Every Line is a Puzzle

Nobody tells you this when you start localizing games, but the actual translation is maybe 60% of the job. The rest is detective work.

Before I translate anything, I read everything I can find about the game first. Genre, tone, characters, marketing copy. Going in blind is how you end up with a technically correct translation that feels completely wrong. I've seen it happen. It's painful. A horror game and a comedy game can have sentences that are structurally identical in English and need to be completely different in Chinese because the register, the rhythm, and the emotional weight are totally different. If you don't know which one you're in, you're already in trouble.

I always build a glossary before touching the actual strings. Names, locations, recurring terms, signature phrases. Sounds boring, but skipping this step will ruin your life three weeks into a project when you realize you've been translating the same term four different ways. On bigger projects with multiple translators this is even more critical. Consistency isn't just a style preference, it's what makes a game feel like one coherent world rather than a patchwork of different people's choices.

One thing that trips up a lot of translators is UI strings. They look simple because they're short, but they're actually some of the hardest content to localize well. You're working within a character limit, the text needs to be immediately understood at a glance, and it still needs to sound natural in the target language. Traditional Chinese compounds words differently from English so what fits in a button in one language can completely overflow in another. I always flag UI strings early and have a conversation with the client about flexibility before I'm staring at a string that says "Confirm Purchase" and I have two characters to work with.

Humor and cultural references are the other thing that separates decent localization from great localization. A pun in English almost never survives a direct translation. A joke that relies on American pop culture means nothing to a Traditional Chinese audience. The question is never just what does this say, but what is this trying to do, and then finding a way to do that same thing in the target language. Sometimes that means rewriting the joke entirely. That's not taking liberties, that's the job.

The thing I do that people find weird is reading my translations out loud. Every line. It catches stuff that looks fine on screen but sounds completely unnatural when someone actually says it. Game dialogue gets spoken by voice actors or read in the player's head. It needs to sound like something a person would actually say. If I stumble over a line reading it out loud, a voice actor will too.

The last step is always a full read-through in context, not string by string but as a continuous piece of writing. That's where the inconsistencies hide. A line that made perfect sense when I translated it on day three might clash with something I translated on day fifteen. The final read-through is where the whole thing becomes one voice instead of a collection of correctly translated parts.