When you oversee the localization of millions and millions of words for the gaming industry you have to weigh your options very carefully. Steen’s team decided to place an important asset in focus: the translator. Let’s see how they excelled – with some help from memoQ.
Steen’s job at Alpha Games, the leading localization service provider heavily invested in the gaming industry, is to make translators happy by equipping them with the best possible translation tools. After all, happy translators do a good job. Equipping them is quite a challenge considering the extremely large workload his team tackles successfully.
“We were fortunate enough to land a huge job translating over 4 million words from an online game into Brazilian Portuguese. The timeframe was 9 months, including testing. To complete the job, we needed a translation environment that would allow the translators and reviewers to work simultaneously, in real-time, sharing files, TMs and term bases,” Steen explains.
Term base management and the ability to add new terms on the fly, plus to approve or change them, were crucial in such a huge project. Handling updates, modified sources, and other changes were also important; as was the ability to slice the huge files, each containing hundreds of thousands of strings.
"So we bought a memoQ server and designed the workflow,” Steen concludes, “and then trained both linguists and proofreaders, plus a terminologist and project managers. And memoQ delivered everything we wanted, enabling us to deliver on time in turn, and with a quality that gained the localized version rave reviews.
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Measuring up the market, Steen found some obvious perks to solutions offered by memoQ:
“We looked at various solutions, but memoQ was the only translation tool that was sufficiently "translator-centric" and affordable, enabling us to undertake the job and do it well, without employing even more project managers to exchange files and translators and reviewers to work in parallel.”
In Steen’s experience, one of the most crucial things is, of course, consistency – and memoQ helps realize that in the operation of such a large project.
“In our case (like with other, smaller games localization projects), the key is often the terminology management. This is crucial to ensuring consistency. Because translators can suggest new terms in real-time and add them to a term base as they go, and can have the terms approved quickly, we can now offer a terminology management and consistency that is superior to what could be achieved otherwise, or at least not without a lot of extra work."
Because memoQ is designed with translators in mind – and not "content management" – it also makes it easier and faster to work, so productivity is better, which is another important aspect when localizing big projects.”
Steen Kesmodel is the Operations Research Manager at Alpha, a major localization agency with over thirty years of experience. The firm is proud to adopt the most cutting-edge technology available in the market. Their vision is to apply technology to make the process of translation as seamless as possible. Alpha has offices in fourteen countries and adopts an in-house model to ensure consistency and quality for their international clients.
Alpha Games is a very well established and reputable provider. They have been working in the gaming industry for quite some time and are delighted to partner with many major game developers and publishers.
