Have you ever wondered all that is beyond the translation of a videogame? Videogame translation is a very increasing market and a whole world is hidden behind creating a wide range of opportunities. If your dream-about job is becoming a videogame translator, here are some tips for reaching this professional career. Any translation agency in Barcelona - http://www.okodia.com/ , or wherever is placed, is always looking for candidates with the following profile to receive them with arms opened. So follow these recommendations for becoming a better videogame translator.
Academic training
In fact, this is the most important point. You should previously show your academic training at University with a Translation & Interpreting degree and/or an Audiovisual Translation Master. A good education provides you with the basis of translation. Besides, any other specialised course related to videogames or the audiovisual area will be considered as a plus in your curriculum vitae by a translation agency in Barcelona.
English language
Statistics confirm that a huge percentage of videogames all-around the world are translated from or into English and that is the most used language in this industry. The reasons are summarised in: availability, as it is easier to find someone who translates from or into said language; economics, as an increasing of availability always reduces the price; and uniformity, as it makes easier to coordinate the translation of a videogame, specially when using several languages.
In other words, it means that English is an essential and the most representative language of the sector. So, any translation agency in Barcelona and worldwide works with it.
Creativity
A translation agency in Barcelona looks for creativity. Are you creative? Puns, double senses... If your mind works at a higher level, then you have an essential point for becoming a videogame translator. If you are an expert on language who always plays with sounds, letters, words, and sentences, then you will express this in your final work.
Gamer
Are you a gamer? If not, please do not waste your time. A translation agency in Barcelona always looks for an enthusiastic of videogames. You can not focus your professional career on something different to your passion, as your knowledge and dedication will not be the same. Otherwise, if you have been spending hours and hours playing videogames since you were a child, then you are a good candidate.
Computing
You are not an IT, but you should - at least - have a basic knowledge of computing. For example, what do you know about HTML? It would help you understand your job. And what about variables? This is an example of variables in localisation: get the {0} into your new {1}. Select your {1}. {0} and {1} are the variables which should be substituted by a word, and this may be a serious headache in some languages due to concordance of genre and number - as French, Spanish, Italian... Sometimes, you should be as neutral as possible. A translation agency in Barcelona might also be limited by space, so your videogame translation pampers any character.
Audience
A translation agency in Barcelona will recommend you to focus on your audience. Do not limit your translation to the original text, it is better to approach the audience. If you are a gamer - as we mentioned above - you may feel identified with this point.
General culture
All the translation projects assigned to you could be very different; you might start with a baseball videogame and then continue with a war videogame. And which is the relation among them? Subject, vocabulary, audience... It is all very different and requires a deep general culture for better facing any translation.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
The charity event will be streamed live from Gamescom in August.
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
Nice blog. I enjoy these informative blogs which don't try to be all confrontational.:)
Anyhow, I would add to the general culture part the ability to contextualize cultural differences, and how something in one culture relates to another.
Easy example would be with Japanese games, they often have a lot of cultural references which wouldn't translate well into a game localized for the US, or that reference would fall flat due to no frame of reference for the western audience. Being able to somehow bridge that gap goes a long way in doing a successful translation.
It's easy enough to translate the words themselves if you have knowledge of both languages, but it's the contextualization of those words which makes the difference between a bad localization, and a good one.
Then of course, there's knowing the target audience for a localized game. Certain types of games you would want to leave more of those contextual references in, because the target audience is more in tune with them...like the Otaku understand more of Japanese culture so they are more likely to want them as opposed to some western pop culture reference ala Working Designs.
Interesting topic; out of interest, are you a videogame translator?
Nice tips.
Most important tip... Please know the goddamn language and translate things into the right thing(what the character says) .. Not what you would say.
My gf is an independant professional translator (english to french) and she struggles hard to find contracts. Most of her time, she writes articles for French press and blogs or translating technical stuff for a norwegian company. If you guys know english-speaking folks looking for a french translator, or places to check for that kind of stuff, I'd be glad to transmit her the info.
Your article is nice, but I'm wondering: why are you emphasizing it around "an agency in Barcelona"? Which one and what does it have so special to keep talking about it? Do you work for it? Or is it based on your personal experience?