Life as a video game translator

Translating video games from French into English sounds like a lot of fun and it can be, but there's much more to video game translation than meets the eye. A fellow professional translator, Sandra Mouton, has just published an article about the realities of working in this field in the SFT's French-language magazine, Traduire. The latest issue is entirely devoted to games and translation. If you've ever wondered what it's like to translate and proofread video games for a living, this article is worth reading. Although, currently it's only available in French.

As you might imagine, it's not all fun and games! Pun intended. Imagine trying to translate a game without any imagery, character information, gameplay videos, or even access to the game itself! This is unfortunately commonplace. And this lack of information leads to additional work for everyone. The developers will be sent back an Excel sheet containing hundreds of queries about a particular word or phrase in each linguistic pair.

Sandra Mouton's article is entitled, 'Traduire le jeu vidéo : rêves et réalités, entretien autour de l’expérience de cinq traductrices'. It explores our role as freelance translators in video game localisation and our day-to-day experiences: 'from the dream to the reality'. Five professional translators tell us about their work (including myself), as well as a designer, a developer, the representative of a localisation studio and a specialised journalist. If you can read French and are interested in the topic, it's well worth your time. You'll find links to the magazine and article below:

The article: https://journals.openedition.org/traduire/2308

The journal: https://journals.openedition.org/traduire/2250