Presented at: Fun for All: III International Conference on Translation and Accessibility in Video Games and Virtual Worlds 13-14th March 2013 Summary: There is no doubt localization professionals are managing to deal with new technology and are adapting to faster product life-cycles and even to company requirements operating in radical new ways. Are localizers really prepared for the challenges they are facing? Are some of these challenges, not really challenges, but real dangers professionals should confront and not try, in vain, to adapt to them? Content needs to be local to engage. Global content is replaced by local user generated content. Often translation efforts are trusted to amateur crowds that want to participate. Game development companies are not strange to this idea and test crowdsourcing approaches for some of their content. Should localization professionals be concerned about this approach? Content development and content localization are expected to run simultaneously. Shorter turnarounds and smaller batches to deal with, are a reality. Feedback and responses are expected at an increasing speed. Is the standard pricing structure in the translation and localization business adapted to this new reality? While some companies are still implementing Enterprise TMs, others are starting to work with aligned data and training machine translation engines for their specific needs. Translators are involved in pre and post-edition of this content. How should the linguistic technicians prepare themselves for this phenomenon? Quality could be affected by the recent evolutions of the market, but quality is rarely a differentiator and rarely negotiable. Is the market really taking care of bad performers? What should be the added-value proposition localization providers should focus on? This presentation explores some of the trends localization professionals are facing and tries to provide some hands-on guidance to help professionals get prepared to what is coming next.

1. Localization:
"The Industry
Who Cried
Wolf!"
Víctor Alonso Lion, PMP®
victor.alonso.lion@gmail.com
@valion
www.victoralonsolion.com
Fun for All: III International
Conference on Video Game
and Virtual Worlds
Translation, Accessibility
and Educational Design
13th – 14th March 2014
Note: this presentation has been simplified and
modified, to facilitate readability.

6. CROWDSOURCING FAN TRANSLATION

7. • SAME PROCESS
• DIFFERENT RESOURCESFan Translation

8. Crowdsourcing
Preparation
Implementation

9. • Consistency
• Awful & Unacceptable mistakes
• Offensive wording
• Attacks
Basic Checks - Controls

10. DIFFERENT TYPE OF SERVICE

11. The Need for Speed

12. Traditional Process
Speed = Crashing Project Schedule
Concept Design
Pre-
Production
Production
Post-
Production
Launch
LOCALIZATION
Localization
Translation
Audio
Adaptation (cultural)
Procurement
Translation
Audio
Linguistic Testing
Internationalization
Text extraction
Text expansion
Cultural Review
Testing
Testing
Bug fixing
Engineering
Reengeniering
Recompilations

14. Ready Set GoDIFFERENT TYPE OF DEAL

16. • Higher broadband speed
• Mobile speed
• Competing Telcos
and
Equipment manufacturers
Cloud enablers
• Games accross differnt
screens and devices
• Publishers under threat
• Continuous request for
new content
Consequences for
Game Localization

17. DIFFERENT TYPE OF ENVIRONMENT

18. Rise of
the
Machines

19. Machine Translation

20. 1. Companies who do not use
any type of content
(translation) technology
2. Companies using TMS, CMS,
Workflow Solutions
3. Early adopters: Shared
Multilingual Data,
Proprietary/Trained MT, Post
Edition
Three groups of
companies:

21. Don’t Fight it:
Play the game!
DIFFERENT TYPE OF GAME

22. Quality
A Differentiator?

23. Are Bad Performers
really quicked out of
the Market?

24. Added value

26. Twitter:
@valion
Email: victor.alonso.lion@gmail.com
www.victoralonsolion.com
Blog: www.globalcontentstrategy.com