Mind Your Language: How to Translate a Video Game and Why - EMF 2026

[applause] Hello everyone. So this is mind your language. How to translate a video game and why. So who am I? I'm Kai Jones. I was the lead sound designer on a video game called Busbound which came out in April. I also ended up being the Welsh language lead on Busbound as well because I ran a translation passion project with a small team in my spare time to try and get the game into Welsh. And we had a four month time limit because that's when we ceased development when I came up with this idea. And I've never actually done this before. This is not part of my job. So, let's talk a bit about Busb. Busbound is a video game set in a fictional American city and it is just swamped with traffic. Like, you can't get around at all. And they've asked you to form a bus network in the city. So, it's your job to build bus stops around the city, serve them, and the more you serve those and the more they upgrade, the more bus stops you get in the city. And then when those bus stops up up upgrade, the entire districts of the city upgrade with the corresponding bus stops. So you have to serve the city and make sure the passengers are happy. And you have to do this with multiple different types of buses, each with their own different quirks and challenges. So where do you even start with translating a video game? Well, first off, you have to find out where all of the text in the game exists. And thankfully for this, we had software that did that. So, we've got what you can see here is the list of the languages with their local codes and the amount percentage finished. And in there, that's how much you've actually translated. And then you have the amount of words that are remaining to translate inside of there. And then when you click on one of those languages, you have on the left the primary language that the video game is in. And for this game, it was in English. And that stuff is uneditable. And then you have the name of the corresponding file inside of the game, which then hooks up when it syncs together. And then on the right you have a blank space where you have to fill in your equivalent line with that language. And you do that 3,400 times and you have busbound. So part one, the characters. So the game has a non-speaking main character, but we do have a couple of side characters in the game. First off is Chuck. He's the person who runs the bus depot and he guides you through the tutorial drive at the start of the game and teaches you how to use the bus, how to serve bus stops, and avoid obstacles. Then you have Taye, who is in charge of running the bus network for you and making bus lines for you to serve the city. Then you have Cleo, who's in charge of the bus modifiers, which makes the game harder, but you get more points and in-game achievements. Then you have Jeff, who changes the color of your buses. And then you have the radio host, who gives you weather updates during the game, which also affects your driving ability, and then also gives indirect feedback of the good work that you're doing in the city. and also the cast that inside of the bus depot give you little quirky messages when you open their menus. So to break it down, you've got four main characters that do tutorial dialogue, one that does weather updates, and all of them do positive messaging. The first thing we're going to cover is consistent terminology. What I mean by that is making sure that we use the same terms for the same things throughout the game and we don't use any variations so that we don't confuse the player. And these things are all said by like the characters in the game. It's stuff that pops up inside the UI and also in the game settings. Some good examples of that is different areas and locations inside the game, of which there are many types. So, you need to make sure that you're using the right words. So, there's unlockable areas, bus stop locations, school zones, upgradeable districts, upgradeable locations, important places and buildings, etc., etc. And then you have to look in the language that you're translating to and find the equivalent words for that and pick the right ones. For instance, district in Welsh. One of them is aridal. That is the best word to use because it covers district, locality, region, which makes sense. And that word comes up a lot in the game. Another one is cleolad, which means location, placement, position, which works works really well because you are graded on how well you park the bus at bus stops. So that says cleolad perf, which means perfect placement/position. Other things to be aware of as well is official terminology for stuff that appears in documents. For instance, the bus has a speed limiter, which means that when you go into a certain area, if you have it on, your bus will not exceed that speed limit. And in Welsh, that is kavang kavander. That actually appears in documentation. And it literally means speed constraint. And you can see on the left of the screen there, you've got it in the UI. And also, I highlighted it that Chuck says it during the tutorial. So that's two different locations where that term comes up. I almost didn't use this term because when I got actors in to say these words, they were like, I have never heard this term in my life. And I was just like, oh no, that means I can't use it. But then I remembered because it's official terminology and you're going to be exposed to it a lot, that means that's okay because you will get familiar with it. Another place where where I didn't use official terminology is with speed bumps. In the UK, it would say like hump 80 yards or in Welsh, Tumpath, which means mound. But that didn't really fit the game's context, and I didn't feel like it was clear enough for the driver that that's what that would mean. And I also wanted a future proof in case I needed to use the word to path somewhere down the road because the location in the game is quite hilly. And I decided to use bump kavlunder. Bump is a lone word from English, so it's bump. And then klam means speed. Another reason that I did this is because the in-game assets have words written on them that do not get translated. The reason being is because then the art team would have to make a lot of assets and when you switch language it would have to switch assets. That's a lot of work. So it matches the lone word on the actual road itself. So that is much clearer for the player. So next is colloquialisms and expressions. So the first thing that you hear in the game from a character is Chuck saying, "Howdy there, stranger." Howdy there does not directly translate into Welsh. And we also don't refer to each other as stranger. So this doesn't really work. So you need to find something that matches the same energy as what they're saying but in that language. And the word in Welsh is shmi, which is a hi, how are you rolled into one. So it's a good warm friendly greeting to use. You also notice that Chuck's name doesn't change here. There was a part of me that wanted to go back and forth on changing his name to maybe something more Welsh. But the thing is is the game is set in Nashville. Well, fictional Nashville. So, the word the name Chuck works perfectly. So, that's fine. It's really important to at least understand the basics of the language that you're translating into. And there are a lot of people that want to like translate games or other projects because, you know, they want to serve different communities. And that's fantastic. Nothing wrong with that. Just please don't use Google Translate because this might say alcohol-f free in English, but that's not the kind of terminology we'd use in Welsh. We'd probably say something like he alcohol, which would mean without alcohol. So this direct translation alcohol am means alcohol for free. So if you go into this specific Asda, you can get away with free alcohol on a technicality. We are now 10% done, but don't worry, it gets easier, right? Part two, the bus passengers and pedestrians. So, what is their role in the game? Their role is to give you immediate feedback on how well you're doing inside of the bus while you're driving. That's stopping at stop signs, going over speed bumps at a good speed, not crashing into other cars, not parking terribly, that kind of stuff. And the more passengers on the bus, the more points you'll get at bus stops if you're doing a good job. And you get multipliers, so you get more points. So, that's their job. And there's two different ways that passengers interact with you. One of them is a speech bubble that comes up above the bus where passengers are sat, which is a good way of immersing people because it shows that there's people actually on the bus. And if you repeatedly do something good or repeatedly do something bad more than three times, in the bottom middle of the screen, you'll see a speech bubble that comes up and that's an actual vocalized line from a bus passenger to kind of assert that you're doing something really good or really bad. So to break it down, it shows the weight of good and bad decisions. It informs you of the mistakes or not mistakes you're making. Good stuff and also just creates a good atmosphere for you. So I had to shorten lines for gameplay reasons. So most of the time those little pop-ups are glanced at, so they need to be read quickly. The problem with Welsh and also German because the game was translated into German is that the words tend to be a lot longer and you only have a limited amount of space on screen and you have to glance at it, understand what's being said and then go back to driving because otherwise it'll feel like texting and driving and you might crash into something after doing something really good for people. So it doesn't stick around for very long. And these are like different ways of pluralizing in Welsh. Uh the double D is actually one letter in Welsh. We had a different approach to Latin alphabet. The double D is a th sound. But still, these are longer and there's different variations of them. So, I had to change this up. So, here are some of the things they say in English. Something like facing traffic face to face means that you're facing traffic. I just literally shortened it to facing traffic with an exclamation mark to show they're not very happy. And there's another one with there, which is zero gravity experience included, which is what happens when you drive over a speed bump incredibly fast and your bus practically flies in the air. I decided to change that up a bit because zero gravity experience included is quite long in Welsh. I changed it to ruddin mindod which means we are going to space but I forgot to put an exclamation mark so every time I see it it just reminds me of this Ralph Wigum meme and I can't unsee it and it's just too funny so I left it alone. Another place as well where like rephrasing and shortening comes into play is cutcenes because the cut scenes are cut to the English text. So that means you often have to rephrase. So some ways of doing this is just yeah rephrasing and shortening lines or sometimes I kind of just had to ask the actors to speak a bit faster which did work because sometimes it's only like a 2 second difference so it you know you kind of just squeezed it in a bit so that's okay. And other things in the game as well is stuff like puns and play on words. It's kind of like a facicious way of like telling you that you're doing a bad job. Um like busted ride not thrilled. What you should really do in this situation is translate the puns and find puns or jokes in the language. But like I said, I had four months. So I kind of just shortened this to exactly what went wrong. So follow an means wrong way. And also like pop culture references come up. Now I know who speedy Gonzalez is and I know what the autoban is, but it's just safe to assume that players don't. And I think it's cool to match different references to different languages. So for instance, speedy Gonzalez changes to Git Bran who is like a local legend in South Wales in like the 1890s I think it was. He could like run up and down the local mountain and back before the kettle boiled and he was like known for it locally. So I thought it'd be a fun thing to throw in. And then I changed the autob barn to the M4 cuz that's the motorway that leaves Wales. And then I kind of added Welsh phrases to some of the more shocked expressions when you crash into stuff. Like I could just translate oh my or oh my goodness, but I chose stuff that I actually heard growing up when something went wrong, which is navy blue, which literally means navy blue, the color. I don't know why we say it. And the other one is or mambach, which means oh little mother. I also don't know why we say that, but I heard it a lot growing up. So it felt relevant and it felt like an actual expression that people could like relate to hearing in a situation like that. Another thing that's really important with characters is having alternative lines. So, I've shown you lines already, but we need to get around eight or 10 recordings of those lines to add variation. Otherwise, it just sounds like you're doing the same bus route over and over again with the same bus passengers. So, adding variation is really, really good. And no one says the same thing twice in the same way. So, it's nice to have variation. So, I'm going to show you a video of that now when it loads. It's getting there. I tried doing it manually. foreign. >> It was really fun recording that because most of the time when working on the game, you had to drive really well to kind of, you know, get through the game. So, I just spent like an evening just crashing into everything and it was brilliant. We are now 30% done. The third section is voice acting and recording. So, for the most part, this was this was recorded in Hoot Studios in Cardiff. The reason being is because they're a very very good studio. They're award-winning, and they're also a fully Welsh-speaking studio, so they could get Welsh cast. And they could also spot spelling errors and other ways of phrasing things in the actual lines we gave the characters. And this was good because I took all of the text to a professional proofreader. But the thing is is the proofreader is actually someone that does academic stuff and government documents. So everything came back incredibly precisely said and no one actually talks like that. So they were actually able to rephrase things for me and change some stuff up and spot small spelling errors. So that really worked for the most part. We did record in just hoot studios. And one of the reasons for that is because having consistency among the voices of characters with the same microphones in the same rooms really makes it sound like when characters are talking to each other, it sounds like they're in the same space. So that's really important. Something that came up quite a bit with using some of the voice actors is we end up re like reusing a bunch of people to do like North Whalian voices, Midwayian voices, different South Wales ones to add some variation. And something that came up from some of the the Mid Wales people was the fact that they actually say things differently and they have different phrases. For instance, Shamai, which I mentioned earlier, changes to Foromi and they say other stuff like that. So, it's really cool little idea. Maybe if you're translating something and you have characters from different regions, see how different regions speak because it's the same in every country. There's different places that speak a little bit different. For the most part, I did cast professional actors and fluent speakers. The reason being is because they could pick up the emotions and the lines a lot quicker than learners because otherwise the learners are spending a lot of time looking at the text trying to understand what's being said instead of actually just saying the lines with expression and fluency because Welsh has a bunch of different rules and different sounds. For instance, we have a h sound which you can hear in like German and Korean or a sound in Icelandic and Mongolian. And also we have something called mutations where certain letters change depending on what words are before it. So like with the welcome to Wales sign the C changes to a G because of the I trigger in there. So that happens. It's really important to understand that like Welsh is nowhere near English and only borrows like 2% of the words and 88% is brethonic which is the original Celtic language it's mutated from over time. So for instance like Heraford down the road in Welsh is Henforth which means own old road. So yeah, it's an old language. And we also have additional vowels that people like to make fun of and assume that they're not vowels. So for instance, the letter Y in Welsh is a vowel. The first Y of a word is an H sound and the last Y is an E sound. And then also the letter W is a vowel in Welsh as well and it makes an ooh sound. For instance, we borrowed the word bus in Welsh and it means bus. So there's an example of a W being used. I ended up keeping on two members of the cast as professional translators because they actually are and they could actually humanize things a lot better. So, these two people ended up staying on and they did a fantastic job. A little bit about the editing of the voice lines. You need to make sure they're all level with the ones that are in other languages so people don't get a shock when they change languages and like the gameplay audio is different. And it's really important to edit out stuff like clicks, pops, people accidentally knocking the microphone, that kind of stuff. R45 the settings and UI. So what is the role of the settings in the game is to help you change gameplay, the video, the audio, and then inside those menus, it gives you little explanations of what every little thing you're changing does. Also to go through the different guides in the game on how to drive, check achievements, make lines, and then also the UI that appears on the bus while you're driving. So quite a big role in the game. All the previous rules apply. rephrasing, consistent terminology, understanding the language sentence structure, and also play test the game is really important when you're doing this. It's a very, very sluggish job when you're translating settings because it's not always very clear what's going on. For instance, I made this mistake probably when I was tired is I mixed up close and close. So, in the text there in Welsh, aos means to get closer and the menu does not get closer. It in fact closes. So I used the wrong one and the actual word is kai and it's important to look at the file names to try and find clues as to what it might be and then you can test in the game and sometimes it's just really confusing. For instance, it'll feature like loads of numerical values or code inside of it which doesn't translate and you need to start trying to find the context for this stuff cuz like I said before pluralizing in Welsh can be different for different words. You need to find out what these actually mean inside the game. It's often icons like a thumbs up or upgrading a bus stop little ring that like helps you upgrade and stuff. And sometimes the file names are just generally confusing. Um, so this isn't that what the code actually says. I just put that in there cuz that's what it looks like to me when I read it. And also that line does not translate to sad Pablo Escobar. That's just how I feel when I realize there are 1,500 of these that I had to do. And now we 100% translated. So final section, why? And also outro. So, some of the benefits of translating a game is stuff like cultural preservation. For instance, just having the game in text is great, but when you have it with the actual voices, it really enhances the experience and lets people know how the words are actually said. So, it's a good way of preserving it, especially in like modern stuff like games. And it also gets actors onto games they wouldn't normally get on. So, I got like a load of people credits who've never worked in games before. So, I got a lot more people credits in games, which helps legitimize them. and also might be the first time you hear or see someone like you in a game, especially speaking your language, especially with smaller languages because that means a lot more because they're not often considered in like bigger western games. Like for instance, here's like you know this is the cast. This is a lot of people to now get credits on a video game and I'm really really happy we could include them. So part of what inspired me to do this was I came across a website called Wales in Games and they list every game that is translated into Welsh and that is literally the list. It's tiny and only a few of those have audio. I also saw Welsh YouTubers playing games in Welsh as well, like Sea Dog VA is quite popular with his Welsh videos and also because I grew up in a fully English-speaking home and I learned Welsh at school and it meant that I never really had anywhere that I could actually use the language outside of an academic setting, especially when I got back home. So, if I had games, that would have been great. And also because there's been Welsh language discrimination throughout history, like the laws in Wales Act, which was ages ago, um stopped Welsh people from using law, uh Welsh in law and in offices. There's even a line in there that refers to English as the natural mother tongue used within this realm. And annoyingly, a bunch of those laws were actually overturned in the 1970s. So, we had to wait a while. And then there's the treachery of the blue books in 1847 where middle to upper class lawyers from Westminster came into Wales to look at the state of education and instead of speaking to Welsh speakers they spoke to English speakers and English people and they all had an incredibly biased opinion and then they printed three books on that biased opinion and it actually uh shamed and humiliated Welsh people out of their own culture and you can see historically the dip of Welsh speakers straight after these books published. There's a line in there that says, "It is not easy to overestimate its evil effects." And then there's also stuff like the drowning of a town called Kappkellen, which was the last 100% fully Welsh speaking town in Wales, and it was drowned to make a reservoir for Liverpool, which they never used. And the Welsh people were outvoted because there were more English representatives in Westminster than they were Welsh at the time because Wales didn't have their own parliament, so they didn't really get a say in it. And also the other reason I didn't do this sooner is because this [laughter] is the kind of stuff that I heard on the way into the games industry as a Welsh person going to places like London, Guilford and Brighton. And it was often then led with then ostracization among communities because they view me as lesser. And this was massively effective toward me entering the games industry for a while cuz I come from poverty. So I was I was getting as much money as I could together so I could get into the games industry and that was insanely hard. So I was spending all my money going to London, Guilford and Brighton only to then be shamed about my own culture and not given work. And it took a while for me to get in. But a friend of mine told me that a good thing to do in this situation is to look at little ways that you can make resistance to boost your own confidence because that's what she does for women in the games industry because she has to deal with men all the time. So, um, she told me, "Do little things of resistance because it will build your confidence." And one of those things of resistance was translating this game. And now, Busbound is the biggest game to have ever shipped with Welsh text and voice over because of that. So now, instead of compiling shaders in English, you can compile shaders in Welsh. [music] >> [music] >> So, thank you. [applause] So, that was one example of resistance in the face of really mean people. But there's loads of other ways you can do it as well. Whether it's for your own culture or for the cultures of people you care about or just cultures you come across at all. Something I have done to kind of retrain myself as a person over time with dealing with negative people is I went from a defeist mindset of there's nothing I can do to immediately repeating to myself there's definitely something I can do. I just haven't found it yet. So what is it? And that's the mindset that I've started to gain. And I just start applying that where I can anytime I see something go wrong. And I did a bunch of those on the game. So, I want to kind of inspire you to show you little things that I did as well inside of the game for different cultures. One of them is the Toelche language. I added an asset with this language inside of the game. So, I mentioned the treachery of the blue books earlier. In response to that, 250 Welsh people asked Argentina for some land in Patagonia and Argentina said yes, but it wasn't their land to give because it belonged to the Towel people. And over time, that area of Patagonia was heavily colonized by a lot of people and is now primarily speaking Spanish with a small 5K community speaking Welsh. And the um if you see on the right there, you'll see Javier Domingo. He codified and collected everything about the Talce language with Dora Manado there, who was the last native speaker of Dwalce, who died in 2019. And there is still a small community speaking it, but the language now exists as dormant. And thankfully, there's more people in the Welsh speaking community that are actually wondering whether or not we should still celebrate our resistance in Argentina when this language now lies dormant. And I wish there was more done about that. So, I kind of wanted to prompt it a bit by adding toce into an asset in the game. And there's a little website at the bottom there for the actual community that speaks to these days. Another one I added as well to the game was an asset that included the Woon language of southern Belgium because I was in a conversation where someone was talking about how Woon was kind of stomped out of Belgium in favor of French and was also suffered with the same levels of punish punishment, shame, humiliation as Welsh did, but much more successful. And then the French speaker in the room decided to cheer as if the French had just won a match in the football. If you ever find yourself cheering like a football hooligan at the destruction of someone's culture, please go to therapy. Another thing I did as well, because I really like to do a lot of research when I work on a video game, I like to dive into the kind of cultures and the kind of sounds that an environment might have so that I can do a good representative job of the game that I'm working on. So, because it was set in fictional Nashville, I decided to search Nashville history and everything that came up was just country music and super whitewashed. I'm just like, if Nashville is a music city, there's got to be some blues and jazz in there. And I was right. Um, Jefferson Street was the music district, the black music district of Nashville. And it was places where like people who got their start was like Jimmyi Hendris, Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, and others had their start in this community. And because of a very nasty technique called redlinining, which is a racist way of getting rid of properties in the US, they built the I-50 highway straight over Jefferson Street. and Lorenzo Washington there pictured he wouldn't have it. So he ended up collecting as many relics as he could from that street and turned his own house on Jefferson Street into a museum to make sure that stuff was protected and it protected the legacy. He also did it so that his house would then become on the civil rights trail in Nashville which guaranteed the community having a bus stop because they didn't have one. So, I reached out to Narrative and I was like, "Hey, can we have a Jefferson Street in the music district in the game?" And then from there, I spoke to Design and I was like, "Can we get Lorenzo a little building in the game, like a nod to him and everything that he's done to preserve music culture?" So, we worked together and we added Lorenzo's sound shack, which is a building that's referencing Soul Shack Records, which is what Lorenzo Washington started in the ' 70s. So it talks about him being a local legend in the description and was a legendary place of local music culture and how he saved the music district. So I did lots of little things there and I hope your take away from that is that there are little methods of resistance that we can do on behalf of people or for ourselves. The important thing if it's someone else's culture is to do research from their cultures perspective and not give into any bias opinions and make sure you consult with people that care and represent for those cultures so that you can do a good job. And like this wasn't in my job description. None of this that I've listed in this talk is in my job description, but I did it anyway. And I want people to start thinking about the fact that we can actually do a lot more, whether it's in our hobbies or in our jobs that are outside of our job descriptions, to make places more culturally inclusive and include voices that would maybe not be considered. And also, if you're a white person, don't do white savior crap. Please don't do it for your own ego. Do it because it's actually the right thing to do and it's a method of resistance. In the words of Dye from the movie Pride, when you're in a battle against an enemy so much bigger than you and much stronger than you, and you find you've got a friend that you didn't know existed, that's the best feeling in the world. So, be that friend. Find ways to help. And of course, mind your language. Thank you. [applause]