Another challenge of the industry is that about 45% of all gaming sales—almost half—are international. To really compete, all games and related content, including all customer support, should be multilingual.
Unique Challenges of Gaming Translations
Gamers come from all over and can be any age, but tend to skew younger in age. Overall, they tend to be more relaxed and informal in their communication, and aren’t as particular about grammar and spelling as other demographics. The gaming industry is also unique in that customers—the gamers themselves—are likely to be engaged and interactive with other customers. Gamers actively seek out other players all over the world to communicate with them, whether it’s through game play, forums, or user-generated content. Just like any group, gamers prefer to communicate in their own language when the option is available.
With communication such an important part of the gaming industry, translation becomes important as well. Yet accurate gaming translations can be difficult. The young, creative nature of the industry drives it to use a large amount of slang and jargon, often with completely made-up words and terms that are unique to individual products. In addition, there are other industry-specific factors that create additional challenges for gaming companies who want to provide accurate translations for their customers:
- Other languages sometimes use English terms intermingled within their language
- In other languages, certain English words are pronounced in a way that makes them sound like they are from that language
- Other languages may use a completely different word that’s not the same as the translation from English
In these situations, basic translation options won’t work at all. Organizations need to have a way to translate that can factor in custom vocabularies for their gaming products.
Turning a Challenge into an Opportunity
Translation challenges like these can be daunting for any gaming company that wants to provide multilingual support to its users. However, this challenge also presents an opportunity. Currently, only 30% of all gaming companies offer multilingual player support. The remaining companies—about two thirds of the industry—only offer support in English. Companies that want to offer truly multilingual services, and who can do it well, will have a distinct advantage over those who don’t.
Though it seems like multilingual translation is the obvious answer, there are actually a few reasons that make companies hesitant to go that route. An obvious barrier is implementation speed. As more companies attempt to offer support in other languages, they’re finding the process is slow. They can hire human translators to handle everything, but it’s a long process to translate every email, user guide or article. It’s really only a viable option when speed absolutely doesn’t matter.
Cost is another factor. Some companies hire and train multilingual customer service representatives to handle customer service and translation. This means absorbing the cost of hiring additional staff, and also budgeting for the time it takes to train these new agents on your product.
Finally, companies must look at accuracy. Technology today offers several machine translation options, which are reasonably affordable and speed up the translation process. However, in the jargon-heavy gaming industry, most of these apps need additional programming to manually add the game-specific jargon, slang, and foreign language terminology. This process has to be repeated for each game and for each language.
Language I/O: A New Approach to Machine Translation
Fortunately, there’s a machine translation platform that can solve all of these problems, while allowing your gaming company an edge in how it translates product terminology. Language I/O speeds up the process of translating gamer conversations while providing more accurate jargon translations.
Our approach is different from other machine translation programs. We don’t need to spend six to eight weeks training a single neural machine translation model of one language pair. Instead, the Language I/O platform follows these steps:
- See the content coming in
- Identify the source language of the content
- Determine what you’re translating it to
- Select one of many machine translation engines to get the best possible general translation.
To make translations even more accurate for something complex like gaming terminology, we put these procedures in place:
- Load gamer-specific terminology into the system when configuring an account for a new gaming company
- Impose the preferred translation on top of the neural machine translation engines
- Provide a self-improving glossary to proactively detect new product names, industry jargon, slang, that is able to change and update in real time
This multi-pronged approach uses artificial intelligence to learn and improve, which helps ensure problematic terms are translated accurately every time.
Gaming companies provide their own vocabulary that’s specific to their products. Once Language I/O has the company’s glossary of terms, new accounts can be up and running in a day or two. Our translation platform helps you speed up implementation and cut costs, providing you with an affordable way to upgrade your customer service for international gamers.
In today’s global gaming world, it’s essential to offer your customers multi-lingual support for your products. Contact Language I/O today to find out how we can offer you accurate translations for a better customer experience.
