Humbly requesting that my followers and anybody seeing this repost it if that’s okay, it could really make the difference <3
I would love to take up a job to localize a game from English to French. I’m currently unemployed after failing to get my sysadmin degree and losing my job. I’m currently looking for work but traditional education and work are really difficult for me because I have severe ADHD and it’s difficult to treat where I live, but I need the money to survive and keep paying rent and food
I’m native in French and fluent in English. I’m passionate about language and translation and I self-taught myself many things about it. What I can show for this is my fan-translation of the indie game FAITH: http://traduction.faith for which I did a full localization (text, graphics, voices), I can send my working files where I note how and why I went about adapting things the way I did upon request.
This is a field that passionates me and if you give me space and flexibility I’m convinced I can do fantastic and complete work. I’ve loved working on this personal project four entire days at a time and whenever I play video games I’m constantly examining the localization decisions and trying to "reverse-engineer" the thought process behind them.
I really need a job like this to get some money in and if you’re willing to give a shot to a person like me it could make my life easier and I’m confident I could make a great, natural localization for your game that would speak to Francophones. Please consider it!
I’m focusing on games with this post because this is what I have experience in. I would consider an opportunity to translate a comic, a book, a video script or anything if you’re willing to give me that chance
Reach me at pro atsign siphonay dot fr
I’m working on my first project (not saying what it is yet, I’m not under NDA or anything but as the person I’m working with hasn’t said anything about it publicly and I haven’t asked yet if I can do it lol), I’m really excited for it.
Once it’s done I’ll review the process I used and how it went and establish formal ToS about how I work, what’s my scope of work, my rates, etc, and make a homepage for that and maybe I’ll go advertise on itch forums or something.
The things I want to focus on are:
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localization and not just translation: I want to convey the original authors’ tone and vision as much as possible to francophone beyond simply the linguistic aspect. I want to involve the authors in the process if they wish, giving my reasoning for translating some things in a certain way, asking for preferences between several options etc. I know this can be hard with someone who isn’t familiar with French but I try my best to give a literal translation of the options I’m offering and what they would mean culturally so that it matches the source material as close as possible
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quality over quantity: I’m still looking for full-time employment and this would remain a side-hustle. This means I would require flexibility from the authors and ideally only take on one project at a time so I can give them all the care they need in the time I have.
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queer (non-binary) inclusion: this is probably the thing I care the most about: French is a gendered language with no neutral grammatical genders, and so a lot of localizations of media with non-binary characters just force a gender on them. This is something I hate to see and I want to make even a tiny difference on that at my level. I would use écriture inclusive, french neopronouns, or writing that avoids using gendered terms, but I would never resort to forcing masculine or feminine pronouns on non-binary characters unless I’m specifically asked to.