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:
- my writing in Chinese is average at best
- the pay was not very good and unlikely to get better
- 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.