In one of our previous blogs, we emphasized the importance of teams and talked about the components of an ideal team. It is important to have a project manager, linguists, testers, and the help of the client, but another great thing to have is subject matter expertise. And the best way to always possess this knowledge is to have genre-specific teams. Let’s talk about what I mean by genre-specific teams!
I want to start with translation teams in general. You might know that although Orient Games Localization specializes in game localization, we also have a sister company, Orient Translation Services, specializing in other areas like life sciences, marketing, fintech, etc.
What makes our companies work so well is the fact that we have separate teams for different areas. We have a medical team consisting of subject matter experts who work on life sciences texts. A marketing team consisting of linguists who love to tap into their creative sides. A technical team full of tech-savvy linguists. We also have a fintech team that perfectly understands money. A team responsible for audiovisual translation that loves TV series, movies, etc. And of course, we have a dedicated team for game localization consisting of true gamers. But even our game localization team consists of smaller teams. Some of them are experts in story-driven games, some of them are better with FPS games, and so on.
Surely, there are so many advantages of having different teams and assigning projects according to their expertise.
Having different teams specializing in different areas offers high quality and maximum expertise. I’m sure we all know that being a translator necessitates a lot of research, but there are some areas where your subject matter expertise is required and even lots of research can fall through. For example, a game localization specialist who usually works on story-rich, narrative games might have more difficulty localizing a highly technical shooter/military-style game.
If you ask translators what they spend the most time doing during the translation process, I think most of them would say terminology research. Especially if the text is term-heavy. Some areas create the need to use certain equivalents for certain terms. When you have specialized teams, you eliminate this need to constantly search for the right terminology.
Sometimes, a client has lots of instructions and directions. They want their content to be a certain way. By having a specific team for that client, the translators and editors become so familiar with the content and the instructions that they no longer need to check what the client wants because they just know. I think this is especially true for game localization projects. When you keep getting the same game’s content for localization, you will become an expert on that game even if you didn’t have a chance to play it.
This division into teams also facilitates the whole process. There is no need for lots of back and forth with the client, no too many questions (not that asking questions is a bad thing), etc. It also reduces turnaround times and ensures that the files are delivered on time and with high quality.
No matter how many style guides there are, each translator is different, and they will produce different translations. They might even interpret the style guide differently. So, by having the same team handle all the translation and localization requests, you ensure consistency both in linguistic style and quality. In return, this builds trust with clients because they know that they will get consistent and high-quality translations.
We take great pride in our genre-specific translation and localization teams and believe that it’s one of the reasons why we excel at what we do. It helps us deliver timely, high-quality, consistent translations and makes our clients trust us with their valuable content.
Written by
Ecenaz Batur
Marketing Specialist
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