#101 The World of Japanese Game and Media Localization With Katrina Leonoudakis

Katrina Leonoudakis joins SlatorPod to discuss her experience as a Japanese-to-English Localization Specialist in the world of anime, manga, and video games.

Katrina recounts her early years as a freelance translator and her experience breaking into the entertainment and media space. She shares the main cultural and linguistic challenges when localizing a Japanese game to adapt to a Western English-speaking culture.

Katrina talks about how she deals with balancing the needs and preferences of the original scriptwriter, target audience, and client. She also reflects on the use of machine translation by indie versus Triple-A game studios and the negative impact of cost-cutting measures on freelancers.

The Pod concludes with Katrina’s views on the highly skilled pool of media translators in film, animation, and gaming, as well as the recent hype around metaverse and virtual reality.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with SwissPost reversing its decision to block DeepL in the workplace after internal backlash. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, some interpreters who worked for ezispeak are complaining that their invoices have gone unpaid.

Meanwhile, Germany-based LSP t’works Group announced the acquisition of Portugal’s Traductanet to expand into Iberia and South America. And Esther shares key data points from Slator’s newly-launched M&A and Funding Report.