Media Translation Link Roundup [2025]

I regularly collect articles that interest me and then throw them together in a translation link roundup when I have enough. I wrote a link roundup last year, which have some great articles. Highly recommend checking that out.

I feel like recognition of media translation has been on the rise in recent years. The start of 2025 in particular has been fantastic for articles on manga translation and lettering, literary authors coming out to celebrate translation, and looks at game localization into different languages other than English.

 

Articles on Manga Localization

Being a Manga Letterer Is More Than Having a Fun Job

“In layman’s terms, manga letterers must erase handwritten Japanese text elements and replace them with English text elements.“

This article by Isaiah Colbert goes over what really goes into lettering a manga in English. He interviews seven manga letterers and talks about how letterers adapt the Japanese fonts for English (often hand-drawing sound effects and creating their own fonts), as well as the logistics of making a career out of lettering.

 

Why Harassment Comes with the Territory of Translating Popular Manga

“The job also comes with a breadth of fallacies about what their roles entail from readers, chief among them being that they are the sole person in charge of localizing a manga series.“

Another article by Isaiah Colbert (who is just knocking it out of the park!), this time looking at manga translation.

He interviews three translators and discusses the struggles with scheduling, low rates, and harassment from fans. This is a great overview of the manga translation industry from the perspective of a freelance translator.

 

Articles on Video Game Localization

How to translate a game with no words

“This game is more about a translator’s mindset than about invented languages.”

Chants of Sennaar is a fantastic indie video game about the Tower of Babel and solving puzzles involving different languages. In the game each area has a different language with different words and grammar. And you, the player, have to learn each language based on context clues you find around the level.

This article looks at how this game about translation was translated into Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, and Spanish through an interview with each of the translators.

 

How translators performed the herculean task of localizing the most incomprehensibly British videogame of all time into German, Portuguese and Traditional Chinese

“The entire narrative walked the line between ‘Oh, I get it, that’s funny!’ and ‘why is this even here?’”

This is a fantastic interview with the translators of Thank Goodness You’re Here, a video game set in a norther town in Britain. If you’ve played Thank Goodness You’re Here then you already know it’s a game rich in weird British culture with lots of jokes, play on words, and references. Pretty much everything that you cannot directly translate. It is both a media translator’s dream job and a nightmare to work on.

This interview is fantastic and the localization choices of the translators involved are fantastic. I particularly like the way they talk about walking the fine line between keeping the quirky British feel and making sure the jokes landed in their target languages.

 

Aeons, Eikons, and Espers: The Localization History Behind Final Fantasy’s Iconic Beasts (Part One)

Summons are a reoccurring feature of the JRPG series Final Fantasy. This article by Anna Cairistiona is a chonky boi with a detailed breakdown of almost every localization choice for summonings throughout the ages. It’s as much a look at the history of Final Fantasy as it is an article about translation choices.

Don’t forget to check out Part Two and Part Three too!

 

Nearly half of Cyberpunk 2077’s 5,000-person team worked on localizing the game

“Tweaks to translated material meant matching the changes across multiple languages and wrangling actors back into the studio to record new lines, says Szwed.“

This is a fantastic article from Polygon on the nitty-gritty logistics behind the localization of CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077. Not just the translation but managing the translation and LQA teams, as well as the logistics of adapting the scripts and recording multi-lingual voices.

I stop to listen every time I see someone from CD Projekt Red’s localization team talk because they are such a good group of people. They clearly care about good localization and the humans needed for localization.

 

To release Animal Crossing in the West, Nintendo ‘had to change everything’

“I’ll never forget [producer Takashi Tezuka] coming to us and saying, ‘If we’re going to [sell the game outside of Japan], you guys have to change everything,’ because they had designed it so specifically for the Japanese market,’”

Another article on game localization from Polygon, this time looking at the original localization of Animal Crossing on the N64.

It’s a fantastic look at a historic moment when localization wasn’t that well known about in the industry, and the time and care the team took to making this series accessible to people outside Japan.

I really like this line, “Good localization means that each part of the game will have the same effect on its Japanese audience as it does on its Western audience.”

 

 

Other Articles on Translation

How Translation Works, Book Title Edition

“This is one reason among many why my contracts for non-English language versions of my books now come with a clause that specifies the text has to be translated by actual humans.“

This article was written by one of my favourite authors, John Scalzi. (Author of Starter Villian, Redshirts, and The Kaiju Preservation Society. Seriously, go read his stuff.)

This is a short article where Scalzi goes over the translation of the Hungarian title of his novel When the Moon Hits Your Eye. Why it was translated the way it was and why machine cannot create the same effect the human translator did.

Scalzi is GOAT.

 

How to Criticize a Translation Effectively (and How to Identify Bad-Faith Criticism)

“Ideally, a good translation criticism should be written in a way that’s clear and understandable even to anyone who isn’t familiar with the work in question.“

Inspired by common heating discussions about Japanese to English media translation, this article does a fantastic job breaking down some issues with certain translation critiques.

It objectively lists issues with critiquing translations based on things like machine translation or blaming all localization as “bad”. Each point is accompanied by clearly defined and thought out points.

Then the article goes over how to critique translation more effectively. Which is useful information for everyone, even if you don’t plan to write about localization choices for a language you don’t speak.

 

“Why The Translation Review Matters and How to Do it Right” (Part 1)

“…mainstream reviews often do not highlight translation as a salient feature of a translated book.“

This is very similar to above article, but reads more like an opinion piece rather than a list of instructions.

It focuses on some of the issues in mainstream reviews of literary translations. Mostly that they seem to completely forget that a translated novel was effectively re-written from another language. Or gloss over the work of the translator.

 

Bonus

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again

“But We Will Realize Untold Efficiencies With Machine L- What the fuck did I just say?“

This made me cry I was laughing so much.

 

Other Link Roundups

Interesting Localization Articles from the Last Year [Winter 2024]

Literary Translation Link Roundup [Spring 2021]

Game Localization Link Roundup [Spring 2021]

Celebrating Game Localization – Translation Link Roundup [Spring 2020]

Articles for Localizers – Translation Link Roundup [Winter 2019 Part 2]

Articles for Game Localization Fans – Translation Link Roundup [Winter 2019 Part 1]