Recent Projects
Below is an overview of recent projects I have completed, whether by translating or managing them.
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F1® 24 I'm thrilled to share that I've just completed the Dutch translation of F1 24! Over the years, I've had the pleasure of localizing the entire franchise into Dutch, including last year's and this year's editions, using my custom-built translation tool, CATOTITUDE. Translating a whopping 571,233 words for this franchise has been an incredible journey. Working with Electronic Arts, a fantastic client, has been a privilege. Despite being a massive company with 15,000 employees, they never lose their human touch, and I truly feel like part of the team. As a fellow Dutchman, I'm especially proud to see Max Verstappen, our world champion, excelling in F1. Knowing he's a fan of Sim Racing makes me hopeful that one day he'll enjoy the Dutch localization of this game as much as I enjoyed translating it. Here's to many more years of collaboration and bringing amazing gaming experiences to Dutch-speaking fans! |
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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. |
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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! |
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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 CATOTITUDE that 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. |
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Pathway With over 160,000 words per language, this was quite a large project. Yet, we managed to meet all deadlines and deliver a product that... well, as you can see from the feedback on the left, the results speak for themselves. Player reactions were phenomenal, and during playtesting, only three words in Japanese were altered. |
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Draugen This smaller title came to us through a friendly colleague. We had plenty of time and budget to localize this game into Japanese and Chinese (though the word count was relatively low), allowing us to give it the attention it deserved, including a full playthrough. And it shows. As you can see, the reviews are glowing. |
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Graveyard Keeper We had worked with Lazy Bear Games before on their previous title, Punch Club, and they liked the result so much that they came back for more! Unfortunately, the circumstances for this project were far from ideal. We had to work from an English script that was still in progress (sometimes written by non-native speakers). There was no budget for playtesting, and to make matters worse, a mistake (not ours!) during the copy-pasting of our translations led to half of them ending up in the wrong places in-game. Naturally, all players saw was the final translation, so we took the blame, and the initial reviews were disastrous. Wanting this game to succeed (and with our name in the credits), we collaborated with the developer to save what we could. We set up our own forums on Steam to communicate directly with players. The damage, particularly to the Chinese translation, was significant, but within a week, we managed to fix the worst issues. The game's success then allowed for 20 hours of playtesting per language (we localized the game into Japanese, Chinese, and Korean). Thanks to our efforts on the user forums, the developer (a truly kind person) decided to pay us even more than we had charged. After several more iterations, the translations finally shone in their original glory. The screenshots on the left are proof of that. |
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Moonlighter Marek Ziemak, the former producer of The Witcher I-III, returned to ask us to localize 11 Bit Studios' latest title into Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. We gladly accepted, and it seems the players loved the results. This game, too, had several font engine issues beyond our control, and there was no budget for LQA. Still, only a few minor errors were found, and the reviews have been outstanding. |
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Gremlins Inc. Charlie Oscar, the developer behind the hugely successful title Gremlins Inc., created an intense strategy board game set in a steampunk world of corrupt capitalist gremlins competing for money, political power, and prestige. The game features around 25,000 words, mostly in card descriptions and game rules. We translated it into both Japanese and Chinese. While the text engine has known issues with displaying Asian languages (beyond our translators' control), the developer hopes to resolve these in a future engine. Despite the less-than-perfect display, post-localization sales in China and Japan increased eightfold and fourfold, respectively. The developer's analysis revealed that Chinese and Japanese are the most crucial languages for game localization after English, more important than German or French. Japanese sales alone surpassed those of Germany and France combined, with the Chinese and Japanese versions accounting for 38% of total sales. The localizations received high praise from the developer, sales outlets, and Japanese and Chinese players alike. |
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Motorsport Manager We've been working with SEGA since 2010, and it's been an incredibly fruitful partnership. While most of their Dutch-localized titles are released in collaboration with Nintendo, which handles localization in Frankfurt, Germany, there are exceptions, and the best motorsports management simulator in the world is one of them. Meet Motorsport Manager, a game containing hundreds of thousands of words, fully localized into Dutch by yours truly. Periodically, new DLCs are released, which we also translate into Dutch. The project is ongoing. |
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Arma 3 Bohemia Interactive, the maker of Arma 3—the most advanced military simulator in the world—has been a valued client since 2015. As the game has been around for a while, we're dealing with many legacy translations, some better than others. While we don't have a crystal ball to guess the exact context of every translation, we're spot-on in the vast majority of cases. Here, you see an After-Action Report video with full context, essentially a how-to for the mission. The entire video (and several others) was translated and subtitled by our Japanese team. This is the result. |
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Beat Cop Working with Marek Ziemak, the former producer of The Witcher I-III, was a tremendous honor. This video showcases Beat Cop, a game we localized into Japanese and Chinese, including reviews and player responses. It took three months of our lives to complete. While there was no client budget to test the localization before release, fortunately, no major issues were found (aside from two complaints about the font, which has kerning issues and isn’t pixelated like the rest of the game). For the record, we weren't consulted on the font choice. We're not perfect, though—we found one spelling error that no player has noticed yet. There might be more, but this is a pretty good score for 80,000 words across two languages after just one week of play! |