Working in the gaming industry can feel like a dream job for many. Being a part of the creation, development, and global launch of a beloved game is every gamer’s dream. Taking a game worldwide, however, is no small feat; it requires tight coordination, smart tools, extensive experience, and a whole lot of behind-the-scenes work.
Video game translation is a highly complex process because it demands context awareness, requires a high level of accuracy, involves large volumes of text, and covers many languages. When the translation process is not managed within a single environment, it can quickly lead to wasted time and unnecessary costs.
One of the most critical yet often underestimated parts of the process is localization. This means adapting a game’s content, including dialogue, cultural references, UI elements, and file formats, so that it resonates with players in different countries and regions.
Localization ensures that a game feels natural, culturally relevant, and fully functional, no matter where it’s played. Without the right tools to easily manage all translation projects, even the best games can face costly delays and have a reduced impact in international markets.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
We’ve gathered the most common challenges encountered by studios and will share with you how translation technology can help eliminate them.
With live-service models, frequent updates, and massive volumes of content, from UI text and voice lines to lore and dialogue trees, modern games constantly evolve. For example, The Sims 4 is available in 18 languages, and managing updates across all of them can be time-consuming. With the right tools, assigning translation projects to your regular translators can take just minutes, greatly speeding up your release process.
Take, for instance, Cyberpunk 2077. It required over 2,400 localization specialists to translate more than 1.1 million words into 19 languages. This highlights just how massive and delicate game localization can be.
Game translators often work without visuals, tone cues, or character context. This can lead to awkward, confusing, or even offensive translations. Without the full context, meaning can be lost, immersion can break, and a game’s reputation can suffer.
There are multiple real-life instances where problematic wording has made it into games due to a lack of cultural awareness or context. Every player has heard or experienced a mistranslation that just felt off. Beyond simply feeling off, this problematic wording can sometimes entirely disrupt your gaming experience. A translation management system that provides translators with narrative, tone, and visual context can help prevent these issues and ensure a smoother, more authentic player experience worldwide.
Over the years, some releases are remembered for their awkward phrasing and broken English. In these instances, tight timelines affected the quality and broke immersion, clearly showing how errors can directly impact the player experience.
Delays in reviewing or implementing localization can slow down the entire production pipeline, creating extra costs and frustration for developers. When a game launches globally, these bottlenecks can mean missing crucial release windows or relying on last-minute patches, both of which can damage the player’s trust.
In contrast, having a well-planned translation workflow not only ensures higher quality but also allows for smoother collaboration between translators, testers, and developers, helping your game reach audiences faster and with the polish it deserves.
Shared universes and sequels rely on consistent language to maintain immersion and brand identity. Without centralized term management, names and lore can shift across titles, confusing fans. A single real-world project can involve hundreds, even thousands of files, making consistency a Mission Impossible-type challenge.
Think of the Mario franchise. For decades, players across the world have known that Bowser is always Bowser, not “King Koopa” in one game and something else in another. Power-ups like the “Super Star” or “Fire Flower” have retained the same names and functions, reinforcing familiarity and nostalgia. This consistency is a reason why Nintendo’s games feel timeless: players can jump into any new title and immediately feel at home in the world.
In contrast, when terminology drifts or is poorly managed, fans take notice. In some cases, gamers even turn to the original-language versions for clarity, highlighting how damaging inconsistent terminology can be. Glossaries and in-environment term bases aren’t just time-savers; they’re crucial for preserving the world you’ve built and for delivering a cohesive experience across every release.
Localization must integrate seamlessly with development workflows or proprietary setups. If tools don’t play nicely together, teams waste time on manual tasks and risk build-breaking errors.
Teams can become frustrated when large translation files cause automated build systems to fail, ultimately delaying the releases. Also, if content is translated from an intermediary language instead of the source text, the likelihood of tone mismatches and loss of meaning greatly increases.
Early collaboration between developers and translation teams can prevent these issues. Without a translation-friendly pipeline, even the best translations may never appear correctly in the final game.
Without systems to track versions and changes, managing files can be a real challenge. Between multiple branches, updates, and vendors, duplicate files, outdated strings, or overwritten translations are all too common.
In one project, if hundreds of XML files are distributed across disorganized folders, it makes it nearly impossible to maintain order without version control tools. Translators might work on outdated content, and merged changes would run the risk of overwriting the latest updates. As teams grow and projects scale, clean version control and file management become a non-negotiable.
Not every studio has the resources for full-scale quality assurance, in-house teams, or custom integrations. Regardless, the expectation for fast, high-quality translation into 10+ languages remains.
Budget constraints often force studios to rely on external vendors or skip certain quality checks. Even small missteps, like a culturally insensitive phrase slipping into a major market release, can trigger backlash or recalls, with serious consequences for both reputation and revenue.
This is where automation in translation management can make a real difference. By automating repetitive tasks such as project setup, workflow steps, and term base usage, studios can reduce manual work and free up resources to focus on quality rather than tedious processes. Automation ensures that even with limited budgets, teams can maintain consistency, respect regional nuances, and minimize costly errors.
Game translation doesn’t have to be a bottleneck. With memoQ’s Translation Management System (TMS), studios can optimize workflows, ensure consistency, and speed up time to market, all while maintaining quality.
Built for high-volume, fast-paced environments, memoQ TMS helps you manage complex content efficiently by automating repetitive tasks and reusing existing translations. As the Head of Translation at Gameforge puts it, “memoQ helps a lot with repetitive strings… and there are a lot of them in some of our games.” Funstage agrees: “We’re not worried as our workload increases, because we know we have the capacity to deliver on time.”
memoQ also gives translators the context they need through previews, metadata, and comments so they can localize not just the words but the intent and emotion behind them. Whether it’s subtle cultural cues or scene-specific dialogue timing, our tools help ensure nothing gets lost in translation.
Consistency is another common challenge, especially across titles, updates, and regions. memoQ’s glossaries and term bases solve this by keeping terminology aligned. Playrix credits this with helping them “resolve and prevent many consistency-related issues,” calling our built-in glossary “one of its best features.”
Managing varied file types and tracking versions is also an easy task with memoQ. It recognizes tags and formatting to prevent errors and broken builds while giving you version control to stay organized. As Local Heroes said, “memoQ was the connective tissue that made an improbable project possible… not a single XML tag corrupted.”
memoQ TMS also fits perfectly into fast development cycles. Automation, pre-translation, and batch processing help speed up releases and patches. Playrix saw a 30% boost in efficiency, and Gameforge was able to focus more on content than on organizing workflows.
As Logrus IT notes, “overall, using memoQ TMS has helped us manage complex translation workflows more efficiently and has reduced the amount of repetitive manual work, […] and we continue to use it on a wide range of projects.”
memoQ supports regional language variants too, helping you localize for different markets such as Spain and Argentina, or France and Canada.
For teams with tight budgets or limited resources, memoQ offers smart reuse of content and automation to cut costs and manual work. Gameforge noted time savings even in admin tasks like invoicing, while Logrus IT calls memoQ “an integral part of our daily operations.”
From managing complexity to scaling globally, memoQ supports an array of teams, from major industry players to specialized developers. More than 200 gaming companies and localization agencies, including most of the top 20 publishers and developers worldwide trust memoQ for their processes.
As Gamigo puts it, “memoQ TMS has been key to our success over the years. The team’s dedication makes us feel like our success is their top priority.” Star Stable adds: “As the gaming industry evolves with exciting advancements in AI, memoQ continues to innovate and adapt.”
At memoQ, we’ve built our TMS to make teamwork feel effortless. With tools focused on collaboration, automation, and long-term consistency, we help you manage version updates, reuse past translations, and keep everyone synced, no matter where or when they’re working.
Game localization can get complicated, but with memoQ TMS, it just works. And as the gaming world keeps evolving, we keep moving right alongside you. Whether you’re growing your team, expanding into new markets, or launching your next big title, memoQ is ready to support you every step of the way, and companies like Logos Global can attest to it:
“memoQ is hands down the best TMS for game localization. It has lived up to its reputation, dramatically improving the efficiency of our projects.”
Ready to level up your game localization?