Hiring the "Best" Translator without Understanding Their Language
Everyone did a great job, the video game is already QA’d and the release date is set. You are targeting several markets to sell your video game in. This is when things might get messy. Assuming that I am a customer who can understand Arabic only. We keep saying “do not judge a book by its cover”, still everyone does… Even AI recruiters do!
Your video game might be perceived negatively, if the localized UI or in-game content is poorly translated in the end-user’s language.
No workplace is inclusive enough to include native speakers for every language you are targeting to have your video game localized in. So, you need to hire a localization professional who translates into a target language that you do not know much about. I will assume that you already are hiring a professional translator, so the linguistic skills are there. Still, testing the language skills or the translation capability is not always enough to sustain a good translation throughout long-term projects.
The hiring process can be tricky. However, there are a few things that can help you to identify that you are on the right track to hire the best localization professional, even if you do not know their language. Testing the knowledge, especially through a live channel, like a video meeting or an audio call will help you massively to determine if you should move to the next step with the candidate, you are interviewing or not.
If you watched "Slumdog Millionaire". Then, you remember Dev Patel “as Jamal Malik” managed to answer every question in his contest at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” all the way up to the very last question. Though Jamal Malik did not have enough education to enable him to reach this level, he managed to achieve the milestone by his own life experiences.
That’s what you should seek the most when you have your video games’ project localized.
For example, if you are working on the localization of a football video game, you know well that most of your audience do watch real football (soccer). They know so well the terminology used in this field. I have seen BIG mistakes that happened from lack of knowledge. For example, you know "George Best" the Irish football legend who is one of Man UTD legends. Press usually refers to him as "Best". So, the headline of a challenge in a video game for instance says, Complete Best Journey to Stardom. Can you guess? 9 out of 10 people would think Best here is an adjective... I will leave the rest of it to your imagination.
If you hire a professional translator who does not know much about football, they will surely do the job, but not as good as you might think. Do not get me wrong. You must hire a professional translator after all, just with knowledge in the subject field.
Knowledge is accumulative, and it is something that no one can acquire overnight. And… Nothing can compensate for it.
The remaining steps and criteria you know very well. Happy hiring!