A Tailored Team
Within the scope of our Chinese branches, EC Innovations assembled a team of native-speaker translators and editors with specialized in soccer knowledge due to the specific volume, timing, and nature of the FIFA 18 content. All linguists on the project were football fans and paying special attention to creatively capture the Chinese linguistic and cultural nuances. In addition, they were familiar with all gaming consoles, mastered the specific semantic style of different gaming consoles’ marketing campaigns. For example “STICK” is called 摇杆 and 操作杆 on PS4 and Xbox One, respectively. Our translation teams mainly comprise native speakers of the target language who take on the following roles »
- Subject-matter experts (SME): With cumulative knowledge and experience in their specific industry, our SMEs support terminology translation and maintenance as well as answer technical questions from translators.
- Qualified translators: Our translators undergo assessment based on our Translation Quality Report (TQR), and we try our best to assign translators to the same product line for the same client.
- Experienced editors: With years of proven translation experience, our editors are effective at using our cloud-based Computer-Assisted Translation tool to review and make edits in real time to provide feedback and confirmation in the shortest time possible.
- Rigorous proofreaders: Equipped with background knowledge in a specific industry, they simulate end users by reviewing the translation with a fresh eye and without referencing source content.
- Quality Assurance reviewers: Our QA team will sample 10% to 20% of total translations for independent verification of quality, and to identify potential quality issues.
- In-country reviewers or third-party reviewers: Often requested by clients to serve as a further guarantee of translation quality.
- In-country language leaders: Work closely with our translator recruitment and management team to build tailored and dedicated translator teams for each client.
- Multilingual DTP team: Ensures that translated documents are compliant and ready to be published in the right format.
Seamless Process, Prompt Delivery
Once the translators had been hand-picked for the client, they were made familiar with relevant terminology and given deeper context, specific to the client. Pitch perfect performances by ECI’s elite project team had delivered one batch of quality, culturally-adapted game content per working week of 20,000 to 40,000 words in order to adhere to the client’s launch schedule. The FIFA 18 project team took a strategic approach by handing in SM & OST TR QA reports every week, summarizing questions for each batch that needed answers or confirmation from the client - this is important for us to fully understand the client’s overall business goals and objectives for the project.
We pointed out where might be inaccuracies: “‘Desailly won a further Champions League’ is not correct, because it could be mistaken as if Desailly won another Championship with Milan after the one in 1994. It would be more correct to say, ‘Desailly won a Champions League Championship.’” And we received their feedback, “Changed.”
We also let our client confirm linguistic differences between English and Simplified Chinese: “Would there be any problem if we leave this in the singular form (Squad Battle) regardless if the source is ‘Squad Battles’ or ‘Squad Battle’? Because when English text appears in Chinese text, the convention is to leave it in singular form.” and get their confirmation: “For non-Asian languages, keeping it plural should be fine.”
Culture Adaption
FIFA football game was localized into traditional Chinese when EA decided to release it to Chinese markets; however, this version was not accustomed to the culture and phonetic system of mainland Chinese market. EC Innovations identified culturally awkward character names and club names; for example, Chelsea F.C. is transliterated into 车路士(che lu shi) in Traditional Chinese, which is hard to relate to the English name for mainland players, so the club name then was translated into 切尔西 (qie er xi).
Localization Process Automation (LPA) solution
We’ve been continuously refining our TBMS LPA system more than 15 years ago to fit the business trends and compliance needs of our game clients. Our proprietary technology enables the workflow automation for content transfer, file preparation, instant quotation, maintenance of language assets, KPI evaluation, data mining for decision making, translation quality report generation, among others. This allows us to shorten turnaround time and lower cost without compromising quality, and make continuous delivery an achievable solution. Refer to TBMS LPA for more information.
