Boards›Story, Art, & Sound

@Riot: How does game translating work?

Silven·8/6/2017, 8:23:19 PM·1 votes·2,985 views

Couldn't think of another board to post this on, so I figured maybe someone here could answer (or point me in a more approriate direction).

But yeah, mostly I'm just wondering how a company like Riot gets their game translated.

Since every text or voice line in this game needs to be translated to different languages for the sake of localization and such, is there a division at Riot that takes care of this? They get the pages from the story devs or sound people and it's just their job to translate them and send them back? Or do Riot Games outsource for this kind of thing? Is there a company whose sole purpose is to translate a cornucopia of text into a bunch of different languages? Do they get to work on a lot of different games? Do they just get translation jobs from big companies?

Mainly asking because I'm 21, working a pretty lame retail job and I speak three languages as basically my native tongues. I always dismissed the idea of working as a middle man for a bunch of retailers or translating user manuals, but mixing my adeptness at languages with my love for video games would be something I could get behind. Now I just wanna know where I can apply/how these things work. And hey, if Rito got job offers... ;)

Thanks for your time!

7 Comments

RiotRiot TreblMuffin8/6/2017, 9:38:36 PM7 votes

I can't speak to the structure, because I definitely don't know it intimately, but I can say that our local teams in regions do a bang up job working on really really tight timelines and getting things right for local players. There's a few things that are actually really interesting about what you're talking about, which we call "Localization."

The first thing is that in the case of in game VO, some ideas and jokes simply don't make sense or aren't part of a local culture. Sometimes a joke that's funny because of the way it's spoken in North America doesn't make any damn sense in China! So at times, localization teams become part of the writing process, helping to shape a regional actor's performance to fit the idea for another culture.

A second component in both our in game and cinematics is specific to the audio team. Our sound designers put a lot of love, thought, and iteration into how a champion sounds. Riot KarateMonkey spent ages hand placing the sounds of Urgot's mask respirator! We have to create entire "recipes" for local teams to use in creative ways to get the same kind of processing on their actors, and reproduce the original tastefully for their language. This isn't simply following steps, but actually listening and making sure it sounds good for the language.

Finally, in our documentaries like Legends Rising or Live/Play, there are sometimes GIANT teams of translators that we hire to help in subtitling and making sure that non-english dialog is edited correctly. I don't know Thai, so for Live/Play Fight, at the end of an edit I'd have a translator sit with me and listen and help make sure I wasn't cutting off any words. I remember for an episode of Live/Play (I think :/) it was almost impossible to find an isreali translator. Why? It's not just that they need to speak the language in question, but that they need to know how to translate League Of Legends into their language. There's a lot of colloquial terminology to League that, unless you're inside the community, you simply don't know. I mean, think of the first time you heard ADC, gank, jungle creep, CC, Nexus, backline, TP. Even if you know your language, it doesn't mean you know the word or concept behind a word. Translators have to be League players, community members, writers, and know their craft!

Lady Faceless8/6/2017, 8:47:26 PM1 votes

Honest, I'm curious with the answer as well.

As someone, who prefers to read the lore in my native language, I really can say that the guys who are doing the german translation really are not the best choice, to be honest.

Sontopo3/18/2018, 6:07:01 PM1 votes

The game needs a norsk translation.