[b][u]30:20 – Tom Slattery[/u][/b] 27) Tom Slattery is a localization manager at Bungie. He manages a full team of people who take content that others have made and convert that into written or spoken language. They’re not so much the sole translators but more so the localization editors, they don’t translate everything but they look over all the translations to make sure things look right. 28) You would think translation is simple, but when you throw slang, idioms, and metaphors into the mix it can be difficult to convey meaning. There’s an anecdote about trying to translate “Riding Shotgun” into German. 29) Tom’s job is more management than translating, manages the team, the schedule, meets with various other teams at Bungie, the people who do the website and the writing. This is the first time they’ve had an in-house localization team at Bungie, some of the benefits was quicker turn-around time which allows for more last-minute tweaks, and the localization team has direct access to the rest of the game and their developers for immediate questions. 30) Tom speaks Japanese and English. He likes English the most because he knows it very well. 31) Tom originally got a degree in Computer Science and went on to teach public middle school English. He only had a minor in Japanese, and he happened into the career field when he moved to Japan to teach more middle school English, and he became a Game Translator, translating Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger for the DS, some Zelda games. 32) Building the localization team was a long and difficult process, they started with writing samples in their language, Activision helped to evaluate and test candidates before bringing them into the Bungie Interview. 33) These translators actually interface with the community, they’ve been coached on interacting with us voracious forum-goers. 34) These people are important, there’s an entire world out there that is cut off by a language barrier which makes it hard to talk about Destiny. 35) Localization can be tough because you go around and tell people “This won’t work, you need to do this a different way”, things like “use an icon instead of words” and so on and so forth. It can be a pain, but it often leads to better site design as a whole. 36) There’s an amusing anecdote about how the Bungie Employees going to Germany couldn’t use a certain English word because phonetically in German it sounds like a really terrible phrase that would result in getting punched in the face by the German fans. 37) It’s not just translating words into other words, you have to understand the cultures of the countries that you are translating for. Things like “German audiences are very stoic, don’t feel bad if you don’t get wild cheering like at E3”. 38) The biggest challenge is that they’re at the tail end of development, once everything is locked down they get ahold of it and they have to get it turned around as quickly as possible. Anticipating problems and trying to influence people before they lock things down is a huge part of making the job smoother, as is getting them to prioritize jobs that will be harder to localize or would benefit from more time being polished from a localization standpoint. 39) Bungie.net currently supports four full localizations, Spanish, French, German, and Italian, and one partial localization for Brazilian / Portuguese. 40) DeeJ’s American voice is hilarious. 41) Not every news article gets translated, for example, they don’t carve pumpkins in Europe, so they didn’t translate that on over to the European languages. 42) DeeJ’s puns make translation difficult. 43) Bungie.net translations might die down as the game nears completion, but it’s worth it because the game will reach out to sectors of the globe that they’ve never reached out to before. 44) German seems to be the most popular of the five localizations. 45) If anyone can find Halcylon and Tom out in the wild they have drinks and beta codes.