We would like to thank Francesca Pezzoli and Riccardo Lausdei for their brilliant talk on game localisation held on Friday 4 December 2015. Game localisation is a dream career for graduates in specialised translation who are also fans of video games. According to our speakers, who have a long term experience in this field, the ideal candidate should have language and translation skills, as well as familiarity with video games, their language and “culture”.
During the talk, students were asked to guess the Italian equivalents of everyday English terms and sentences that, in this field, take on new and unexpected meanings. Examples included “hit the deck” (meaning “fall to the ground”, and translated into Italian as “tutti giù!”), and “a sweeper may be able to counter-attack” (which few could guess comes from the domain of football and can be translated as “un libero potrebbe partire in contropiede”).
Francesca and Riccardo also dispelled some stereotypes, for example that understanding Japanese is a prerequisite in this field, and that video game localisers spend their days playing (in fact, they are much more likely to spend their nights working!). The fun part is not about playing games, said Francesca Pezzoli, but about contributing to their creation, especially when you need to use your creativity to find (absolutely hilarious) translations as required by the localisation process.