Trials and tribulations of translating in the game industry

Max Morkovkin 00:00 So, our first speaker is ready to join us. And let me introduce you to Taylor Matthews CEO newgen creations with his presentation about trials and tribulations of translating in the game industry. And Taylor will tell us about the adventures his company had translating the game that won Game of the Year 2019 Award. The name of the game is sekiro shadows die twice. I have never played that one. But if you guys played this game, tell us in chat would be really nice to know if you're familiar with this game. And the mission of new game creation started with translating and delivering bug reports from English to Japanese and Japanese to English. Yeah, forgot to say and you can creations the Japanese based company. And they ended up translating the whole game, as well as over 10,003 boards and amazing experience. Are you here? Taylor Matthews 01:04 Yes, I'm here. Max Morkovkin 01:05 Well, welcome. Welcome to work from home. Nice to see you as a speaker today. Taylor Matthews 01:09 It's a it's a pleasure. And it's also exciting to be the very first guest. Max Morkovkin 01:15 Yeah, yeah. Really nice. You're really involved into the gaming industry. So you also have this gaming chair? Taylor Matthews 01:21 Yeah. So our office, we tried to make it as game centric as possible. So we work hard, we play hard. Max Morkovkin 01:29 Cool, really cool. Okay, so are you ready to share the screen? I am. Just give me one minute, maybe less, guys. During the presentation, you're welcome to use q&a tab to leave your questions. And then after a tailor will finish the presentation, I will help to ask those questions for you. Please don't use chat, it will be hard for us to find those questions in the chat because you guys leaving a lot of messages there. So just use this q&a tab in the bottom of your zoom application window. Okay, I'm now turning off my camera turning off my mic and give it to you, Taylor. Enjoy. Taylor Matthews 02:14 Alright, thank you very much. Um, so let me introduce my company really quick. company's name is Mugen creations. And I bet your first question is what's a Mugen? So this is a Mugen. It's basically the Japanese word for infinite. And what we do, we do a lot of things. I'm gonna go into the details. But first, let me introduce some of our staff. I'm the CEO, I handle a lot of the operations in the company, we have 30 or so full time staff. So we're getting pretty big. All things considered. I worked with a lot of famous gaming companies as a game designer. So when you think game design, you think maybe the artwork but game design is actually like the inner workings of games. So like, what kind of RPG? Will it be, what kind of characters they'll be? What kind of stats will the items have that kind of stuff, worked with Bandai Namco, probably bought side games, etc. Some other stuff that we work with is Steve Heller. He's a producer. He's worked on many different indie type titles, hack, net, screen sheet and Orwell series. If you're familiar with games, you should have heard them if you're into the indie scene. And then Scott Wheeldon, he's our communications manager. So basically, he handles a lot of our SNS projects. We focus on not only game translation, but also SNS media, and that kind of marketing side. So to go further into the details of what we're what my company does, SNS management so daily social media management on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Discord, etc. Localization for like games, on a manga, comics, anything that requires creative writing, and breathing life into text, product consulting, so if you want to bring your game or whatever, item, item product, etc, to either east or the west, we know a lot of information about those countries, and we can help you do that. We work with a lot of influencers, a lot of PR companies, so advertising, campaigns, utilizing Facebook, Twitter, etc, press releases all that. And we also have an in house production team so we can make trailers for you assets for posting and all that good stuff. So let me tell you a little short story on how we worked with Activision. And from software on sekiro shadows die twice in one game of the year. 2019. So, the particular topic of this event is game localization As a living organism Now, if you're familiar with games you might have, like, remember a game called Spore, which is basically creating living organisms within a game. So I want to talk a little bit about the game localization and how to us we feel like it's a living organization. organism, sorry, not organization. Hey. So I want to talk about three particular things, the importance of gaming, current status of the gaming industry, and how we at Mugen are overcoming the trials and tribulations that come with game localization. Now, the importance of gaming. In this particular image, you're probably thinking, why is he showing a banana? And why is there a doctor there? So when you think about gaming, you don't think of it as an essential item. Like if, for example, all games were to disappear tomorrow, everybody would still go on living. But we can't live without food. Can't live without medical care. We need these kinds of things. But is gaming really that unimportant? Let's remember what happened in 2020. So we have killer bees. We have the Coronavirus. We have a lot of people going around and putting on like protests, we have basketball players passing away. And we have fires in Australia. When you think about fires in Australia. Yeah, that happened in January 2020 has been pretty crazy. And it's not even over yet. So with all of this craziness happening, I think really deep down that games are important. One specific example of it being important is, for example, Animal Crossing. This game, I believe, probably saved a whole bunch of humanity. It came out at the right place at the right time. Everybody was going probably crazy without all of that human connection. But then with Animal Crossing, you can boot up the game and actually interact with people all around the world. So to us, we feel that, yes, it certainly did have more importance than people think that gave me has. So I want to come and talk about the current gaming industry. Now these listening, this information that I have here is all prior to Coronavirus. So I'm pretty sure the average hours played in the hours of games watched has increased significantly since then. But upon this data, it was about an average of six hours played a week and an average of three hours a week watched online. So with all of those, like games being played all around the world, and these are from France, Germany, in the Italia, Japan, South Korea, etc, etc. All of these countries, and all of these people around the world are playing games, watching games. So having proper localization and having people that really understand games being involved in it is really pretty important. So not only are is it important for the people playing it, but it's also important for the people that are making it. And the particular story that I have today is in the making side of things. So people around the world are working with companies that are not in the country that they are that are in another country that speak a different language. So like various language pairs are pretty difficult for like to overcome. And sometimes they need a third party to kind of help bridge that language gap. So for example, company crest, they work with a developer that's in Korea, and their internal team is Japanese. So they need somebody in between to handle Korean and Japanese. And then for example, the publisher, fellow traveler, worked with a developer in Australia, and a port developer and pulling these language barriers had to be overcome as well. This particular story that I'm discussing about is how we helped Activision and from software on things that they needed done, what did they need to have done? Well, they came to us and say, We want you to translate bug reports from English to Japanese, and then translate the comments from Japanese to English every day, twice a day, until release. If this doesn't say, translation is a living organism, I don't know what does from morning to night, every day. And we're like, Sure, we can do that. They came to us and said, Hey, we're going to be using this product program called JIRA Software. And so, internally, we thought first, we got to figure out the logistics of it. We only need to translate the reports that need translation, only translate comments that need translation, copy and pasting was out of the question because nobody wants to do that, and is prone to human error. It needs to be able to be scaled according to like the amount of work coming in coming in. translated content needs to be imported back to JIRA, in the appropriate places and Also, we needed to work through a VPN. Now a VPN, a lot of people's common thought when they hear VPN is allows you to be, pretend that your IP isn't in another country. So even if I'm in Japan, I use a VPN, I can say that I'm in America to watch American Netflix maybe. But also VPN is there for security measures. So if you use a VPN, then you can actually access servers and areas that normally you cannot access otherwise. So we have to use that very high security stuff. And then we're thinking about okay, so we have JIRA. And we have the logistics figured out. How do we work together with like software that can be like answer all of those needs that we have. And we've been really familiar with SmartCAT. And so we thought, okay, let's work with SmartCAT. And also, they use the Mugen symbol. And we found that pretty exciting. So to kind of bring you back up to speed, Activision, working with JIRA Software. We're using an API with JIRA Software and SmartCAT. So, with our research, we figured that figured out that SmartCAT has an API, and JIRA has an API. And what we did was we created some software that allowed us to connect JIRA and SmartCAT, and do the things that we needed it to do. So what were we able to do, we were able to use a tag system to only translate the reports that we needed translation, we had a flag system based on who commented on a report in JIRA to then let our script know what needed to be translated. We ran a script that imported and exported the required text in a format that was compatible with markup. Then once translations were labeled complete in SmartCAT, we would run the script to export directly to JIRA. And then the PC that we were running the script had access through VPN, to then finally push the translations to where they needed to be. I know it sounds really complicated. So to kind of show you exactly what we mean. So here we have the like a sample JIRA screen. And here we have the type bug status, like to do description. So in here, we had the bug reports and cetera, and then also the people that are working on it, and all of those good things. So we had to take the information from here. Also, the comments from here, using that tag that I mentioned earlier, and then we needed to put it into smart cat. Now smart cat. As this is the smart cat as the host, I'm pretty sure many of you have access this particular screen. But here on the left hand, we have the text that needs to be translated. On the right hand side, we have the text that is translated. And then like what our translators put in. And then over here, we have, you know, memory banks and information, you know that in regards to the translation. So say, for example, we were translating one bug, and it has terminology that we needed to use amongst all of our translators, we would use this tool to make sure that everything was consistent, nice and neat, and all that good stuff. One thing that we had to do is make sure that once the translation was in there, and edit it and all that, we had to make sure that it was labeled done. Some people don't go through that entire process, but it was a must for us. So the particular steps that were needed in order to import the text within to SmartCAT. And also to JIRA was like this, we imported new text to translate translation needed to be marked completed on smartcam. Check which translations are new from our database and SmartCAT export translations into JIRA compatible format, and import translations back into JIRA. So this particular part right here, the third one, check, check which translations are new from our database. So if we didn't have a database within the computer, that we were running the script, we would constantly be pulling the same kind of bugs all the time. And so we needed to make sure that once we translated a particular report, that it didn't come up again. So that's where some coding got complicated, but we were able to work it out. And this is the kind of scripts that came so whenever we ran the script, what it did was, it pulled the text from JIRA and insert it into our database. It labeled it, you know, according to what it was labeled on JIRA. And then the next one, we imported the translation text to our internal database. Then from there, we had to make that text compatible with JIRA. So we converted it and then we imported it the text back into JIRA. So this place is also pretty complicated, and there's not enough information in here to know exactly how we did it. But it ultimately ended to be quite a bit of text and quite a bit of code. But then it saved us a lot of time. So we A few weeks developing it, it became a total of 11 files of script 1000 lines of code. But the amount of time that it saved us was just dramatic. There were days where we'd get hundreds and hundreds of reports. And we were weren't running on the same 12 hour schedule. So the bug reports were all written in English from Activision, which is the American publisher. And the comments to those particular, bug reports were all into Japanese. So what we did was we took the English we translated from English to Japanese, so that the people that were debugging the game and coding the game could understand where they needed to fix. And then after they fixed it, and or if they had questions in regards to replicating that bug, they would write it in the comments. So they would be like, Hey, we have problems replicating this bug, can you please go into more detail? Or? Okay, we decided to fix this, can you check it? Or we don't have time to fix this? Can you just not even consider this a bug anymore. And let's just move on, and continue on Word, bugs with higher priority. And so all of these comments, all of these reports were constantly being translated every single day, for an entire year. And then from there, they're like, hey, Mugen. So we have another issue, the game translation needs to be done, and we don't have enough people to handle it, can you guys handle it? And so they gave us quite a bit of text to translate in very, very short amount of time. And I don't know if you've played Cicchitto. But the type of English that you see there was translated from Japanese that even Japanese people had difficulty reading and understanding at times. So in a very short time of timespan, we were given really difficult Japanese to translate, and had to deliver, all while doing the bug reports as well. So it was a very chaotic, a lot of trials that we had to overcome, but ultimately, very, very satisfying. Job. So we did over 2000 or 10,000 reports, over 2 million characters and words. And yeah, we translated the end game text. And we got our name in the credits as well, which is quite important for us as a company, because if one game of the year 2009. Teen Yeah. Anyways, so I think I kind of sped through that presentation quite quickly. So we still have quite a few minutes to spare. I guess we can go into the q&a. If you guys want to contact us, you can always use the QR code here or visit us here on the website there. But yeah, for those that have questions, I think we could probably get into there. So actually, um, for LinkedIn, oh, sorry. If Max, you want to join in, you can? Max Morkovkin 18:00 Yeah, yeah, of course, I'm here to help you with the q&a part. And so yeah, you started with with the right questions was the first one about the LinkedIn. So please, come on from this. Taylor Matthews 18:10 Okay, so believe it or not, I'm not very active on LinkedIn. If you guys are really interested in contacting me, you can contact me through the website, contact form. I know I probably should get into LinkedIn and get my profile going there. But in Japan, it's really not a thing here. So I haven't really felt the need to be super involved in LinkedIn. I guess maybe in the future when it starts to pop up and be more important in Japan. Perhaps I could do that. But sorry, guys. Max Morkovkin 18:40 Okay. Okay, good. So, another thing that I wanted to tell you quickly, that there is a nice comment from Hanley, he said that sicuro is my Game of the Year of 2019. The quality of localization is top notch. Taylor Matthews 18:58 Thank you very much. Yeah, Max Morkovkin 19:01 I just, I just got it in the Zoom chat. So yeah, guys, keep keep going. Share your feedback. We keep monitoring these. Okay, so let's take a look at our q&a part. So there is a question from Karina Baba, what's the pricing strategy for this type of project. Taylor Matthews 19:23 So the pricing strategy for this particular project was pretty interesting. So when discussing prices with the publisher, we were saying, it's difficult for us to give an exact rate due to not knowing exactly how much work is going to be required for our stuff because depending on the month, the amount of work coming in, can go up quite high or go down quite low. So what we started them out with is a monthly rate that would satisfy our requirements to pay our staff as well as generic Little bit of a profit. And then we also put in a limit of how many reports that we would do over the entire year span. So if it went over that amount of bug reports, we would get a certain amount of extra money per bug report from then on. Max Morkovkin 20:17 Okay, so I hope this answers the question and we can move to another one from Valentina Constanza. How much time did it take to develop the API connecting JIRA and smoker? Taylor Matthews 20:31 So, coding itself, it took about two weeks, and that included a lot of testing. So what we would have to do is we had to make a JIRA account. And we also had to make a test SmartCAT account and worked with the information and ones within there. And then from there, after all of the testing. Yeah, it ended up working, of course, at the very beginning, we had some hiccups here and there that we had to fix along the way. But in general, I believe a couple of weeks is all it took to fully get it up there. Yeah, it was about two weeks, but not eight hours a day of pure coding just Yeah. Max Morkovkin 21:12 Okay, good. So let's then check. The question from Indira Lorenzo. Did you consider an empty plugin on JIRA? Atlassian seem to have an in product translation feature English to Japanese is not a great thing, which bear in empty, but wondering if this was considered as an option. Taylor Matthews 21:31 Okay, so did you consider it to be plugin? So okay, machine translation for this particular thing wasn't actually something that we could really consider. And the reason being is the the requirement of the job needed to be very, very specific. So we were translating bug reports. And if we relied on machine translation for that, the bug report would probably be, you know, off, right? So what we did was, we did it all manually. But the thing about bug reports are is they're pretty much the same kind of steps. So the more translations we did, the more our translation memory filled up to be usable on further reports. So that means when we get when we got to the very, very hectic area, like timespan of the the development process, and we were getting 100 reports a day. That machine translator, another machine translation, but the memory were like helping us fill in those translations quickly, so that we could have, like, we didn't have to have a huge amount of translation or translators involved in the project. We did have quite a few. But because we had this translation memory built up from all of those months prior, we didn't have to escalate it to like hundreds of people. So yeah, Max Morkovkin 22:59 good. Good. And there is a question about JIRA again. Me, however, is asking, how did you develop the connection to JIRA? Is it something you did? Or did someone SmartCAT somehow help to you? Taylor Matthews 23:15 So I would like to say it's Mark has helped me but no, unfortunately, we did at all. But they did offer a lot of help. So when we had questions, SmartCAT stuff, were always quick to answer. And they did help us out in a lot of the bumps and stuff from there. But basically, we looked at Joe's API and smart cats API. And it was all documented very well. So we were able to figure it out there. But there was one instance, that was very interesting thing that we helped, I think SmartCAT figured out is that there's a limit to how many translation like, imported, like, translation, what is it rows, columns? So we had like, several 100 pages worth of translation in there. And I think, maybe when we were using it, everybody noticed, but we were making SmartCAT go really, really slow at one time. We were kind of Yeah, the file amount. Yeah. And so that SmartCAT was going really, really slow in the import and export process. And I had to speak with maximum like, Max, why is it taking so long, and he's like, you have several 100 pages of translations done, you need to need to archive those you need get rid of those. And so it ended up as having to do those manual purges every now and then. But um, if you had like a very slow time period, sometime in 2018 19 area, it was probably because of us and all the bug reports that we were putting into my cat. Max Morkovkin 24:45 Yeah, it was it was really, something happened. really unexpected. Yeah. So another question that we have here. From Raphael, Matias hater. Learn how to get started on gaming business, science and greetings from Brazil. Amazing job. Taylor Matthews 25:06 Thank you. Um, so the gaming business business in industry in general, especially in Japan is very connection based. So I worked in the gaming industry from the inside. So I was able to make a lot of connections with people that were developing the games. And so when I shifted from being a Japanese game designer, to running my own business, I utilize those connections to get those jobs that we needed at the beginning. Now, from there, we use our experience and the games that we worked on to further get more game translation jobs. But basically, I think anybody can get into the gaming industry. Not that I want to make all these rivals out there. But um, yeah, if you guys contact various games and, and the publishers and whatnot and say, Hey, we would like to localize your game to bring it more to people in Brazil, then. I don't see what's stopping you just as long as you have quality and passion and people that can check your work after that. I think you can do it. Nothing should be stopping. Yeah. Max Morkovkin 26:14 Okay. So many questions coming. In a question from Iman Abdu. I just want to know, how could you organize the work between translators and reviewers in a very short time. Taylor Matthews 26:27 So it wasn't exactly a very short time. The entire process was over a year, but we had several months to prepare for it. And at the very beginning, the amount of bug reports coming in. Wasn't that, that high in amount. So we were able to work with the initial translators that we were assigned for this particular project. But then as things started to ramp, ramp up, we had a general idea of when that was going to happen. So we reached out and made sure that we trained the new translators and the reviewers over the the texts and stuff that we've been translating, you know, several months before to make sure that they were on par with the current translators, and we scaled it that way. Cool. Max Morkovkin 27:09 Till are my colleagues helping me to say that when you share your screen, the attendees do not see us. So if you can stop sharing, they will see us on the cameras. So yeah. And so let me check what other questions we have here. Okay. So there is a question from from Karolina cologix ish, I'm sorry for pronouncing. You've mentioned the Japanese original was quite difficult. how closely do you work with game creators to understand it was their process platform for queries? Taylor Matthews 27:48 So basically, what we did was, we got Excel sheets from the developer to translate the text, right? So within these sheets, it it has a lot of information, like who was the speaker, and various information that helped us understand the kind of situation that was happening within the game, but also when we were translating it. When we translated. On the side of our translation, we added all of these comments, right saying so, because of this, we translated it this way. And this way, when the developer or publisher looked over our translations, they could see where we were coming from. And if we were unsure about a certain area, we would say, this particular area could be also translated this way. So based on the way that it showed on game in the game, you might want to adjust accordingly. But we worked very closely with the publisher, we had to have meetings if there was anything that we weren't sure of. And yeah, we used a comment area in the Excel sheet to further flesh out any kind of translations to make sure that what we were submitting was accurate, considering the, you know, short times period or timespan, as well as the difficult Japanese Yeah, that we were working with. Max Morkovkin 29:06 Cool. Um, oh, I see. Robert O'Keefe has already joined us and shared about questions, good presentation, what processes are in place to maintain the linguistic quality of the game? Taylor Matthews 29:18 So the process that we would have is for the game translation, as I said just a minute ago, that we'd have information explaining what kind of things were happening, but we had to also, you know, ask a lot of questions as well as make sure that we update our glossaries and whatnot, so that when we were translating it with multiple channel translators at times that we would need to, we would make sure that the language used was consistent with well, and also we would have one particular reviewer that was involved in the entire product process project from the beginning to the end. Make sure to review the final script so that it was Utilizing the same kind of language in one line, so to, you know, even working with a lot of different translators, some would, would give like a certain character a different way of speaking. And so when we have that final reviewer, review it, it'd be like, Okay, this particular character speaks this way. So we would change it accordingly. Max Morkovkin 30:19 Okay, cool. Tiller, I should say that there are at least two attendees who are interested in this JIRA connector really, and asking if this is something that you can also share with them. So yeah, I think that we can, we can discuss Taylor Matthews 30:35 it. So, yeah, Max, and I actually spoke about this, maybe offering it on the smart cats store area. So yeah. Since there are people interested in it, I think, yeah, Max, and I can progress with those discussions a little bit more. Yeah, Max Morkovkin 30:52 we should take it further. Cool. Okay, all the questions we have. I hope you're not getting tired Taylor, because really your presentation, got a great interest from the attendees. And they leave more and more questions. Another question from Let me check. Yeah. Another question from Robert O'Keefe. Our next speaker, did you consider the suitability of machine translation or a in the generic content translation? And if so, what did you learn? So, these but yeah, maybe you? Taylor Matthews 31:28 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, as I said, machine translation is definitely something that we couldn't consider. Not only was like the quality of the translation, very, very important, but also, yeah, the client didn't want that to happen as well. Max Morkovkin 31:45 Yeah. Okay. And we have a couple of questions. Do you do user testing? Taylor Matthews 31:53 Do we do user testing? Um, so I'm thinking the particular question is, did we play the game after we translated it to see if the translation was accurate or not? Or I'm not exactly sure what, what user testing they're required are referring to. But so the localization quality assurance was actually done by the publisher to make sure that the translation matched it and all that. So that wasn't particularly our job. But we did help them iron out any kind of translation issues, should there have been? Max Morkovkin 32:27 Okay, so I see. Francesca attic, has added some content from someone who is not a translator, so probably telling you about testing translators, if they're good in translation, the quality of their translation. So Taylor Matthews 32:45 I say, um, so all of our translators that we work with have to undergo a very, very difficult translation tests to even be considered to work with us. So upon them completing that test, I as well as my other staff, go through the translation to test and assure that the quality is there. So yeah, we work with a lot of specialists in special areas, especially games. And so that's how we kind of judge that quality there. Max Morkovkin 33:12 Okay, so I have to say that you answered all the questions. Taylor, thank you very much for these insightful presentation. Really appreciate you joining us today. Taylor Matthews 33:23 Yep, no problem. If you guys have any further questions or anything, feel free to hit me up on the website there or, yeah, contact Max, he knows me and so you can get to me Max Morkovkin 33:37 create his LinkedIn profile one day. Taylor Matthews 33:40 I have one. It's just not very updated. And I don't even have a picture on it. So it's very embarrassing, but yeah, I'll check out the LinkedIn profiles and add people that want to have me out of there. So thank you very much. Max Morkovkin 33:53 Okay. Talk to you later. Bye.