watermark
Game Localization - English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Dutch and other languages
Don't localize. Loekalize.

Other language pairs available upon request
Charlie Oscar: "Our Chinese sales showed an eight-fold increase after your localization into Chinese." Gremlins Inc.

Recent projects

  • Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew (Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese)
  • EA SPORTS™ F1® 23 (Dutch)
  • Multiple AAA titles for Electronic Arts (Dutch)
  • Someday You'll Return: Director's Cut (Japanese)
  • Stray (Dutch)
  • Syberia: The World Before (Dutch)
  • Arma Reforger (Japanese)
  • Cyber Shadow (Simplified/Traditional Chinese)
  • Pathway (Japanese and Chinese)
  • DayZ (Japanese)
  • Draugen (Japanese and Chinese)
  • Swag and Sorcery (Japanese, Chinese and Korean)
  • Return of the Obra Dinn (Simplified/Traditional Chinese and Korean)
  • Graveyard Keeper (Japanese, Chinese and Korean)
  • Moonlighter (Japanese and Chinese)
  • Beat Cop (Japanese and Chinese)
  • Dota 2 (Japanese)
  • Motorsport Manager (Dutch)
  • Gremlins Inc. (Japanese and Chinese)
  • Punch Club (Japanese)
  • Arma 3 (Japanese)
  • Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games (Dutch)
Recent projects

Below please find an overview of recent projects I have done, by either translating stuff or managing projects.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew

A staggering 164,310 words were translated into Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese, with each language undergoing 50 hours of Language Quality Assurance (LQA) in playtesting. This ensured a rich experience for every player. The high-quality localization is evident from the rave Steam reviews.

In partnership with Mimimi Games, we introduced a new font engine, making Japanese typography both accurate and visually captivating.

The flood of positive reviews confirms it: this isn't merely a game; it's a global sensation.
EA SPORTS F1® 23

We've been working with Electronic Arts since 2010, and they're one of our very best and most loyal clients. Most of their games are not localized to Dutch, so our work mostly pertains to translating marketing material and websites. This game is an exception though, not in the least because of the enormous success of our Dutch pride Max Verstappen.

It was an incredible honor to do the full Dutch translation of this high-profile AAA game for Electronic Arts: the game contains 310,886 words and we're still counting. Special thanks go to the incredible team in Cologne and all the testers in Madrid: without you this would never have been possible!
Syberia: The World Before

A lovely 83,000 word project for Microids, made possible by Thierry Begaud of Words of Magic. This was also the first really big test for my self-developed Computer Assisted Translation tool Cattitude that in the end managed to import the huge and incredibly complicated Excel files accompanying this game within 17 seconds.

This is a beautiful story about love, friendship and a search for the past, which I can definitely recommend to anyone. You will be touched. You will be moved.
Pathway

With more than 160,000 words per language, this was a somewhat larger project. Still we managed to make all deadlines and deliver a product that... well, the comment on the left says it all. Player feedback was raving, and during playtesting, only 3 words in Japanese were changed.
Draugen

This smaller title came in via a friendly colleague of ours. There was ample of time and budget to localize this title to Japanese and Chinese (though admittedly the word count was relatively low), so that we could give the game all the attention it deserved, including a full playthrough.

And it shows. As you can see, the reviews are raving.


 

Graveyard Keeper

We had worked with Lazy Bear Games before on their previous title Punch Club, and apparently they liked the result so much, that they came back for more!

Unfortunately, circumstances during this project were not ideal: we had to work from an English text that was still being written (sometimes by non-native speakers), there was no budget for playtesting and to make matters worse: someone somewhere (not us!) made a mistake while copying and pasting our translations, so that half of them ended up at completely the wrong places in game. Of course all the users see is the translation itself, so we took the blame for everything, and the first reviews were disastrous.

As we absolutely wanted this game to be a success (and because we were held responsible as our name was in the credits!), we consulted the developer to save what could be saved. We were allowed to open up our own forums on Steam to communicate directly with the players. Especially in the Chinese translation, the damage was enormous. But within a week, we were able to repair the worst parts and as the game was a huge success anyway, there was now enough budget for twenty hours of playtesting per language (we translated this game to Japanese, Chinese and Korean).

Because of all the efforts we had put in on the user forums, the developer (an incredibly nice guy) decided to pay even more than we charged, and after several more iterations, all the damage had been repaired so that the translations could shine in their original glory. The screenshots on the left are proof of that.
Moonlighter

Marek Ziemak, former producer of The Witcher I-III, came back for more and asked us to localize 11 Bit Studios' newest baby to Japanese, Chinese and Korean. We gladly complied, and it seems the users liked the result.

This too was a game with several font engine issues outside our influence, and there was no budget for LQA. Still, very few errors have been found yet and the reviews are raving.
Gremlins Inc.

Charlie Oscar is the developer behind the hugely succesful title Gremlins Inc., an intense strategy board game in a steampunk world of corrupt capitalist gremlins who compete for money, political power and prestige. The game contains about 25000 words, which can mainly be attributed to card descriptions and game rules. We translated this game to both Japanese and Chinese.

Now the text engine of the game has a few issues with displaying Asian languages; these are known issues that our translators can do very little about. The developers hope to solve these issues in a future engine, that will be able to display Asian languages in a better way.

That said, even with the current less than perfect display, after localization the Chinese sales and Japanese sales respectively showed an eight-fold and a fourth-fold increase. After careful analysis, the developer found that Chinese and Japanese are the most important languages for game localization after English, more important than German or French. Japanese sales alone surpassed the combined sales of Germany and France, and the Chinese and Japanese versions of their game constitute 38% of their total sales.

Both the Japanese and Chinese localization were praised highly by the developer, their sales outlets and Japanese and Chinese users.
Motorsport Manager

We've been working with SEGA since 2010, and ours has always been a very fruitful relationship. Unfortunately most of their titles needing localization to Dutch are released in co-operation with Nintendo, which does its own localization in Frankfurt, Germany, but there are exceptions, and the best motorsports management simulator in the world is one of them.

Meet Motorsports Manager, a title containing hundreds of thousands of words, which has been completely localized to Dutch by yours truly. Periodically new DLC's are released, and these too are translated to Dutch. The project is still ongoing.
Arma 3

Bohemia Interactive, maker of Arma 3, the most advanced military simulator in the world, has been an esteemed client of us since 2015.

As this game has been around for a while (before 2015), we're dealing with lots of legacy translations, some better than others.

Since we still don't have a crystal ball on our desk to guess the exact context of the translations, we cannot guarantee 100% accuracy, but in the vast majority of the cases our translations are spot-on. Here you see an After-Action Report, a video with full context and basically a how-to for playing the mission. The whole thing (including several other videos) was translated and subbed by our Japanese team. This is the result.
Beat Cop

Working with Marek Ziemak, former producer of The Witcher I-III, was an incredible honor.

This is a video of Beat Cop, a game we localized to Japanese and Chinese, including reviews and player responses. This took 3 months of our lives. There was no client budget to test the localization before release, but fortunately no issues were found (besides two complaints about the font, which is not pixelated like the rest of the game and which has several kerning issues). Then again, we weren't even consulted about the font choice in the first place...

We're not perfect though: we found one spelling error no player has noticed yet. There's probably more, but this ain't a bad score for 80,000 words and two languages after one week of playing!

 

About Me | Contact Me | ©2006-2024 Loek van Kooten