Anonymous User asked: did you do anything specifically to make sure you found a translator who would do all the puns etc? one thing ive found out in learning a foreign language is that there are a lot of indie games1 where they dont translate the puns and (if its the name of something) will even just write it how the english name is pronounced rather than trying to convey the meaning
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and probably aaa as well, but im not as interested in those so i havent really looked into them
Great question! So basically one of the questions I asked applicants over email was "The text to translate involves weird American colloquialisms that I'd like to localize into weird Brazilian colloquialisms: the game's primary source of text is a character named Goose who speaks very informally, often with "incorrect" grammar. Additionally, you'd be working with video game terminology, and translating some marketing copy for the game's Steam page. Certain pieces of text have strict size limits. Are you comfortable with these tasks?"
Keeping the spirit and weird tone of the original text was very important to me, since the game's text is basically 100% that weird tone. Asking about it proactively helped me find a localizer who was comfortable with all these tasks and willing to engage with a "weird" text.
(And, for the record, those localizers were @Siph for the French version and Bruno Sampaio for the Brazilian Portuguese version. Hire them!!)