it is in the language that you used to conceive it. So yeah.

LARA: Yeah. I mean, when you were mentioning…

OLGA: And we haven’t even mentioned the cost here, right? So all that comes up when you bring in localization late, that means more money is gonna be spent on the work that can be done early in the process and therefore be cheaper.

LARA: Yeah. So when you were mentioning the challenges, I could easily like recall games that had those problems that I already played, you know? And I was like, oh my God, this could have been such an easy fix from the early stages, but here I am, playing this game, facing these challenges, and it’s like, Oh, this joke is not even funny in my language. So I totally agree. Um, I have the other question now. From your experience, what are the benefits of having a localization expert collaborate with the development team from the early stages?

OLGA: It’s a really good question, and I think we touched a little bit on that already, but let me just expand and see what else comes to mind when I think about the benefits for the developer. Well, let’s start with money. Because I think that proverbial return on investment from localization that everyone expects is one of the things that you can really justify and can really separate what exactly was the localization role apart from the marketing or user acquisition campaign or the game itself. Maybe the game is so genius that it doesn’t have to have all the bells and whistles that localization brings into. But the money is just, you keep the costs down. You… You avoid the expensive do-overs because you get it right the first time. So one of the games in my last workplace turned out to be extremely successful, but it was not created with localization in mind. They had it in English for the longest time. At the same time, the management realized that they’re leaving a lot of money on the table because, well, there are players who don’t speak English all over the world that could be enjoying the game and bringing in money, the revenue. So that need, it was there, so the decision was made to actually finally have the localization in the game. So without like even any numbers, I’m just gonna tell you that it took nine months of work for two engineers revamping the code and making the localization possible.

LARA: Oh, my God. Like the amount of money, time and effort. Oh, my God!

OLGA: The translation itself didn’t take that much time.

ALEXIS: Right.

LARA: I imagine. Oh, my God, it’s insane. I get, like, goosebumps. It’s insane.

OLGA: It can be really expensive. It can be, like, it can save you a lot of money if you think about internationalization. If you have the right people in the team who can guide the developer and tell them that there are certain things that are better avoided or there are certain things that need to be done from day one that, even if you don’t launch with multiple languages, even if you only launch in English, by the time that you make a decision to localize, it’s not exactly going like that, but very similar. And it does save you a lot of money and time to make it happen.

LARA: Money and time, two things that we could all have more of.

OLGA: And that’s the famous triangle, right? Money, time and quality.

LARA: Yeah.

OLGA: At least you hit two of those. And then quality is up to the professionalism of the localization people that you have.

ALEXIS: Olga, you’re talking about the quality, the professionalism that translation, localization, when taken in the right time and place of the development process, saves you money, saves you time. But I want to go back to the professionalism aspect and the cultural considerations that come with the localization process. Do you think that there are any cultural considerations, like in a broad aspect, that are particularly important for game developers to be aware of when creating content for different markets?

OLGA: Absolutely, Alex. It’s a very good question. Again, like it’s very relevant to the daily work that localization teams are doing around the world, right? We are bridging the cultural gaps. We’re doing it every single day. And we help because we’re bringing players together, and making us all a little bit closer to each other. So there are linguistic considerations. So language and humor, you don’t want to have any puns and jokes that might not translate well. It’s like, if you tell a joke that only makes sense in one language and you hear crickets from the audience, right? So you don’t want to run into this. And don’t get me started on geopolitical sensitivities. I can give you two very fresh examples and one not so fresh one.

ALEXIS: I was gonna ask for examples. Please, go ahead.

OLGA: Oh, that’s fine because I do have it. Say that Spider-Man game that was just released and the flag SNAFU with mixing up Cuban and Puerto Rican flags.

ALEXIS: Yes. I saw that.

OLGA: If they had a culturalization expert on the team or if they paid maybe more attention, they could’ve easily…

LARA: Oh, my God. Yeah.

OLGA: And that was…

LARA: It was so simple.

ALEXIS: It’s simple. We’re doing the same expression, Lali. We’re both like…

LARA: It’s just like, oh, my God. Yes, I saw it, and it was like, no way.

OLGA: It takes a certain like… It takes some skills, right? It takes a certain… Um… You need to be attuned to certain things in a game or in a movie or in a book to be able to catch up on these things. And that’s why you need people who can help you with that. The same thing with the Barbie movie that was banned in Vietnam because of the nine-dash line and that map that they were referring to, it didn’t even look like a map, but it was significant for Vietnamese people, right? And it was a big issue for them, so it was justified in their eyes. From my own experience, I can tell you that we had really big problems with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 that was released in Russia with the level that Activision actually took away from the Russian edition with the terrorists killing civilians in the airport.

ALEXIS: Yes, that famous/infamous level.

LARA: Oh, my God, yeah.

OLGA: But we had quite a big backlash from inside the country that was pointed at the company at that time, the publisher. So they blamed us for neglecting this particular sensitivity in this particular case, even like considering releasing the game in the country. So just like, you know, like three quite bright examples, but there are so many more and they happen all the time. I actually, myself, I have a collection of the movies that make some funny things with the Russian language just because they sort of entertain me, and I find it interesting that, with the amount of money and the budgets that Hollywood has, they just neglect double checking so many things.

MELISA: I would love to see that collection.

OLGA: Well, the movies that have actually Spanish speakers in them, you probably, like, you can totally relate.

ALEXIS: We can do the same with the Spanish. It’s a horror.

MELISA: Yeah. But I think the point that you were making about the movie and why this, like, those are great examples. And it’s so painful, there’s a lot of effort and money and people working for years sometimes in some of these games, and just, you know, to get ruined or banned completely for a completely full audience like of several countries and stuff like that just for these tiny mistakes that, you know, can be avoided. That’s like how important I think this message that we are here trying to spread thanks to Olga. It’s like… You know, I think that’s a great proof of our point.

OLGA: And it’s heartbreaking for the teams because, like you said, they’re working so hard, they’re putting their heart and soul in the game and then they’re being criticized for something that could be easily corrected or avoided at all. So, yeah, those were my examples.

MELISA: Yeah, those are a great examples.

LARA: Great examples.

ALEXIS: Thank you for those great examples.

MELISA: And related to what I just said, can you share some advice for those game developers who may be listening to this episode and may need to become more familiar with the importance of early localization involvement?

OLGA: Yeah, let me try. So, I would tell that they need to be curious, because a lot of times, the developers speak only one language. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You can’t expect everyone to be bilingual or be interested in learning something about the different culture. But it pays off when you try and do that. So just be curious. Try to understand and embrace the landscapes of different cultures and languages. Do the research, ask questions. I think not being guilty to ask questions, and not be afraid to ask them is one of the most important things that a person can actually have in them. I think that the ability to ask questions and to show curiosity is actually showing that people are not indifferent and they’re passionate about what they’re doing. And that’s really important. And it usually shows in the results. What else? So besides curiosity and asking questions, building a diverse team.

LARA: Oh, my God, yeah.

MELISA: I love this.

OLGA: Different backgrounds from different countries speaking different languages. That usually helps. My biggest release so far was a game that was published on Netflix platform, and we launched in 15 languages and we ended up having 33. Obviously, I don’t speak 33 languages, but we had a lot of team members who were able to help out with a lot of them. And that did help. And because, again, like having people on the team who were able to give you advice about their culture, who can tell you what’s acceptable and what’s not, what is… what aligns with customs of the country and what doesn’t, and sometimes are able to tell you the peculiarities of the language. And, if you have a problem with, say, Hindi, which we didn’t know that Unity had, but we had some Hindi speaking people on the team and we were trying to assess how serious this issue is, can we actually release the game with this issue or do we need to change all the words in the game that have this particular glyph or this particular character in it to something else and try that approach instead? Right, so, there are those small things, but they add up to being very important and the quality, never going down. So, yeah, that’s… Definitely brings a unique flavor to the table, for sure.

MELISA: This is some great advice. Thank you, Olga, that was…

OLGA: In fact, with the Netflix release, there was… My mom was actually… Well, I was bragging on my social media, and she was seeing that and was asking, “But how do you translate in 33 languages?” Like, “Mom, it’s okay…”

LARA: I love that!

ALEXIS: I love that. It’s a constant that I found in many people working in the localization industry, that moms usually don’t quite grasp what we do.

OLGA: And that was after 15 years that I’ve been doing that, she was still very naive.

ALEXIS: “My daughter is a translator.” Right?

LARA: Yeah, that’s what my mom says, like, “Yeah, my daughter works translating video games.” She doesn’t even have a clue what goes into it.

OLGA: And I think that’s actually a common misconception that we also have to fight, because for… A lot of times for the management, we are just glorified translators, for some reason, who earn more than they deserve. But that’s not the case. Like a lot of work that we as localization professionals do is language agnostic. It needs to be done in your product no matter how many languages you support. You need to have your conversation with the Game Designer to find out what was put behind each and every player phrase and string in the game, you need to have it documented and you need to know the context for that game because the translators, they’re gonna ask you. And if not the first time, then maybe the second time around. And you need to have that localization Bible like I call it, like it’s usually based off on game design document, but it’s so much more, right? So you build up on that and you use the questions that are asked by the translation team, you add on to that and then, when it’s time to launch in a new language, you have it already and a lot of questions are already answered. So yeah, it’s so much more than just translation and just sending files back and forth. You have to think about so many things besides just having the text translated, starting from, I don’t know, choosing the right font, making sure that all the characters are there, like I said. When I started in localization, I was translating into a language that was not part of EFIGS. So very rarely the developers had an idea that there are certain sets of characters that will be used for displaying the text in the game. So a lot of times, we were receiving a localized version, no characters were seen or, the best case, we had like the tofu squares.

ALEXIS: Yeah, I remember those squares.

OLGA: I can’t count the times I had to get back to the developers and ask them, “Where’s my Cyrillic font? Why don’t they have a Cyrillic font?” So, it’s better now for sure. And a lot of phones have like a full set of characters for alphabetized languages, but it’s still, like, for a lot of them, it’s still a work in progress. And usually, the… the game designers, the UX, UI people, they like to work with the fonts that are pretty, that create a certain atmosphere. Like, imagine something like Bioshock, with its art deco vibes, right? So those fonts, they rarely have support for all the glyphs. So you need to think about that because your engineers, game designers, even your UI, UX people might not, and you need to help them. So, yeah, it’s part of the job. Very exciting, actually.

LARA: Yeah. Yeah, I love that. I love that. I mean, we in Spanish, we have special characters all the time too. And it’s actually funny because the tofu squares that, like you mentioned, I find them always, all the time, and it’s just like, oh, it was just as simple as changing the font. But yeah, there you have it. It happens.

OLGA: Yes. Or just testing, right? So just bring the pangram, use the pangram and you will be able to tell right away if any of the characters are missing. But it’s just because engineers are not trained and the game developers rarely think about it from the start, especially Hindi, right? Like they’re thinking about creating something so special, so new, so exciting that they just don’t have time to think about all the intricacies that might come with actually making a global release. So it’s just the nature of the work. And that’s why localization exists as a discipline and that’s why we need it.

LARA: I love it. I love it. This episode has been one of my favorites. Like, thank you so much, Olga, for your time. This has been amazing. Guys, I don’t know if you want to say anything else.

MELISA: Olga, everything you said was so on point. I think everyone listening, like, it’s just great, great advice, great examples. So thank you so much for joining us.

OLGA: Oh, thank you for having me. I really… I love my job. I really like what I do.

LARA: We can tell. We can tell, we can see the passion that you have.

ALEXIS: Thank you for sharing your own personal stories as well. That’s very important.

OLGA: I find it that some people usually want to hear something personal rather than just very abstract…

ALEXIS: We do it, too.

LARA: Yeah, 100%. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much, everyone. You that you are listening or hearing or watching this episode on YouTube or wherever you are listening this, too, thank you so much for joining us today. We will see you again in another episode. Bye-bye!

MELISA: Bye, everyone.

ALEXIS: Bye-bye.

Episode Transcription

ALEXIS: Hi, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Open World. I’m Alexis and I’m here, as always, with Melisa, with Lali. Hi, guys. How are you? So, in this episode, we’re gonna be talking about accessibility in video games.

LARA: And what a topic.

ALEXIS: What a topic. So let’s start small, okay? So what do you guys think that accessibility is and what does that mean in video games?

LARA: Um, accessibility is making the game available and playable for everyone, regardless of anything, you know? Just like, to me, it’s opening the opportunity for someone that might have never played a video game before being able to play a videogame. For me, that’s huge. And nowadays you’ve seen like a lot of games adding these accessibility features and stuff, and something that flutters me a little bit is just like… I’ve seen video game companies talking about accessibility as if it was an issue. And I think it’s a solution. It’s far away from an issue.

MELISA: It’s an opportunity to reach more people.

ALEXIS: It’s all the contrary.

LARA: It’s all the contrary. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, that’s basically for me. Accessibility is making your game playable for everyone.

MELISA: Definitely. And for me, it’s also like, make it part of your process. Like, you know, for a lot of people, they have to find a way around it of how to play it. But when you have it, you know, as part of what you offer for your game, it’s great. And we’ve come such a long way and like technological advances and everything. So it’s something I believe it’s very, you know, like people just know the importance of it a lot more now.

LARA: Yeah. And sometimes we have these misconstruction or misjudgments that accessibility is, I don’t know…

ALEXIS: A ramp for a wheelchair. Right?

LARA: Oh, my God. It’s just like, it’s so much more than that. It is that, but it’s so much more than that.

MELISA: Exactly. There are a lot of different disabilities, you know. Mobility disability, of course, but there’s this whole other, you know, speech…

LARA: Speech, hearing. Yeah.

ALEXIS: You have vision. I have cheats. Sitting here gives us that privilege. Vision, hearing, speech, mobility and cognitive impairments. So on that note, in video games, what are some of the accessibility features that nowadays are being used or that should be used, as you said, Lali?

MELISA: One of the main ones I know is like the remappable keys, so like when you have the option to configure like different keys to have, you know, different options in the game. Or, I mean, not only keys, but like different controllers, different buttons. So like, an example, if you’re playing a shooting game and to fire a gun, you have to press Enter, and you can change it to, you know, the spacebar, if you’re playing with a keyboard. But, you know if you can add a different controller, like the Xbox controller.

ALEXIS: The adaptive controller of Xbox, yeah.

MELISA: That’s like a huge advantage, you can even add different, you know, comfortable controller for different mobility disabilities.

LARA: Yeah, I know a bunch of streamers that have built their own console or keyboard by themselves just to adapt their necessities to gaming. And I think that’s so amazing. And being able to have these feature of remappable keys, it gives this option to these people that are doing their own controllers or their own way to play a video game more accessible. So it’s just like, if you do that, you know that everyone can play that game. It’s so important.

ALEXIS: Nothing should stop someone from playing video games.

LARA: Absolutely.

ALEXIS: So, Lali, what about you? Any other?

LARA: Yeah. For me, it’s colorblind options. I’m a little bit color blind, I have troubles with blues and greens, and I’ve seen it in some video games like League of Legends or Overwatch. What they have is just like, ‘cause they are PvP video games, so it’s player versus player, you can actually change the colors of the teams so you don’t mix them, which for me is great. And I know… the problems I have with color blindness is they are so small compared with other ones, but this accessibility feature, to me, makes it easier. It is easier for my brain to process which one is the enemy and which one is my teammate, you know? So for me it has to be that.

ALEXIS: But, I mean, it’s quite common. It’s a quite common problem to some extent, to have colorblindness, especially in men. I have one or two friends that are actually quite colorblind with different colors, I don’t remember right now which one. But it’s also, I mean, not only the color of things, right? But also like subtitles or even closed captioning, you know? And other elements that…

MELISA: Another feature that is really important.

ALEXIS: Right? Not only adding colors to the subtitling or the size or even like a background to make them more visible…

LARA: Or change the fonts.

ALEXIS: The fonts.

LARA: The amount of times… The size of the fonts. Yeah. Sometimes I find myself… The other day I was playing actually a video game. I don’t remember the name, I don’t think it’s important at the moment. But I was playing on my PS5, and I had the controller and I was playing in bed, chilling. And when the game started with the… In the game, actually, you have to customize your character. And then when the game starts, I encounter myself with subtitles like this. Like this. And the size of the letters was so small.

ALEXIS: Many lines?

LARA: It had like four lines. It was like screen-wide long.

ALEXIS: Wow.

LARA: So I actually had to pause the game to be able to read the subtitles. Because that is not subtitling, dude. That’s just putting text on your screen.

ALEXIS: A paragraph.

LARA: An entire paragraph. You are writing the story of your game in the screen.

MELISA: And nowadays, I mean, you have so many of like, you know… everything is like measured in how long it takes you to read.

ALEXIS: You have best practices for everything.

MELISA: For everything, which is great.

LARA: Right. Yeah. I have played video games when you can actually slow down the speed of the subtitles. That’s so good.

ALEXIS: And, I mean, even in closed captioning, it also gives, like, for example, this is very, very used nowadays, but The Last of Us too did an amazing, and one of the most visible examples that I can remember, in their closed captioning, you could even see, from the intensity of the letters, how near were, I don’t know, your enemies or the soldiers, and where the sound was coming from.

LARA: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla had that, too. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, when you start playing it, you can see the arrows or you can see where the sound is coming from. So it makes it much easier for you to set yourself and immerse yourself into that world if you have hearing aids or something.

MELISA: And for night, too. Also.

ALEXIS: And what about difficulty or tutorials or things like that? Because those things can be restrictive for players.

MELISA: And for cognitive disabilities. That’s why tutorials are key.

LARA: Yeah. To me, having AI assistance is so important because you don’t know the person that is playing your video game. And if you want that person to play your video game and you have, I don’t know, only one type of setting of difficulty to be like super hard, that person is not going to be able to play your game. And I sometimes I feel it myself, because I might be a try-hard with some games, but with some other games I just really enjoy…

ALEXIS: It’s good to have the option.

LARA: Make the game easier. You’re not going to judge me if I play a game on easy mode. I don’t care if you do, but you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t at all, because I’m doing it because I wanna chill, my brain is tired and everything, but there is people that are doing it because it’s their only option.

MELISA: Yes, of course. And tutorials are key to learn how to play it in the first place. So absolutely, they’re a key part. And now that we’re talking about, like, all the different features, I also have… I’m sorry, Ale, I’m also going to use it. There was the Video Games Accessibility Awards in 2021. We’re going to link this in the description because this is great. I mean, just the games that are doing a really good job because are getting recognized and, you know, it just brings more visibility to everything that we’re talking. And I thought about just naming a few of them because there were many, like, different things that they gave awards for. But some of them are Clear Text with Halo Infinite, was someone who won. AI Assistance, it went to Forza Horizon 5. Improved Precision, Far Cry 6. And Peer Assistance, It Takes Two.

LARA: Amazing. What a great game.

MELISA: And Remapping, that we were talking, it’s Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker.

ALEXIS: You have so many, you need like 12 or 15 fingers sometimes, who played that kind of game. So, the fact that they can have the remapping.

MELISA: Yeah, the configuration to adapt it.

LARA: Yeah. And having like an award for this is so important. I remember the Game Awards in 2020 when they first introduced the Accessibility Award, because I think it’s like an encouragement for the video game industry and companies.

MELISA: And to keep innovating because it’s a field that there’s so much improvement that you can, you know, and like technology is advancing. It’s amazing the work that is being done.

LARA: Yeah. I remember the first one being The Last of Us, and the latest one, that was last year, God of War: Ragnarök got it. And when the person that went up to the stage to receive the award gave an amazing speech, I actually got in tears because it was, like, so good. It’s like a side of the video game industry that is not competitive. They are all there just to get to one same result.

ALEXIS: To get video games for everyone.

LARA: That everyone is able to play video games. And it was so good.

MELISA: There’s a lot of advances from different companies that they share everything so that other companies can learn from them too.

ALEXIS: Yeah, that’s a big thing. Most companies should share what they’ve been doing, you know, in order to make their games more accessible. Because that’s not happening that much.

LARA: It’s tricky because they all have these secretive kind of stuff.

ALEXIS: I wonder why.

LARA: They wanna be the only one, they wanna be the best one, they wanna be… It’s just like, but in this case, I don’t think it should be like that.

ALEXIS: Or maybe it’s not even… they don’t even realize…

LARA: No, but just make that for your story, for your quest, for your type of video game. But with your accessibility features, please make them available for everyone so other game developers, indie developers can study what you did with your previous video games.

ALEXIS: And how to install them on the engines that they are using, whether it’s Unreal, Unity.

LARA: And make it, like, available for everyone so everyone can learn how to improve their games for everyone. So it’s just like…

MELISA: It’s the whole point of accessibility, right? So it’s great that… I mean, some companies are sharing it, which is great. And of course, you know, some aren’t. But I think it’s, you know, maybe it will help. Like the more we talk about it, it will help bring awareness to this and that companies, like, sharing.

ALEXIS: Yeah, I mean, we’re talking about this, but I think that the question is due. Why is accessibility important and in what levels? Because we’re talking about making the game more accessible for everyone, of course. But if you had, I don’t know, an indie developer that wants to know why make their games more accessible, or even a publisher that wants to further… enhance, sorry, the experience for the gamers, why is it important?

LARA: I’m going to be like straightforward with this. If you have your game accessible for everyone, more people is going to play it, more revenue for you.

MELISA: Yeah, that’s a great point from the business side.

LARA: The straightforward side.

MELISA: And for the more sociological side…

ALEXIS: But please, be straightforward too.

MELISA: No, of course, of course. I think, I mean, we want to be a better society, like a better world, we wanna be better as an industry and we want to, you know, portray video games like everyone can play it, everyone can connect with it and have a great experience and don’t feel that, because you have a disability, you’re going to be discriminated in the video games or in the, like, you know, your possibility to play it. So I think we’re going in the right direction here. We want to see more of it.

ALEXIS: I agree. I agree. I mean, you both make a great point. There are no downsides of implementing accessibility features in your game. You might not know them all as a developer or as a publisher, but it’s a constant in every episode, if you don’t know how to do it…

LARA: Research.

ALEXIS: Research.

ALEXIS: Find a way to do it.

MELISA: We can leave some links below as well, more information of where you can, you know…

ALEXIS: I mean, just from the top of my head, AbleGamers is a company that even assisted I think Xbox in making the adaptive controller, so kudos there. I mean, but I don’t want to leave this aside because we’ve been talking about many different accessibility features that exist, but localization, I mean, is an accessibility feature as well. If you don’t know a language…

LARA: It is. You make your game more accessible.

ALEXIS: I mean, I don’t know English, I don’t know any other language except my own, and I want to play, I don’t know, The Witcher. Or, I don’t know, any game. You name it, it doesn’t matter. And I grab my joystick, I sit down to play and I don’t know how to play it because I don’t understand anything that’s on screen from the story, from what I have to do. And, if you don’t have contact with games that you don’t really know, localization is an accessibility feature as well.

MELISA: For sure.

ALEXIS: Yeah. So, guys, no one likes to feel an outsider. Thank you everyone that is making accessibility features for everyone, no matter what they are. Keep improving. Let’s work towards making a better industry and a more inclusive experience for everyone.

LARA: Yeah. If you have more examples of games that are more accessible for everyone, please let us know down below in the comments.

ALEXIS: We’d love to know more.

MELISA: Or our Discord server.

ALEXIS: Yeah, and share them on our Discord server. I mean, I’m sure that everyone has someone that needs accessible games, so please share. Thank you for your time, for visiting us on this episode, and we’ll see you next time.

LARA: Bye-bye!

ALEXIS: Bye.

Episode Transcription

MELISA:Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Open World. I’m Melisa. Your other hosts, Ale and Lari. And today we have a very special guest, María Eugenia Larreina, who’s joining us to talk about a very important topic that is accessibility in video games. She is a Ph.D. candidate at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and her research focuses on the needs and preferences of persons with visual disabilities and the potential applications of audio description. Thank you so much for joining us today, Eugenia.

EUGENIA:Thank you so much for having me.

LARA: Yeah, thank you. It’s amazing. So we met each other… We’re going to be, like, giving a bit of context here. We met each other back in Berlin last year. And I was completely amazed by your talk. I was like, “Oh, my God, we have to have her in Open World because, oh my God, this is amazing.” But can you tell your professional journey walkthrough for those who don’t know you yet?

EUGENIA: Yes, of course. So I started studying translation and interpreting. I did Spanish, English and French. And when I was done, I was very interested in media, film, translation technologies, so I decided to do a master’s on audiovisual translation, and that’s when I had my first contact with accessibility. So we studied subtitling for the deaf and the hard of hearing, audio description, and respeaking. And when I finished the master’s, I had the opportunity to work on a project about audio description called the Rad project, and how to apply it to video games. So this was my Ph.D. topic, that right now I’m finishing the thesis. And I just fell in love with audio description and accessibility in general, and how to apply it to certain medium like video games.

ALEXIS: That’s amazing. And what was that inspired you to pursue a career in accessibility? And maybe, as a follow up question to that, what are some of the key challenges that you have faced in this industry so far?

EUGENIA: So I was very inspired by the fact that accessibility can be applied to anything in real life. So when you use a ramp to enter a building or when you use subtitles to watch a movie, or when you use an audio guide to guide yourself around a museum, all of this is accessibility and we are all users of accessibility all the time. And just the fact that what we do in university can be applied to real life and potentially improve real people’s lives and our lives was very exciting.

ALEXIS: I like that because that’s true. That’s true, right? Everyone is a user of accessibility to some extent at some point, right? Even with translated text.

LARA: Yeah. Don’t you get mad when you see something that is not accessible for some people and you’re like, oh my God, like, this has to be accessible? Like, it happens. Even in the simplest things, it happens.

ALEXIS: Yeah. And when it comes to video games, even some triple-A studios sometimes don’t even… I’m an old guy by now, so I notice that I sometimes need bigger fonts. I do, because I can’t see. And I came across some futuristic first-person shooters that don’t really allow me to make the font bigger and I couldn’t play it. I couldn’t play it.

EUGENIA: Yeah, and it’s really easy to make. If there is awareness about this, it’s not really hard to code or hard to integrate into the planning and the budgets. So it’s really about being aware of it.

MELISA: Absolutely. Absolutely. And, María Eugenia, how would you say the accessibility landscape has changed in the recent years? And also, like what emerging technologies or trends do you see happening? I bet in audio description, in particular, for your research, I imagine there’s been a lot of changes in the recent years.

EUGENIA: Yeah, no, it has changed and I would like to say that for the better. So I hope that it continues improving the whole situation. So I started the project in 2020, and back then there was no audio description at all anywhere in video games. We had audio games, which are games that only have sound. So you have a narration explaining what’s going on, but no audio description really. And now, in only three years, we have game trailers with audio description, we have audio description in some cut scenes in major games, and we also have some gameplay audio description. So it has really evolved very, very quickly and it’s very exciting. And this is also a big challenge as well because you need to be aware of all the new games that are being launched all the time. And there’s a lot of diversity, lots of new things every day, but it makes it very exciting as well. As for new things that I’m excited about, I’m very interested in virtual reality lately. I think that this will have like many cool applications for accessibility if it’s done from the start. So right now we are just like starting with the technology, starting to become more popular for gaming. And if we are thinking about accessibility now, we will make it better for the players of the future.

LARA: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I couldn’t agree with you more. And also I think about the recognition that accessibility is getting into the video game industry because there are some awards also that are like awarding video games that are accessible for everyone, right? Do you have like some example where you were like, oh my God, this game has mastered accessibility?

ALEXIS: That’s a good question.

EUGENIA: I have to say The Last of Us part 2.

LARA: Yes! I was hoping for this.

EUGENIA: It was a before and after. Yeah. Yeah, really, a before and after, that such a major triple-A game had so many accessibility options. It’s been like a major break for the industry, I would say. And now other companies are looking at it and saying, “Can we replicate this? Can we make this better?”

ALEXIS: That was something that I was gonna ask. You said that it’s not hard to code, to keep in mind, to implement. So a game like The Last of Us has set the bar too high or is it really just a matter of, okay, let’s include it in the pipeline from the very beginning and let’s go with it and it wouldn’t be too complicated? Or does it really set the bar too high?

EUGENIA: Well, I want to think that not really, that everyone can reach this level of accessibility. But of course, you need to have the resources to do so, and this might not be easy. But it really depends on the type of game, right? So depending on what game it is, you will need some different accessibility options, and maybe the ones that we have in The Last of Us cannot be applied to your game. So if you’re really creative from the start and design it with users, like real users, involving them in the creation and the testing, and then you work with the developers, the artists, the project managers, everyone together, you can really make it accessible, yeah. I believe so.

LARA: Absolutely. Yeah. So this is like the best question I have after this talk. What are some of the best practices for ensuring that websites and all digital content in general are accessible to users with disabilities?

EUGENIA: Well, again, it depends a lot on the app or on the website or things like this, but we already have some guidelines that can give developers some ideas. So, for example, we have the Web Accessibility Guidelines, or the Game Accessibility Guidelines as well, and you can start from there. But then, of course, the best would be to have users… Sorry.

LARA: Yeah, I mean, are the guidelines free to use, open to use for everyone? Like, you can find them online or something?

EUGENIA: Yeah, some of them are, others are not. For example, the information for The Last of Us is not available. We only know the accessibility options we have, but we don’t know how they were developed. We need to look into interviews of, like, people working on the game and things like that. But still, we have very public documents that we can look for. So the Game Accessibility Guidelines, for example, just like this name, is open on the Internet.

ALEXIS: We could share that link.

MELISA: Yeah.

ALEXIS: I don’t know where links live in videos, below…

MELISA: And do you think there should be more, like, communication between gaming studios and companies to share technological advancement or guidelines and things like that? What’s your opinion about that?

EUGENIA: It would be nice if all of this information was accessible as well, so that maybe smaller studios can take inspiration from them. And it would be also very nice if the same company would make all of their games accessible and not only some of them. So this is something that happens as well. I mean, if you have already the protocols developed, you can just apply them to all your games, right? But of course, the workflow in the industry is very opaque, right? You don’t really know much about how the studios work. So maybe they have some constraints that we don’t know about, but it would be nice to have this information for everyone to use.

MELISA: Yeah, absolutely. And with the things that are available now, what advice would you give to organizations and companies that are just starting to prioritize accessibility to digital content and products, games?

EUGENIA: I think that the most important thing is to talk to real users, because sometimes we have companies creating accessibility that then is not usable by the real people. Maybe they think that it will be useful, but then when you get real people using it, it’s not meeting their needs. So if you really involve them from the start, you will cut costs and make it more profitable at the end as well, more usable. And then another important thing that I would say is to make the information about accessibility accessible itself. So if you create an accessible video game or you have some accessibility options on your website, you need to make them very clear and easy to use and not hidden in an endless menu or hidden in the tags, difficult to find. If you have created them, you want the people to use them.

LARA: Yeah. Sometimes it happens to me when I’m like playing a video game, I open the menu, I see the options, and I find, like, some really good things regarding accessibility that I’m like, “Oh my God, this is so useful.” And I’m like, why was this so hard to find in the menu, in the options, in the accessibility section? Oh, my God, why? It’s just like, yeah, it makes total sense. Total sense.

MELISA: Yeah. And also incorporating like the users. I think that’s a great advice because, at the end of the day, you’re assigning resources to make it more accessible. And of course you want to like, you know, make it right. So that’s a really, really, really good point, I think. If you, you know, assign all those resources and at the end of the day, the users are not, you know… it’s not helping them, then…

EUGENIA: Yeah, exactly.

ALEXIS: So looking ahead, right, looking in the future, what are your hopes in particular for the future of accessibility? And… I have a follow up, but I’ll leave you with that first question. What are your hopes, what do you think that accessibility’s gonna come to?

EUGENIA: Ideally, very optimistically, I hope that one day you can play a game and it’s accessible from the beginning. You don’t have to wonder if you can play it or not. You just press Play, you adjust whatever settings you need and then you go. But maybe more realistically or more in a short-term scenario, I would like to see some standardization regarding game accessibility, so maybe some minimum requirements that games should have. So we already have seen this with subtitles, for example. There are many games that now have subtitles by default, so that’s very nice for everyone.

ALEXIS: That’s a given now. We think that… Yeah. I mean, it… Let me jump on that wagon of thinking of things that should be ideal. Maybe you could even have some pre-settings on your console or computer or whatever, and the game can pick that up from the start, right? So you only need to tweak everything once.

LARA: That would be cool. Yeah.

ALEXIS: Right? Like big fonts.

LARA: Like, I don’t know, for example, in your Steam profile, you have like an option to say, “I always want big fonts because I cannot see absolutely anything.” Like me, for example. Or some other, like, accessibility feature on your, I don’t know, profile or your Steam page, PlayStation, Xbox. That would be great.

ALEXIS: Your user, you know? Your user, that games can pick it up from your profile.

LARA: Yeah, so I don’t have all the time to go into the game, into the menu first, setting the options and then…

ALEXIS: I mean, to, again, hop on what you said, María Eugenia, I have an Xbox, it’s my preferred console right now. The games already pick up if I have my console in Spanish or in English. The games already go in Spanish or in English, depending on how the console is configured.

LARA: It wouldn’t be that hard now.

ALEXIS: It wouldn’t be that hard. I don’t know. Maybe someone is watching this.

EUGENIA: No, it would be very nice. Yeah. But at the same time, I think that it’s also important that you can manually set things. For example, for my thesis, I was talking to this woman who was helping me figure out the audio description in games, how to create them, like a player who is blind. And she was telling me, “I was playing The Last of Us 2 with all the presets for visual accessibility, and then, once I had mastered the whole game, I had played through it, then I started checking off some of the accessibility options, and I started making it more difficult for myself, more challenging,” because part of the game, you know, it’s like to complete these challenges. So if you have the option to customize it completely, then you can have a new experience every time you play. So that would be nice too.

ALEXIS: I like this brainstorming. I like the idea. So again, thinking in the future, how do you see your role in shaping it, in shaping this future that we are thinking about? How do you see yourself?

EUGENIA: I would really love to stay researching game accessibility in the future, once I finish my thesis for sure. And I would like to see how all of this develops. So maybe continue doing user research, which I really like. It’s been very nice to follow up with all of these participants who have helped me with my study during these three years. And it’s really nice to have this back and forth with them, like they tell me about their experiences with new games, I tell them about some news that I read about this upcoming game. It’s really nice to have this feedback and to be in touch with them and then to take this information to society. So I really like the whole dissemination part and talking to the industry, talking to the general public, and just raising a bit of awareness about it.

ALEXIS: So in this future, do you have any interest in joining a video game publisher or a company that creates video games? Or do you think of something more altruistic from the outside as a researcher?

EUGENIA: Both would be nice, for sure.

ALEXIS: “Both. I want both.”

EUGENIA: Yeah. Yes. There is this new kind of profile, which is an accessibility consultant profile that some people with disabilities are taking now, which is very, very good. So someone who is there working with the developers hand in hand to make the game accessible. So yeah, it would be nice to do something like that, but as an accessibility researcher. Maybe continuing user research, but from a company. And then I also like university a lot. Maybe I can do everything.

ALEXIS: You can do everything, yeah.

MELISA: I love it. At the same time, you know, it’s always a thing about, you know, when academic work is a bit like, you know, further away from the company work or whatever. So I think it’s great that you’re trying to put them closer and how, you know, they can help each other. And I was wondering, going back to the brainstorming, because I have heard, I mean, some gamers, which is, you know… This is why we like having this episode, you know, so kind of giving a bit more information and insight on accessibility and to other people also because they may not know, but they think that, you know, changing the difficulty level or the story mode is just making games easier, or they complain about that and they don’t know like the real reason behind it.

EUGENIA: Yeah, no, this is a very big criticism that I have heard during these years as well. Because sometimes, when you’re talking about game accessibility, you are met with very enthusiastic people who want to jump on it and be like, “Yes, this is a great creative opportunity. Let’s do it.” And then you have the other side, which would be, “No, this is too hard. This makes no sense. People don’t need accessibility options. We don’t want the games to be easy.” What I try to tell them is that, if the game is completely unplayable for you because it’s not accessible, then it’s not hard, it’s just impossible to play. So we are not making it easier, we are just making it playable.

LARA: Oh, my God, I love that. We are not making it easier, we are making it playable. I want to tattoo that on my skin. Oh, my God! I love that! I’m very passionate… Every time I hear you speak about accessibility, it’s… I don’t know, something lights up inside me. I love it. Can you give us some advice for someone that is interested in working in this accessibility industry in video games?

EUGENIA: Interesting question. Well, something that I have learned in this time is that you should be very open to talk to very different people with very different views from you. So we really need to involve everyone in the process of making a video game into making it accessible. So you need to talk to the developers, to the artists, to the project managers, to the people in marketing who are selling the game and to the players. And all of these people have very different vocabularies, very different priorities, and they will see accessibility in different ways. So if you can really communicate with everyone, then you are winning the game, really. So just to be very open and very flexible to understand all of these roles and then being able to communicate what you want to say. Then it’s also very exciting when you are explaining something to a developer, like what is audio description? So the first time that I did this, it was very hard to explain. It was like, “Yeah, like a narration, like a voice line, like…” And at the end, I ended up explaining it as an additional voice line that you put in the soundtrack. And then they were like, “Oh yeah, I know how to code that.” It’s not that hard.

LARA: Yeah, it’s all about education.

ALEXIS: And you see them… “Oh! Yeah, yeah, I can do that.”

LARA: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

MELISA: Great advice. The whole episode. Thank you so much, María Eugenia. This was great. I think all of us can keep talking about accessibility all day. Of course, we’ll leave links in the description. And, yeah, if anyone wants to contact María Eugenia or investigate a bit more about accessibility, we always encourage you to do so.

LARA: Yeah.

MELISA: Yeah. Thank you so much.

EUGENIA: Sure, you can contact me anywhere. Yeah. Thank you so much. This was really great.

ALEXIS: Thank you, everyone, for tuning in. See you next time.

MELISA: Bye!

LARA: Bye-bye!

Episode Transcription

FLOR: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is an action-adventure video game developed by FromSoftware and published by Activision. Set in the closing years of the Sengoku period, this 2019 Game of the Year depicts a withered yet vivid world spawned from a reinterpretation of Japanese-inspired aesthetic, where the battle unfolds for a solitary shinobi, bound by code to protect his master.

ALE: Yes, I love this game. The characterization of ancient Japanese culture in this game is flawless. From the shinobis’ code names, such as Okami, the main character, and Fukurō, his master, to the mythical, colossal, and majestic Sakura-ryū, Sekiro has all the qualities you’d expect to see in a Game of the Year winner.

FLOR: Yeah, but these names may not ring a bell to you since they were localized and adapted for different markets. And today, we are going to discuss some of the cultural challenges you can face when localizing a game like Sekiro.

ALE: We want to focus on some of the characters’ names in the game. So, for starters, we have the word “Sekiro” (隻狼). As the name of the game implies, it’s actually a contraction of “Sekíwan no ōkami” (隻腕の狼), that translates to “one-armed wolf” in English. So, the name of our main character Okami, who is missing an arm, was translated just as “Wolf.”

FLOR: Yes. And we also have the Shinobi master. The Shinobi master, just like his student, takes on an animal-themed code name. So, following the localization strategy Ale just mentioned, “Fukurō,” which means “owl,” was translated as “Owl” in all languages.

ALE: Now, another character, though he doesn’t play a big role in the story, actually triggers some major events in the game. We’re talking about Sakura-Ryu, or should I say Divine Dragon for us western players? When we reach the boss fight, we can see that the dragon is clearly associated with the Sakura tree. Even if we don’t know about his original name in Japanese, which literally is Cherry-Blossom Dragon, we can see the connection.

FLOR: Yes, absolutely. But why do you think they changed the boss’ name? I mean, could it be due to the fact that western players wouldn’t have understood the importance that Sakura trees have in Japanese culture? So they just made it sound epic and godly enough for players to understand that the dragon was a big deal?

ALE: Yes, I believe so, Flor. I mean, cherry blossoms in Japanese culture go back hundreds of years. Their magnificent but brief lifespan is a reminder for all Japanese that human life is also short and beautiful. So for Western players, the boss’ name was localized into “Divine Dragon” in an attempt to portray the importance this ancient symbol has for the Japanese culture.

FLOR: Hmm, interesting. What do you guys think about this? Was the Sakura tree reference important to you in the game? Did any other cultural aspects or even imagery stand out for you? Let us know your opinion in the comments below.

ALE: And that’s all for today’s LocFact, everyone. See you next time!

FLOR: See you!

FLOR: Today we have a very special guest with us. Her name is Belén Agulló. Belén is a compulsive life learner. She holds a BA in Translation and Interpreting Studies, an MA in Audiovisual Translation, and a PhD in Translation and Intercultural Studies. But her experience in the localization industry goes beyond the theory. Belén has worked in the game localization industry for more than five years in different positions, as a Project Manager, Training Specialist, Marketing Strategist and Copywriter, Translation Manager, and Quality and Innovation Director. She combined her years in this industry with her true calling: training others. She has been teaching game localization and subtitling technologies in several MA programs and workshops in Spain, UK, and France for more than five years now. As a continuous learner and a passionate trainer, Belén now leads Nimdzi’s e-learning program with a design-thinking approach aimed at providing the best learning experience to Nimdzi’s partners. As an academic with hands-on experience in the media industry, she thoroughly leads the research for the media localization landscape. Apart from all the studying and work, Belén loves binge-watching a good show with good company, and cares about the environment and animal welfare. Belén, welcome to this new episode and thank you so much for being here. How are you today?

ALEX: Welcome.

BELÉN: Thank you so much. I’m super excited and super happy to be here. When you invited me, I was super happy to have the opportunity to be in this videocast and to share this conversation with you guys. And yeah, thank you. And I’m good. Thank you so much.

FLOR: Thank you for joining us. So we have a couple of questions for you because we wanted to learn more about your background and what you’re currently doing. So, Lore, do you wanna go first?

LORE: So happy to have you here. It’s really fun to get to chat with you and pick your brain a little bit more, obviously. So to start off with, would you mind sharing with us exactly what Nimdzi is?

BELÉN: Of course, that’s a very good question, and I have a hard time explaining it, because we do so many things that it’s difficult to summarize it for me, but I will try. So basically, Nimdzi offers research and consultancy service for the localization industry, and research and consultancy services materializes in different shapes and forms. What we do is… so all sorts of things. So for example, we publish yearly research, yearly studies, such as the Nimdzi 100, with the list of all the biggest LSPs in the market and how the industry is doing, some forecast and so on and so forth. We also publish the Language Technology Atlas, which it’s a compilation of all the technology that is relevant for the language industry. And we have also the Interpreting Index, where we talk about companies in the interpreting sector. So we have these general reports that we share every year. But then we also have a lot of custom research commissioned by our clients. We do all sorts of research with end users. For example, we… or for specific verticals. If a client wants to know, is it good to go with this specific market with videogames localization, can you give me some insights so that I can better make my decisions on my strategy for my company? We do this kind of things as well. We do a lot of consultancy engagements, for example, localization audits. I really enjoy these projects because some companies, usually enterprises, they want to make sure that their localization structure is functioning alright and that they are optimized, so they come to us and we analyze it and we provide insights. We also carry out change management audits. We help people change because changing is so hard.

FLOR: Oh, yeah.

BELÉN: Right? So when, for example, a company wants to implement a new tool, a CAT tool, they’ve never used a TMS in their entire life, and they want to implement that, and that goes between different departments. So we help them to succeed in that change. And, yeah, and now we also have a training offering. Hopefully next month, we will release in the Nimdzi Learning platform, and we think that’s also an added value to the industry, because we believe that people need a continuous learning, and specifically now that we are all at home, unfortunately.

FLOR: Absolutely.

BELÉN: You don’t get to learn from the people sitting by you because they are not there anymore, and you cannot just speak there, “What are you doing?” or “How would you do that? Because, I don’t know. I’m not sure.” We don’t have that anymore. So we believe that this continuous learning experience is important, and we are aiming to release that next month.

FLOR: That’s amazing. Well, I look forward to see what you have in store for us.

LORE: Yeah. I don’t want all of our brains turning to mush.

FLOR: So, yeah, and we wanted to also know more about the e-learning program, because I know that it’s coming next. But what subjects are you going to tackle through that program and who can actually access to it?

BELÉN: Okay. So as I said, this product is born in the middle of the pandemic, as many, I think, babies will be born in a few months, because the pandemic gave us all this free time to do stuff. So it was born during this time because we…

FLOR: Your brainchild, isn’t it?

BELÉN: Exactly. Exactly. It’s my brain baby. So, yes, we wanted to provide this continuous learning to the industry. We wanted to make it remote because now everything needs to be remote. And also to have a bigger reach, because, until now, Nimdzi has been offering in-person workshops, and we still do, but of course, no one can do in-person workshops.

ALEX: No one can attend.

BELÉN: Exactly. So it was the right moment to do that. And also the… My dog does work, too.

FLOR: Hi!

BELÉN: And also the format that we want to have for these courses is short, to the point, very practical and video-based. So we are not giving like books and things to read. Of course, we can share some of that as a support material. But what we want to do is to have short videos for each lesson. So it’s very straightforward because, let’s be honest, we don’t have time to spend 10 hours every week learning stuff, because, even if we want, we don’t have the time. We are working, we’re busy, we are doing many other things at the same time. So we want something that is quick and it’s accessible. That being said, the type of content that we are releasing for now, we have a few courses on like general skills, management skills, such as strategic decision making, change management. We also have a general course on the Business of Translation by Renato Beninatto, the Nimdzi Insights CEO, and the author of the General… co-author together with Tucker Johnson, the other Nimdzi Insights CEO, of the General…

FLOR: Translation Theory. Yeah.

BELÉN: Exactly.

FLOR: It’s like the Bible for us.

BELÉN: That’s great because Renato just turned that book into an e-learning course, and it’s great.

FLOR: Oh, really? I didn’t know that! And we can access to it through Nimdzi’s website, right?

BELÉN: Exactly. Yeah. And we will also release a couple of more courses on sales for LSPs, for example, customer profiling, how to sell in online events. And my colleague Miguel Sepulveda is developing a course on UX and localization, designing a good UX for a global market. Which is pretty awesome. I have already watched some of the videos, and it’s very interesting. And who can access this? Okay, it will… Every course, we have two parts. The first part will be accessible for everybody. Everybody who signs up with a free Nimdzi account, you just need to sign up with your name, your email, and that’s it. You don’t need to pay. And the second part of the courses will be only for Nimdzi partners. At the same time, there will be some courses that will be completely free. We are deciding which content, because we want this to be like, I don’t know, like a crowdsourcing kind of thing. I mean contact with external… For now, all the courses are developed by Nimdzi members, but we want external people to contribute as well, because we believe people have so many things to say, so many knowledge stored, but they just don’t have the time to, you know, go out there and create a course. Or they don’t have the time to talk to universities and help them update their curriculums because, yeah, we’re super busy. So with this quick format, we are aiming to help these people who have so many things to say to the industry and so many value to add to the industry, we want to help them with our platform. And yeah, we hope, if anyone is interested, please reach out to me.

FLOR: Yes.

ALEX: Yes, we will be doing that.

FLOR: Absolutely. I can’t wait to, especially, check out Miguel’s course, because it sounds super interesting. And he actually was one of our guests. So we look forward to sharing that episode with everyone, too.

ALEX: Yes. I can see why it’s hard for you to like box what Nimdzi is, and also the amount of things that you do, Belén. But maybe you could tell us a little bit about the Immersive Accessibility project. Can you please elaborate a little bit on what that is like?

BELÉN: Sure. So I participated in this European-funded project. It was called, because it’s finished now, Immersive Accessibility, ImAc for short. And basically my PhD is based on that. So this project, the aim of this project was to bring accessibility to immersive environments, meaning virtual reality. Virtual reality glasses is what we had at the moment. So we realized that this type of content was not accessible for people with disabilities, for deaf people or blind people, or hard of hearing people or people with no vision, and so we wanted to make this accessible for them. And the project lasted two years and a half. And basically my focus on this project was to research how to implement subtitles in this type of content, in 360-degree videos, specifically. And my colleagues, for example, were working on audio description, how to implement audio description for the blind in 360-degree content. We also worked with sign language, how to implement sign language interpreting in this type of content. And in the project, there were many companies participating, universities, software developers, broadcasters from Spain and Germany. So it was like a consortium of different companies. And yeah, and I think we were quite successful. I hope.

ALEX: But wait, you mentioned subtitles in 360 in VR.

BELÉN: Mm-hmm.

ALEX: I want to know the challenges. What was that like? Because I’m guessing that it’s not something easy to implement, but incredible to do it, right?

BELÉN: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when we started the project, there was very little research on this topic or basically nothing. Only the BBC was already doing something around it, but there was really nothing there, so we didn’t know what to do. Like, how would we implement subtitles?

ALEX: Well, you’re pioneers.

BELÉN: Exactly. I’m very proud because of that. So what we did is we took a user-centric approach. So we started having focus groups with the end users, with deaf people and hard of hearing people. And we asked them, like, what do you need? What…? How would you imagine having subtitles? How would you like to have subtitles in this type of content? And then, from there we gathered their feedback, their needs, and then we started to say, okay, now we can start working on that. So basically the main challenge was… There were two main challenges. The first one was how to position, where to put the subtitles in a 360-degree sphere.

ALEX: My first question was that, where does it go?

BELÉN: Exactly. So during my research, I found out that The New York Times, they had these 360-degree videos and they were trying to promote these, because this content is very suitable for journalistic content, because, you know, to make people feel like they are in the middle of a war or in a specific country or something like that. So it’s very moving and very engaging. So they already have a few videos, and some of them had subtitles because there were people speaking other languages, right? So they were in English, but with foreign speakers. So what they did is, they positioned the subtitles in three different positions, fixed positions, in the 360-degree sphere. So when you put your glasses on, you know, you are in a 360-degree sphere, and then you can look around and you see what things are around you. So what they did, they put one subtitle here, one subtitle here and one subtitle here, for example. And they were fixed. That was a possible solution, but we talked to the… we tried it with the users, and they didn’t like it so much because they were missing information. Like, I want to look at this now, or I want to look down. And then I’m missing the information in the subtitle. So it’s not a bad solution, but it was not optimal. So then what users wanted, they wanted to have fixed subtitles, like if they were watching the TV, to be honest. So they wanted to have, and the subtitle would move with you. Sorry I’m gesticulating so much, but it’s…

FLOR: No, no, but please. We’re super excited and passionate about what you’re telling because I wouldn’t know where to start with that. And that’s actually one of my main concerns. Where to start with VR subtitling?

BELÉN: Exactly. So, yes, then we tried different positions, fixed position. At the beginning, we had troubles because, for example, I wear glasses and I have myopia and astigmatism.

FLOR: Same here.

BELÉN: Okay. So for some reason, I saw like double, I had double vision. So I saw the subtitles twice and it was, “No, this is not working. Sorry.” So we had to, like, manage to make the subtitles farther from… It’s difficult to explain because it’s very technical and I was not the actual engineer doing this, but actually, if you put the subtitles too close to your eyes in the 360-degree sphere, then it looks off. But you can put them in this…

FLOR: In the distance.

BELÉN: …distance with more depth, and then it works. So we tried that with the users and, and we got… My PhD was basically doing tests with end users, gathering feedback, seeing if it was immersive or not, which subtitles were more immersive. We tried the three fixed-position subtitles and the ones that move with you, and the ones that move with you were more immersive, some people preferred them better. That was the first challenge. And the second challenge for deaf people was to indicate where the sound comes from. Because if you’re in a 360-degree and you’re lacking the auditory cue, then how would you know where you have to look for the person speaking? So we, again, tried different options, such as arrows close to the subtitles, or a radar, more like in a video game type of thing. And we tried these different solutions and, at the end, people preferred the arrows because it was more like straightforward. And for… But that’s for 360-degree content, cinematic content. But I think for video games, for example, I hope someone keeps researching this, we will have more options. We can combine fixed subtitles with moving subtitles with radars and arrows, because in a video game, you have many more options.

ALEX: To have to be, for the gamers, to be able to identify where to go, where to look. Yeah, totally.

BELÉN: Exactly.

ALEX: Wow. Super interesting.

FLOR: Yeah. There’s so many aspects to have into consideration.

ALEX: I know. I didn’t know up until now.

FLOR: Yeah. Same for me.

ALEX: Thank you, Belén.

BELÉN: I’m glad it’s interesting.

ALEX: Yeah.

FLOR: And I have another question for you, because I wanted to know, from your experience as a researcher, are there any languages or markets in particular that are more challenging than others when localizing your app or game?

BELÉN: Good question. Yeah. I think, specifically for… Well, my focus is more video games, but at the end of the day, some video games are… from the development point of view, are kind of similar. One thing that we’ve been hearing from gaming studios is that implementing Arabic, due to the left to right support, it’s quite challenging for the development team. So sometimes they just drop this language because it’s too hard for them to implement this. And, of course, the market is not as, you know… maybe the original investment in those markets is not as big as in other markets. So that’s one challenging language. Another challenging language, but from a different perspective for me, is Japanese, or Japan as a country, because it’s so culturally different from the Western countries that it’s so difficult to sell a game there, because sometimes either you adapt it or you cannot sell the game there because no one is going to play. Like, who’s going to play Call of Duty in Japan? Very few people, to be honest. So sometimes companies have challenges marketing the games in Japan because what they want is super different from… or the tastes, it’s different. At the same time, I think Japanese users are much more demanding and they require a really different user experience. So for example, from the marketing perspective, you would need to be more detailed, more, you know, focused, giving more information. They care a lot about quality. They wouldn’t accept a sloppy translation, for example. It’s like, “Well, okay, this is not Japanese, let’s forget about it.” So I think it’s a very challenging country and very interesting at the same time. It’s funny that the other way around, we love Japanese stuff in the Western countries, right? So since we were kids, we’ve been watching anime and reading comic books from Japan, or the ones who are nerds like me.

ALEX: Or playing video games from Japan.

BELÉN: So it’s amazing. We love that. We love the kawaii style, we love manga, we love anime, we love video games from them. Nintendo is huge everywhere. But the other way around is more difficult. And the third country, more than language, country, that sometimes it’s hard for developers is India. Not because of the complexity of the language, but because they speak so many languages in India, that they don’t know which one to pick. They don’t know which strategy to follow. It’s like, I don’t know, let’s keep the game in English. The good thing is that in India, many like educated people, they have a very high level of English. So they just say, “Okay, we’ll release the game in English and that’s it.” But I think they are missing something there because the experience could be much better. But that requires research, right? Requires researching which parts they speak which language and which language is more widespread. And so that’s a challenge for many companies as well.

LORE: I have another one for you as well. I would love to know more about the technical aspects that we should be taking into account when we are internationalizing a product. I don’t… Personally, I don’t know that much about the tech side of it.

BELÉN: Okay. Yeah, that’s a very good question. I mean, I’m not an engineer, so my insights are more from a linguistic perspective or a project management perspective, where I’ve learned through the years. Specifically for video games, there are certain things that are like basics, you know? For example, when the player can be male or female, having variables for female and male characters is very important, because if you start the game, you know, and you can select, I’m a girl or a boy, okay? And you can select, but then in English, the adjectives are all the same. They don’t have different… they don’t have gender terminations or anything like we have in Spanish, for example, or Italian or German or all the other languages, the EFIGS and stuff. So we don’t have that, it’s very complex. We don’t have variables for masculine and female. It’s very complex then to localize the game and have a nice user experience, because sometimes what the developers ask is, “Okay, just try to keep it neutral.” Okay. But in Spanish, how many neutral adjectives do we have? Like 10, 20… Well, maybe more. But that fit in the context? Not so many, no?

FLOR: Yeah.

BELÉN: So, it’s difficult. So implementing variables for that is very important. Another thing is please don’t use concatenations. Concatenation is the enemy of internationalization best practices.

FLOR: Someone had to say it.

BELÉN: Exactly. It’s terrible because, again, in English, for example, you can combine nouns and adjectives and so on and so forth. And it works, it’s great because you save a lot of space in the game and it’s great for developers, in English, to keep the game as it is. But in the rest of the languages, that’s a huge limitation. It has a very negative impact on the outcome of the localization and then with the user experience, and it’s really bad. Like at the end of the day, the translations are poor and the user experience is not good, so please don’t use concatenation. And the third thing is like the character limitation. How do you design the interface? It’s another thing that we struggle a lot. Specifically, in this case, I’ve encountered more issues with games coming from Japan, because especially for, you know, portable consoles like Nintendo DS or these portable kind of devices, they have a limited interface. And in Japanese, you can say many things with very little space, but try to translate that into German, for example. I mean, it’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare. And again, you need to use abbreviations, things are not easily understandable, and it has a very negative impact on the user experience. So try to design interfaces that are adaptable and that the boxes can be re-resized.

ALEX: Totally.

LORE: It makes sense.

FLOR: Great advice. And I have a last question for you, and this one is gonna be a bit controversial, because I wanted to talk about machine translation. And what are your thoughts on machine translation applied to videogames? And do you think that machine translation will ever replace translators?

BELÉN: I love this question. Regarding the second question, I love… The other day, watching Renato’s course, he says in this course, when machines will replace translators completely, we will have bigger issues to worry about.

FLOR: Oh, yeah.

BELÉN: So, I mean, that’s my reply for that. Sure, in the future, maybe. But then, yeah, maybe Skynet and things like that portrayed in the fiction movies. So, yeah. Yeah. Maybe, why not? Everything is possible in the future, but not at the moment. And I’m glad it is like it is at the moment. And regarding machine translation and video games at the moment, specifically, the other day I was talking to, well, I’ve talked to several heads of localization in gaming companies, and they all don’t see the value of machine translation at the moment. Like one of the heads of localization told me that machine translation… sorry, that game localization is the last bastion of machine translation, of human translation. Oh, my God, I said that quote so bad. So I’m going to repeat it. Game localization is the last bastion of human translation. And I agree. Because it’s so complex. Game localization is so, so complex, like, different type of texts, it has a huge impact on user experience. Every text. For example, I don’t know, player support text, maybe? Yeah. For that kind of stuff, maybe you can use machine translation because it doesn’t have a huge impact on the user experience. But like the interfaces, the voice-over of some of the games. Some of the games are very cinematic and they have voice-over. Marketing material. I mean, sure, you can use machine translation and post-edit it, but the actual time-saving at the moment is not really… is not really significant. So maybe in the future, sure, why not? And we are making progress in this field every day. So maybe tomorrow the landscape will be different. But at the moment, I don’t think… I mean, the people in general I talk to, they don’t see the value of machine translation at the moment for video games localization.

FLOR: So every translator out there working on video game localization can be rest assured that that is not gonna happen, not in the near future, at least.

BELÉN: For now.

LORE: As comforted as you can be, while also knowing that Skynet might be around the corner at some point in the future. But for now, we can be at ease.

ALEX: When you said “last bastion,” The Lord of the Rings, the battle for Helm’s Deep just came to my mind.

FLOR: Yes.

ALEX: All the translators with their laptops.

BELÉN: Yes, that’s a very good analogy. A very good picture.

FLOR: I love that. So, yeah, now we’re going to go to the fun part of this episode, because we asked you to share with us your favorite memes. Well, it’s the first one, and I absolutely love baby Yoda. I’m like a big fan. But let us, I mean, when did you actually start watching Star Wars? Are you a big fan of it? Or what happens to you with baby Yoda?

BELÉN: Okay. I have to say, I’m not the biggest Star Wars fan. I watched the movies. The first movies that I watched where the three in the middle. The worst ones.

ALEX: Ah, same.

BELÉN: With Jar Jar and all this stuff. Uff! And I enjoyed them. They were entertaining. And then I watched the good ones, the first ones with Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford, and I loved them. And actually, I only have seen the first one of the three new movies. So I still have two more to watch. But, yeah, but The Mandalorian is so amazing. Like I actually signed up for Disney+ only for The Mandalorian. Baby Yoda is worth my money, you know?

FLOR: Yeah.

BELÉN: And I think it’s so well-done, like apart from the extremely crazy cuteness of Baby Yoda, which is the best thing ever, that… I mean, we need more Baby Yodas today.

FLOR: Yeah.

LORE: Preach.

BELÉN: But I think the series is so well-done. Like, I love this vintage retro kind of vibe that it has. And, I don’t know, it’s so epic. I feel like a little child when I watch it. It’s amazing. I love it. And I love Baby Yoda.

FLOR: Yeah, we’re big fans of Star Wars over here, so we love that you brought this one. Okay. And now we have a Game of Thrones moment.

BELÉN: Yeah.

FLOR: How far are you of the series?

BELÉN: Okay. I loved the series. I haven’t read the book. Sorry, I’m the worst, but…

FLOR: No. Me neither. Do you actually have time for that?

ALEX: You have time to read the books?

BELÉN: Exactly. So I watched the series. I really enjoyed it. I didn’t start right away when everything started. It took me like, a couple of years or three years. Then one day I was very sick in bed and I was like, “I’m bored. I have a fever. I don’t know what to do.” So I started to watch Game of Thrones and I was, “Wow, this is actually good.” I had started previously, but I didn’t like it. And then I loved it in the second attempt. But then I hated the last episode. I hated the last…

FLOR: Yeah, everyone did.

BELÉN: It was great… From a cinematic point of view, it was an amazing season, but like, it’s horrible. So I hate it. And I love Daenerys, and I love dragons. So I’m not gonna say anything else, but… And I love avocados.

FLOR: Yeah.

LORE: Yeah!

BELÉN: I eat at least one avocado a day, not only for guacamole, but like the actual avocado. I love it. It’s my favorite.

ALEX: Yeah, and I can totally relate to that feeling when you find the perfect one. Just like, just right.

FLOR: Yeah, I agree completely with that too. It’s like I have to check it out, the color, the texture, how it feels. And know when it’s gonna be ripe, because, of course, avocados, like the minute you turn away, it’s…

LORE: They’re done. Yes.

FLOR: They’re done.

BELÉN: Exactly.

FLOR: So, yeah, well, over here, we are on… we’re on the opposite… Over here, I’m in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and we’re starting summer. But I know the feel of both of you, Lore and Belén.

LORE: Yeah. And we’re also big “Office” fans over here.

BELÉN: Yeah. I mean, I don’t like… I live in a small town like by the sea, and it’s empty during winter and on fall, but then in summer, it’s packed with tourists and it’s super hot, super, like, humid. And I really don’t like summer at all. So everybody’s like, “Yeah, summer, it’s fun! You can go out,” and blah, blah, blah. But no, no, no. My favorite season is fall, and I love Halloween, but I’m sad because I don’t live in the United States for truly enjoying Halloween. Here Halloween it’s only dress up like provocatively and go out and get drunk. And I’m too old for that now, so I would love to have my house decorated and have little kids knocking at my door, “Trick or treat!” That’s my dream.

LORE: You are absolutely invited here. Any time.

BELÉN: Thank you, Loretta. I hope. Maybe in the future.

LORE: House is open, we’ll dress up in less provocative clothing.

ALEX: There’s a Gandalf costume.

FLOR: Yeah.

ALEX: It’s starting to become famous.

LORE: I know, I keep bringing it up. But yeah, we’ll give out way too much candy. It’ll be great.

FLOR: We need to see you in that costume, Lore. Okay. This one cracks me up. Look at that face.

ALEX: I mean, you cannot intend to say any other thing, right?

BELÉN: Exactly. You know what I mean?

ALEX: You’re ducking mad.

BELÉN: Yeah. I mean, this one is self-explanatory. I don’t think I need to explain this one.

FLOR: And this one. I mean… Every single time that I’m like, I try to, for example, whenever I’m playing Counter Strike or any, like, shooter game, I feel like super badass because I’m like a dude for everyone else, but it’s myself behind that mask.

BELÉN: Exactly. I just love The Lord of the Rings, like it’s my favorite fantasy adventure movies. And this is one of my favorite scenes. It’s like, so powerful, so feminist. It’s such an amazing scene. I love it. I really love it. Yeah. And this was so funny because this Pikachu meme…

FLOR: Yeah.

BELÉN: …with this face of amazement, it’s just… It makes me laugh every time. So I really like this one.

ALEX: It’s a good combination.

BELÉN: Yeah.

FLOR: Well, thank you so much, Belén, for joining us today. It was an absolute pleasure to have you on this show and to learn so much about what you’re doing. And I personally learned so much from you because I didn’t know anything about subtitling VR. And thank you for sharing that with us.

ALEX: Thank you so much.

FLOR: I hope that you had a great time with us today.

BELÉN: Yeah.

FLOR: And, well, we look forward to seeing you all on our next episodes. And stay tuned for more. Thank you!

BELÉN: Thank you!

ALEX: Bye, everyone! Thank you, Belén!