I was thrown into the middle of things as soon as I started my job. All of the games that go through us start out in Chinese, and C-E must be done before they move onto FIGS and more. It is chaotic but also incredibly challenging and fun. I work with a great team of translators that love games and give incredible feedback on my English translations, both of which I wanted but never had at my previous job.

A typical day for me looks something like this –

8:55 shuttle bus arrives at complex

I take one of the many free company shuttles to work (they have 250+ routes that cover most of Shenzhen!). My stop is about a 15-minute downhill walk from my apartment, and takes about 35 minutes to get to work in morning traffic.

9:00-9:15 quick bite at cafeteria

Chinese style scallion cakes, meat bun, sticky rice and soya milk. All for RMB 8!

9:20-12:00 work / short tasks

For the first 20-30 mins I check my e-mail and internal messages to see if people left any comments on my translations. Then I check my weekly schedule to see what I have planned for today and if anything from yesterday spilled over. Usually I take care of short tasks before lunch and leave the longer ones for afternoon/evening.

12:00-14:00 lunch / nap

People here take their naps very seriously. After having lunch at the cafeteria downstairs or at one of the many joints nearby, it’s lights out on the whole floor and most people pull out their folding beds, pillows and blankets and sleep until 14:00. Developers tend to work until very late, so this nap is very important to them.

14:00-18:45 work / ongoing assignments, urgent assignments

This is when I deal with longer tasks or tasks that span multiple days. For many projects this is also when additional strings come in the form of “Can you please take care of these 10 strings within the hour?”

18:45-19:30 dinner

Off to the cafeteria again. This meal is usually free because I get a free dinner coupon for leaving work after 20:00. Most of my workers have hundreds because they leave late but never eat at the cafeteria.

19:30 onwards

Usually I stay until at least 20:15 to finish up what I couldn’t before dinner (and because of that dinner coupon, which I can use for next day). But on most days I stay till 21:00, because I want to see if I can finish some work in advance, which will give me more time the next day to deal with urgent dev requests. I sometimes take work home or go in on weekends for a few hours to do that as well, because we never know what the devs will throw at us and want to have as much capacity as possible at all times.

The other thing I hear a lot when I tell people that I localize games for a living is, “how did you end up doing that?”

I worked in the family business from 2006 to 2013, and finally left because I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t for me, even with the temptation that the company and assets could be mine one day.

I have always wanted to get into translation, so I started looking and as luck would have it, a French mobile game company was looking for an English to Chinese (Taiwan) translator in their Hong Kong office. So I applied and got in after 3 rounds of translation tests. That was how I got started.

After about 1.5 years there, however, I realized a few things:

1. my writing in Chinese is average at best
2. the pay was not very good and unlikely to get better
3. there was no career path in the HK office and I’d have to move to Montreal (where their loc office was) if I wanted a real shot at moving up the ladder

So I left, got a full time job that was not related to translation, and started picking up freelance work in Chinese to English, a pairing that I was more comfortable with. The switch proved to be one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life, as it led to incredible opportunities later.

I specifically looked for requests from Taiwan, where the rate per word was lower but I could finish much faster and therefore take more orders than others. This lasted about 9 months before I left the full time job and went full freelance for about 3 months.

At the beginning of 2016, I started as in-house game translator for a start-up that had both a product side (cloud translation platform) and a service side (translation agency). This was like hitting the jackpot because they were looking for a translator that

• speaks fluent English (check)
• loves games and has played games (check)
• has experience (check)

I translated roughly 1.5 million Chinese characters during my time there, and 95% were mobile games developed by Chinese companies. I also started getting more freelance requests from game devs/publishers and language agencies on LinkedIn, so I was translating games both at work and during my free time. Apparently Chinese-English game translators are a very rare breed!

Then in 2017, I came across a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and joined a very large game publisher in China. There aren’t a lot of great games from China at the moment, but they’re getting better. When the breakthrough comes, it will most likely happen through this publisher and I want to be their go-to person.

So this is where I am now. The ride is just getting started and I’m very excited to be in the front seat.

Most of the time when I tell people that I localize games, I get one of the following responses:

“So you get to play games all day?”

“Are there that many words to translate that there’s a full-time position for it?”

“I didn’t know that was a thing!”

<insert picard_facepalm.jpg>

Based on my previous job, here is a list of things that I do on a regular basis…

1. Translate updates to an existing game: new patches, new events, emergency notices, etc. Most of these are done on the same day as the assignment.
2. Translate a new game: usually ongoing, doesn’t start until the confirming the final deadline with project manager.
3. Tests: sometimes publishers/developers want to see the translation quality before they place orders, and I was the gatekeeper.
4. Proofreading/Editing: the only time when E-C comes in. I am not that fast when it comes to localizing in E-C, but I am fast at spotting translation errors.
5. Drafting translation tests: our C-E test had strings in different categories (UI/System, Abilities, Dialog, Story, etc) and each category had maybe 5-10 different strings. My job was to randomly pick strings from each to create tests, and occasionally adding new strings to the categories.
6. Glossary/Style Guide: for large projects that require collaboration between in-house (me and another guy) and freelancers, I was in charge of creating/maintaining a glossary and writing a simple style guide on how to proceed.

A typical week means that I will spend ~85% of my time on 1-3, 10% on 4 and the rest on 5/6. But at my new job, that ratio is sure to change and I will write about it after working there for a period of time.

 

 

 

 

 

Due to my choice of language pair, the (sometimes sad) state of game localization scene in Taiwan/HK/China and how games in general are perceived here, I have never really felt like I was part of the “real” game localization industry until maybe 2 weeks ago.

Up until then, I have met and communicated with a good amount of translators, because some of my job duties at my last job (a cloud translation platform maker / game translation agency hybrid start-up) overlapped with vendor management. But most of them took on many genres and I’ve only met a handful that were full-blown game localizers like myself, and only a few that work in the same pair as I do (Chinese-English).

So it was great that I got to meet a legion of them in Tokyo over the course of 3 evenings – first night was IGDA’s Localization SIG Roundtable, followed by 2 nights of drinking and mingling with people from the industry. Since this was in Tokyo, most of the people I met were E-J or J-E translators, but we spoke the same language in that we understand the unique challenges in game localization, and discussed how we overcome those challenges. Everyone spoke candidly (as much as our NDAs would allow) and generally had a good time talking trash about poorly written source texts, unrealistic character limits and other inside jokes.

I have always thought that people who come to these events are experienced/veteran translators and that I’d be at the bottom, but it turned out that I am now considered to be one of the “experienced” (4.5 years and counting), and I was very happy to meet localizers new to the industry and share my experiences with them. I will never forget how I got started and all the advice I received, and will do my best to pay it forward.

With that said, now I finally feel like I’ve arrived and I’m ready to make an impact.

 

If getting housing and opening a bank account were bosses in an RPG, getting a foreign work permit in China is probably the final boss. Actually, the process more or less resembles the Lavos fight from Chrono Trigger.

My new employer outsources visa matters to an HR company, which actually has employees working on-site and they all have email accounts with my employer. For some reason unknown to me, it took a month after accepting the offer for them to send me a list of required documents just to start the process. I was required to submit copies of my passport, diploma, results of a physical, reference letter from my previous job and a “Certificate of No Criminal Conviction”.

Calling the last item a mini-boss fight would not be an understatement, because this item alone took about 3 weeks to get and a whole lot of red tape. The instruction said “if you have lived outside of the country of your passport for more than 1 year, then you should obtain the certificate from where you are currently residing”. It also turns out that to get this record from the Hong Kong Police, they need some kind of formal request from either an embassy/consulate or the government. I was not sure if I should consult the US Embassy in China (where my permit will come from), or US Consulate in Hong Kong (where I currently reside), so I asked HR for advice. Their reply? “We’re not sure. You should find out by talking to the embassy in your area.” Yes, very helpful indeed. In the end, US Consulate in HK came through with the request letter and I waited 3 weeks to get the Certificate.

They also wanted any non-Chinese document translated, but that was not very hard.

The next part also took maybe 3 days to sort out – basically, the pre-approval requires that my diploma be authenticated, and that process alone will cost USD 700 (if I go through the HR company). It needs to be notarized by UC San Diego, where I went to school, then authenticated by the State of California, and finally authenticated by the Chinese Embassy in US. This fee is not covered, so I spent a few days haggling and hoping my employer would pay for it. In the end, though, my employer actually came through and said that the authentication would take too long (20 working days), so they’ll be my guarantor on the application. I was finally able to submit all my documents at the end of August and waited about 2 weeks before I heard back.

But of course, it did not end there. It turned out that all the work was for a “pre-approval permit” in the form of a one-time entry visa. The HR company failed to mention that, so when I went to pick up what I thought would be the work visa, I was surprised to find out that a) they expected me to enter right away, and b) I would not be able to leave until further paperwork is approved. Since I had travel plans for the first week of October, I decided to not activate the visa and will do that after the national holidays in China.

Just FYI, the rest of the process is as follows: enter China on a one-time visa, then submit all the paperwork plus more documents from my employer to apply for a work permit and a residence permit. I also need to register myself as a foreigner with the local police. Only after both permits are granted will I be able to leave China, or I risk not being able to get another work permit ever.

Worthy of a final boss, don’t you think?

I realized there actually isn’t very much to say, other than that banks in China make it very, very difficult for an American to open an account there.

My new employer requires their full-time employees to open accounts at a certain bank, so naturally I went to the branch closest to work with my passport.

I was promptly rejected because I didn’t have the required documents, which were: passport, proof of employment, proof of residence, and a “tax ID” (which turned out to be my social security number).

(Right after this, I was told by the apartment complex that I could not rent without a bank account, so I was stuck for quite a while until housing was resolved).

I tried some other branches and even other banks where I pretended I didn’t speak a lick of Chinese, but got the same answers as soon as they saw my American passport.

After renting a place with a bit of help (see previous entry), I went to the local district office and got a single-use proof of residence solely for opening bank accounts, and was finally able to get an account.

Then things kind of took a 180-degree turn, because they saw the company name on my proof of employment (offer letter), and told me since that my new employer is a huge client of theirs, I am automatically granted the highest account level without having to maintain the minimum balance (RMB 500,000). I also don’t have to pay the bank any commission fees on money transfers, and I never have to wait in line at the bank.

With housing and bank account out of the way, there was just one last thing to do – get my work visa. This turned out to be the single most annoying item to get, with lots of red tape and further complicated by human factors. As of today (September 17th), I still don’t have it but at least I know roughly when I will be able to get it. More on this later.

“Dear Chosen One” is probably one of my most translated phrases for the last 1.5 years. It is common in Chinese dialog to include greetings, and Chinese games sometimes take it to the extreme by greeting players whenever possible (patch notes, hotfix, notices, news, system messages and whathaveyou).

Many of the styleguides I have received specifically ask translators to omit these greetings, but some clients insist that I keep them because in their minds, localizing Chinese games means translating word by word, and omitting superfluous content in source text is bad practice…

When I was looking for a name for this blog, this came to mind along with many other Chinglish phrases I’ve been asked to translate/retain, but it stuck longer than the others, and was easier to understand (other candidates were “Successfully Verbed”, “Insufficient Gold” and “Top Up Now”), so I registered the domain and here we are.

This blog is about my experience as a game localization professional working in China.

It’ll start with some posts about getting an employment visa, opening a bank account and finding a place to live in China. Once those are out of the way, I would like to write about my work in a way that does not violate my NDA and about linguistic issues that I have encountered in Chinese to English translation.

This is bound to be an interesting journey, and I look forward to sharing whatever I can on this blog.