That is what happens when a game is translated one line at a time. The word Save has no context on its own, so the translator guesses, and the guess ships.
A line of game text arrives with no scene attached. Is Fire! an order to shoot, or something burning? Is Bolt lightning, or crossbow ammunition? A human who has read the whole script knows. A tool working line by line does not, and it will answer differently every time it meets the word.
So I do not work line by line. Before anything gets translated I build two things with you: a short brief about the game (setting, tone, who speaks how) and a glossary of every term that has to stay fixed. Then the text is translated with the whole document in view, and every line is read and edited by hand afterwards.
Constructed examples, using the failure modes that actually turn up in shipped games.
Note rows two and one. Bolt is the same English word and both Spanish answers are correct. Which one is right depends entirely on whether the player is casting it or loading it, and nothing in the string itself says which.
Spain and Latin America split on the second person, and it is not cosmetic. An order to a squad is ¡Disparad! in Spain and ¡Dispara! almost everywhere else. Pick one at the start, or the game sounds like two different translators. I default to neutral Latin American Spanish, which reads naturally to the largest audience, and I will do Spain instead if that is your market.
%s, {player} and the rest come through untouched and in an order that still makes sense in Spanish, which is not always the English order. Broken placeholders crash builds; that is not an acceptable thing to hand back.
If a region is called The Ashlands in the menu, it is not something else on the death screen. Proper nouns, items and skills are locked in the glossary before translation starts, so they cannot drift halfway through the script.
Some lines genuinely cannot be resolved from the text. Spanish forces a gender that English hides, a joke turns on a pun, a title depends on who is speaking. Those come back flagged with a question, not quietly guessed. You know exactly which lines to look at.
Formats today: .po / gettext · JSON. Anything else, send me a file and I will tell you straight away whether I can handle it.
I am starting out. I do not have a shelf of shipped titles to point at, and I would rather say that here than have you find out three emails in.
So the first sample is free and there is no obligation attached to it. Send me a scene, a boss's mechanics, one character's dialogue, whatever you think is hardest. You get it back translated, with the glossary I built and the lines I flagged, and you decide from the actual work rather than from anything on this page.
On tooling: I use AI-assisted translation, driven by the glossary and game brief described above, and I read and edit every line myself before it goes back to you. I mention it because you would reasonably want to know, and because a translator who hides it is a translator you cannot check. The free sample exists so the quality answers this instead of me.
Tell me the game and what state the text is in. I answer everything.
juan@rampoldi.es