Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Worldwide Independent Localization of Games conference.

The conference was a huge success with a large international audience. Please take a look at the photos!

PHOTOS
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  • 👫 SHARING IS THE NEW OWNING

    With so many independent games localization providers taken off the market in the past years, it is easy to forget there still are plenty of boutique localization agencies around. They are as passionate as ever about localizing games and the language and culture they represent. And because of the changing landscape of games localization, they are working together more than ever. So far, this happens mostly in the background though.

  • 🌐 THE NETWORK IS HERE

    The WILG Conference intends to make visible this strong, well-organized network of passionate games localization teams that work hard every day to bring the best possible games localization to the market.

    It does that by breaking the silence and putting some of the brightest independent stars in this network in the spotlight and letting them share their knowledge and experience with each other and games publishers and developers alike.

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  • 🍹 CASUAL POWER

    The WILG Conference is unique in that it is bringing around 200 localization managers and providers together in an equal mix and allows them to share notes in a completely casual setting.

    This means every attendee has an equal input and is of equal importance to the conference!

MEET

The conference kicks off with an introduction of all attendees. This allows everyone to get to know each other’s role in the games localization industry and what company they work for, making it easier to get together during the rest of the event.

LEARN

10 micro-talks will be held by independent localization professionals from all over the world. Return to this page regularly, because topics and speakers will be announced in the upcoming weeks.

CONNECT

For the remainder of the day, all attendees are encouraged to step up to the colleagues from whom they think they can learn, or the share their insights, experience or knowledge with them. There will be plenty of food, drinks, games and music to create an open atmosphere that invites both casual and stimulating interaction between the attendees.

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🤩 Conference speakers

Come discuss the past, present & future of games localization with these professionals. More speakers are being added and we will announce the final list soon.

🎙️🦸 Localizing with friends

Richard Lammerts van Bueren-van der Giessen, Local Heroes

An inspiring story about growing big, starting all over again and growing again - but differently: from a small team to part of a worldwide independent multilingual games localization network. Making a virtue of necessity with the cloud and smart project management tools and how they help creating lean and future-proof localization teams.

🎙️🚀 Rethinking the Localization PM and Lead Translator roles in the G.a.a.S. era

Simone Crosignani, Jinglebell Localization

Localization in the Games as a Service era demands an entirely different approach of the Localization Project Manager and Lead Translator roles. With translation requests coming in 24/7 on multiple platforms and the client expecting immediate answers, you have to look for ways to let the team of translators deal directly with the client. So where does that leave the PM?

🎙️🌆 Localizing Tom Clancy’s The Division 2

Patrick Görtjes, Massive Entertainment
Virginia Boyero, Massive Entertainment

A behind-the-scenes look at the localization of the latest instalment of Ubisoft’s acclaimed massive open world game.

🎙️🌊 Developers are agile. Should localization providers follow?

Víctor Alonso Lion, Pink Noise

As we all know, developers and publishers work more and more in an agile environment: they create a feature, some content and once approved, it is sent out to be localized. That content creation step is often classified as agile, in the sense of delivering content iteratively and incrementally. However, when that content reaches the localization vendor, should we consider this as ‘agile localization’?

🎙️🀄 The Great Wall of Chinese Localization

Romain Bovéry, Active Gaming Media

With more than a billion speakers, Chinese is the second most spoken language after English. But the cultural gap, different writing and others can sound like a frightening wall as much as a very promising market. Let’s discuss the ways and tips to get properly prepared for this challenge.

🎙️🛂 Getting rid of translation tests: ways to hire and on-board translators in videogame localization

Fedor Bonch-Osmolovskiy, Levsha

For any games or localization company looking to hire (freelance) translators, evaluating the quality of the candidates with a test doesn’t require a lot of text. To really make sure candidates are suited for the grueling task of translating games, you need to know so much more about them. This talk presents an intense, but successful process, where the embedding of the candidates into the workflow of your organization plays a vital role.

🎙️👫 Problems with gender translation and how to solve them

Ryszard Chojnowski, Albion

Game worlds are getting bigger, with more characters and dialogue, but development cycles not always expand accordingly. Sometimes this forces developers to leave out the possibilities for gender duplicates in their design, creating huge challenges for localization teams across the world. This talk focuses on methods of translating English scripts with no gender system into languages in which such systems are still present.

🎙️💚 Creating a triforce for Brazilian awesomeness

Sebastiaan de Witte, Local Heroes
Bruno Dias, Locsmiths
Aline Lacerda, Unidub

With 200 million Brazilians, publishers are keen to localize their games for them. But delivering quality in time had always seemed impossible. Until 5 years ago, when three companies joined forces to combine best-of-class voice dubbing and the deepest approach of script translation with Western-standard project management, creating something that is much bigger than the sum of their parts.

🎙️🏂 A superfast approach to voice recording using home-brewed tools

Friso Hoekstra, Local Heroes

Larger volumes, same production time: the pressure on localized voice recordings for games keeps rising. And out the window goes that well-planned schedule, if a voice actor calls in sick! So loc managers that deal with voice recordings need to be smart. This talk presents some ingenious tools that independent studios have created to speed up and improve the quality of all three stages of the voice dubbing process.

🎙️☄ The Impacts and Challenges of Turkish Localization

Osman Erkol, 23 Studios
Semih Sancar, 23 Studios

Considering the growth of the Turkish gaming community and how dependent it is on localization, and especially under the current economic circumstances, machine translations may be a necessary step. Every language has its own localization challenges however, and Turkish has a rich repertoire of these. Understanding these challenges means understanding how big the impact of machine translations can be on Turkish games localization.

🎙️🎒 How to rise to the perennial challenge of educating publishers to better resource localization

Mark Estdale, Outsource Media

Context driven recording raises the bar in the origination process, carrying it through to Localization is a no-brainer - you would think. A case for letting creative localization work be driven by the creative process, rather than marketing deadlines that undermine profitable sense.

📝 Attendance

Access to the Worldwide Independent Localization of Games conference is invitation-only. Contact speaker@wilgconference.com if you would like to qualify for an invitation.


📅 Date

Friday 28 June, 2019

  • Opening: 16:00
  • Closure: 02:00 (Sat.)

🧭 Location

The WILG Conference takes place in the Garden and Garden Rooms (Tuinzalen) of the beautiful medieval Centraal Museum in the historic city center of Utrecht. Utrecht is centrally situated in The Netherlands and 30 minutes by train from Schiphol Amsterdam Airport.

Centraal Museum - Tuinzaal
Nicolaasdwarsstraat 14
3512 XH Utrecht
The Netherlands


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