Nina Hampton
Welcome to the ROAR podcast, ROAR podcast is produced by the Middlebury Institute Translation and Localization Management program, bringing together global voices from the localization industry, I’m Nina Hampton, and I’ll be your host for today’s episode. Today, I sat down with Becca Guttentag, a localization producer at Riot Games to talk about her journey into games localization, workflows and processes associated with producing and localizing a AAA game, the structure of Riot’s localization team, what makes it good localization producer, and why you shouldn’t be afraid to admit that you don’t know something.
Nina Hampton
Hi Becca, thank you so much for joining me today.
Becca Guttentag
Hi, thank you for having me. Glad to be here.
Nina Hampton
Could you please introduce yourself?
Becca Guttentag
Yeah, my name is Becca Guttentag. I was a 2018 through 2020, student at Middlebury Institute in the TLM program. And I’m currently working as a localization producer at Riot Games.
Nina Hampton
That’s awesome. So could you take us through your journey with localization?
Becca Guttentag
Yeah, so the story that I always tell is that when I was in high school, you know, Capcom had released a game called the Ace Attorney series that I was eating up at the time. And I found out that the localization producer on that game, had a blog series that was kind of showing up on all of the social media sites that I was following for this game. As I read through it, I remember she talked about all of her experiences taking such a unique game and localizing it, to make it make sense to an American audience the challenges that she had to do for that. And I remember at the time thinking, like, this is the coolest thing, you get to do that as a job. And then I promptly forgot about it totally went in a different direction, ended up, you know, going to college studying different things ended up in Japan. And as I was finishing up my time on teaching with the JET Program, which is an English teaching program that is run by the Japanese government, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, because I didn’t want to keep teaching English. And it turns out that one of my friends was also going to the Middlebury Institute mentioned it and said, you know, this is a great program for this thing called localization. And it was like I was hitting the back of the head with all of those memories of that blog series that I had read nearly a decade prior. And it kind of hit me that maybe this is something that I can actually pursue as a career, why not try it? So I did. And that’s that that’s how I came to be at the Middlebury Institute. That’s how I ended up making game localization my focus and how I’ve been able to pursue it now.
Nina Hampton
So did you go in wanting specifically to specialize in game localization,
Becca Guttentag
it was one of those things where it was always a dream. And you know, the localization industry is so varied and has so many different aspects that it coincides with. But I knew for me that games were such a passion of mine, the unique storytelling abilities that it allows for, the more active role that players can take versus passively taking something in. So you really need to make sure that that localization speaks to the players, no matter where it’s being sent to globally. So I knew that that was something that really interested me. And I decided, during my time at MIIS that I was going to try to focus my energy and all of my around schoolwork into trying to make that happen.
Nina Hampton
Do you feel like your time at MIIS prepared you for your current career?
Becca Guttentag
It definitely prepared me in a lot of ways, some that are obvious, and some that are not so obvious. You know, the localization industry, obviously, we’ve been localizing and translating things for a very long time. But actually having a degree program for this an actual, you know, regimented, educational program for it is kind of new. So, on the one hand, I was able to get hands on experience in a world that I really didn’t know, you know, I had done some translating on my own just pet projects, but I had never touched a translation CAT tool. I had never, you know, seen, especially when it came to game localization, how text in a game gets translated. So there was a lot of the concrete things that the classroom taught me at MIIS. But then there was a lot of the more, I guess, ephemeral stuff that we learned, you know, just through being in the program. Getting that network of connections from other alumni, getting the kind of worldly experience of other alumni, learning from people in other programs, who could help, you know, expand my view of not just the languages, but how other people were using them. How that could play into some of these other- or some industries that crossover with Loc. And obviously, the connections to different conferences and programs that we were able to get into or experience because of people who understood the MS program.
Nina Hampton
You’ve mentioned that going to the Game Developers Conference was really important for you. Can you talk about your experience there?
Becca Guttentag
Yeah. So in my first year at the Middlebury Institute, I was, like I said, I was trying to make game localization my thing, but I didn’t know the first thing about it. You know, we were very lucky to have some alumni who had worked in the games industry, and professors like Max had tangentially touched it or directly touched it. So we could learn from their experiences. But there was so much that, you know, a localization focused degree program and a language focus degree program can teach you about that, you know, world, but not so much about actually what is being made in the games, how you do, how you do actually take assets that need translation, and make sure they get translated, what are the pitfalls of it.
Becca Guttentag
So I, at that time, was looking for opportunities. Max had mentioned that there was a conference called the Game Developers Conference, I did a little bit of digging and found out that they had what was called the conference associate position. And it just so happened that around the time I was looking into this program, which was November ish, they were taking applications. So I said, Well, this is a shot in the dark, because I am a student, which is what the project really looks for. But I’m not in the game industry yet. So since this is the Game Developers Conference, most of the people who are attending our actual developers, whether this be the programmers, people who do the art assets, people who write the narrative, all of that, which localization is a part of, but didn’t have the biggest representation at the event itself. So I applied on a whim and tried my best to make my essay sound like, I’m really interested in this part of the industry. I know, localization touches it, but I need to learn from actual developers, please take me. And I was very lucky that they did. It was an amazing experience to be able to, as a student, be involved in this organization. But as one of the staff members be able to, in my free time, attend events, and really learn from developers giving speeches about what they were doing in games that I had no visibility in, outside of my, you know, very basic Google searching.
Nina Hampton
Have you been able to attend since working at Riot?
Becca Guttentag
So unfortunately, you know, my second year at MIIS, I was going to apply for it I got in, I was so excited for the 2020 Game Developers Conference. And it was maybe the week right before that, that they actually canceled the event. Because obviously COVID was starting to spread. So unfortunately, I have not been able to go back since then. But I do have some colleagues who are going to be attending this year. So I’m very jealous of them. And I’m hoping to kind of cruise along with them next year.
Nina Hampton
Yeah, I’ve looked at the schedule. Looks like there’s a lot of cool panels going on.
Becca Guttentag
Oh, yeah. And every so often, we get a localization panel, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that maybe one of these days, I’ll be able to make a case for Riot to send me in to speak about localization. But we’ll see.
Nina Hampton
So prior to your work out, right, you worked at Keywords Studios, can you talk a little bit about that experience and how it differs from your current role?
Becca Guttentag
Yeah, so when I came straight out of MIIS during the summer internship period, between my first and second year, I had worked at a smaller LSP focusing on brand and marketing localization. And that had been a great kind of generic LSP education really got my hands dirty, with things like SDL Trados and actually taking projects. But again, the world of game localization is so different. So when I graduated, I was very lucky to have been given the opportunity by two people at the company who I had met at, not the Game Developers Conference, but the Game Global Conference.
Becca Guttentag
So when I started, they knew that I had this experience at the Middlebury Institute, hands-on with CAT tools. I had touched something like MemoQ, but it was really my first opportunity to be a project manager for localization, for games specifically, and game-specific content. So instead of Word files and text-based assets, and very easy text-based files, it was JSONs and or .JSON files. It was, you know, very complicated Excel files that are that have a lot of different information about a lot of different pieces of items and inventory things, character names, such as stuff like that, that was very different to what I had been doing at the more generic LSP. I was also working with about, I want to say at any given time, 10 different clients at varying levels of activity. So there were some that were coming to me like once a month with a huge batch of materials to have on a very regular schedule to send off to the translators. And then there were clients that were every single day sending some small little requests with very different file types and very different formatting every time. So it kept me very busy. But it also gave me such a huge range of experience with these many different companies running their text in very different ways having very different genres to, you know, have to source very different translators for and very different languages for. So it really was a high-paced, very intense experience to be a pm on the vendor side. But it was so incredibly useful to expand my knowledge of all the different ways that all these different companies were running their stuff.
Nina Hampton
Yeah, we talk a lot about stakeholder management in the program. And it seems like you’ve got a lot of experience with that early on.
Becca Guttentag
Yeah, yeah. And that’s one of those things that, like you said, you can learn about that in the classroom, and you can hear everyone’s stories of how to deal with it. And you can go into your job thinking, Oh, no, how to push back? Oh, no. How to say No means no, or that’s not possible. Can we do this instead, and it sometimes doesn’t go as planned. And those were definitely big lessons for me to learn at the beginning. And I definitely shot myself in the foot a few times by making promises to appeal to stakeholders, while not doing my due diligence to really push back and say, you know, I’m not saying no, for nose sake, or because I don’t want to here’s why. We may need this amount of time, or you may want to do this language instead of that one.
Nina Hampton
Yeah, and especially working with many different clients, I’m sure it’s hard to juggle.
Becca Guttentag
You get really good at filtering your inboxes.
Nina Hampton
Can you talk a little bit about what your day-to-day looks like now as a localization producer for Valorant?
Becca Guttentag
Yeah, so when I was at Keywords, my life as a project manager was project-based, it was very much my day to day was tied to what I was receiving from my stakeholders. So I could have very busy days where just a flood of things are coming in from multiple clients, versus days where suddenly nothing really is happening. So it’s just checking up on the work that’s already in progress. And all that to say that my work was driven by the actual physical requests coming through and making sure that they get sent out and sent back. My job now has very, a very different focus. Because as a producer, my role is less so that very granular, day to day, every single request coming through the valorant Translation pipeline, and more so strategically, planning and acting as the, I keep saying my my go to analogy for this is that if we’ve got the developers as one cog that’s spinning, and the translator’s is another cog that spinning, I’m the one in the middle that makes sure that both are able to spin and do their work as normally and without interruption as possible. So that means that instead of handling individual requests on the day to day, it’s more looking at the trends of the requests that we’re getting fielding questions and concerns from our linguists teams who are saying, maybe we’re seeing this trend and how requesters are requesting things and not giving us this amount of time that’s necessary, or you know, not receiving the correct context documentation. And then on the flip side, listening to the devs as to what kinds of considerations do we need to make to make translation easier? What are some of the linguistic things that we’re not thinking of to be able to advise them on those kinds of questions. So that, again, that pipeline runs as smoothly as possible that our developers know that they are making something that works for our many, many languages, and that our translators are able to translate with all of the context and time that they need.
Nina Hampton
So it seems like your role requires a lot of evangelization of localization.
Becca Guttentag
And I will say that, you know, I’ve been very lucky with the teams that I’ve partnered with that, you know, Riot is, compared to some companies still pretty green, it’s still kind of young, being only slightly older than a decade at this point. And most of our games are barely even two, three years old at this point. So I’ve been very lucky that the teams are built up of people who may be worked on the legacy work of League of Legends, worked at other companies, and then came here. And I’ve faced a lot of great openness from my developer teams to understand who I am, and listen to the kinds of things that I’m trying to pitch. Now it’s not perfect. There are certain times when sometimes when you have a game that’s so old, or that has such a long history, that it’s hard to just one day decide we’re making a big change. Or here’s what would really help us. You have to kind of over time talk to people understand, from the development game team side, like what is blocking the ability to change this practice, and understanding, you know, where you win some battles and where you sometimes might need to shelve it for a little bit longer or have longer conversations to find a middle ground that works.
Nina Hampton
Yeah, so you’re a part of a really great event that the CampLoc team did. About Riot, and terminology. And during that event, you talked a little bit about the organization of the localization team. And can you talk a little bit about the difference between production and operations?
Becca Guttentag
Yeah, so kind of similar to what I was talking about before, where my work at Keywords was granular, and whereas producer has more long reaching, the intent is that operations is handling the day to day work, you know that they are fielding requests, flagging any issues, that they may be having any material that’s not missing. Whereas from the production side, it really is producing an environment that allows everyone to work. So we work in partnership, you know, I would not be able to do my job without my loc ops leads, as well as our regional leads who speak for the various regional offices, because I’m only able to really argue for their case, when I understand their case, and when they make things known to me, and when they are able to flag issues. So my role is really, in the pursuit of making sure that they can work as easily as possible, that, you know, I understand all the pitfalls that are going on, and that I can communicate them properly. So I would say that there, there’s no better role that like, production is very different from the ops work. And I can say that sometimes I really do miss the predictable rhythm of ops work, log on, see the work that’s coming in, set up a request, send it out to the, to the translators upload it and do that same, you know, very, I don’t want to say, not repetitive, but very predictable work. Whereas production is a little more slow paced, it’s harder to see the steps that you are making towards something bigger and better sometimes, because it is such a long process. But for me, it’s been a very fulfilling one. Because when you do get to have a process that kind of clicks into place, or you do have this big effort that you’ve been working on that finally releases, it feels really good to see that, you know, finally reach its endpoint.
Nina Hampton
What are some qualities you would say, make a great localization producer.
Becca Guttentag
Openness to speak. Yeah. And this is one that really it took me a while. But knowing when you don’t know something, and feeling comfortable saying that, because when I came into the game industry, I had my personal life being someone who plays games, I had my personal knowledge and my passions about it. But I wasn’t a developer, I had been to the Game Developers Conference and learned some things. But I’d never physically worked in the string tables in Unreal Engine. So suddenly, there were conversations going on in Slack channels of developers asking me things and asking me for the opinion, that would best help the loc team. And there was a period of time at the beginning where I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t know what I was talking about, or that I didn’t know what they were talking about, as you know, what this kind of file type is what the previous character limits were.
Becca Guttentag
So there was a point, eventually that I realized I kind of just had to say that I didn’t know what was going on. And I was all the better for it. Because the producer only does well when they know what’s going on. And it’s okay to admit that you don’t always know. I would say another thing that’s important as a producer versus ops person or project manager is just personability. Because it’s very easy sometimes to feel like the localization team is kind of an island on its own away from the game team. And there’s kind of that feeling sometimes that you’re the enemy on both sides, where the developers want to do something, and you’re the one having to tell them, ‘no, that’s not going to work.’ You know, that program doesn’t work in that language. Or you’re going to have to, like those really great visual assets that you created that fit the English perfectly, are not really going to work in German that expands 30%. Or, you know, things like that. But on the other hand, you are also sometimes feeling like the enemy to the linguists, when you have to say, well, the marketing team has this asset that needs this deadline, and they didn’t tell me early enough, and I’m just communicating this to you now. And we really don’t have any flexibility.
Becca Guttentag
So yeah, it helps when you are open to people about this, that you make it known that you’re listening to their grievances. And even if you can’t change, change it in the moment, being someone who is determined to keep with it, and find ways to puzzle around it in the future. You can’t always affect the instant moment. But it’s trends, it’s all towards a future goal.
Nina Hampton
What are some unique localization challenges that Valorant poses?
Becca Guttentag
So let’s think unique ones to Valorant. So there’s always certain things like, there’s UI elements that make it again, that argument of something can look so beautiful, and so pretty in English, and then suddenly, it’s, you know, you don’t have the exact space needed for other languages. But in a more Valorant-specific kind of answer, I would say that, compared to our other properties, Valorant is really unique in that, you know, League of Legends, Legends of Runeterra, Wild Rift, those are all in the world of Runeterra. And it’s a fantasy realm where we can take inspiration from the real world and apply it to characters, we have a new champion that we just released, who takes a lot of inspiration from, you know, Southern American cultures, Latin American cultures, but isn’t really tied specifically to a very specific cultural identity.
Becca Guttentag
Valorant, though, is our only game that takes place in our world, or a very parallel similar world to our own, which means that in our effort to be as unapologetically global and really align our characters with our players identities, we need to be very, very thoughtful in how we are doing that. And when this works really well, it works really well we get characters who speak to our players in a really powerful way. For example, we don’t actually put the game into Hindi. But last year, we released a character who is from India, and we had all these players in India who were playing in the English version. So they were suddenly coming up to us in comments and so on social media at our events in India to kind of hype up this character saying, not only is this like really cool character representation, but it feels hip and modern. It’s not, you know, based in mysticism which sometimes happens to us a lot, it feels really authentic to the character that you’re creating and to a modern player of this game. And that always feels great.
Becca Guttentag
It feels less great when there are communities that we’re not speaking to as well, or communities that feel maybe slighted in some ways, I can speak to the fact that we have certain limitations with the languages that we can represent. And the languages that make sense for us to then localize into. So for example, we’ve been doing Portuguese for Brazil for a really long time. And recently, we were able to give some representation to European Portuguese through one of our maps that takes place in kind of an alternate dimension, Lisbon of sorts.
Becca Guttentag
And it was really great to see our players who were from that area feel represented in the VO that was playing on the map, and in all of these signage and stuff in Portuguese. But suddenly, we’re getting requests like, well, you know, you did all of this in our language, when are we going to see the dub of the or when are we going to see it Portuguese for Europe dub? When are we going to see that language option? And there’s a lot of things that go into making a decision like that, that we can’t just flip the switch and say, Yes, we’re sending it to your language hold tight. So making those decisions can be difficult sometimes. And my position is then to support with both data as to show you know, do we have the number of players to support making a whole effort to do this translation in a totally new language for all of the legacy material we’ve had until now? What is our capacity? Can we test those kinds of decisions that make my role important to both player expression but also realistic goals?
Nina Hampton
Yeah, so earlier, you mentioned that you had to learn how to ask questions and learn to how to admit when you didn’t know something, and as students or young professionals are usually really afraid of failure. So could you talk about a time when you failed forward, or you failed? And then learn something? And we’re able to move past that?
Becca Guttentag
Oh, yeah. Let me think of a specific example. Because there have been many cases of failing. I’ll give one right now that I’m kind of, I mean, I’ve been with Riot for a year. And I have not been perfect the whole time, there have been times that I’ve been learning and growing from my mistakes, but they happen now. And sometimes it can be something as simple as being the producer, I get a lot of visibility on many, many things early, which is meant for me to then be able to communicate that to our game teams for them to be able to scope properly. And I put a lot of work into making sure that I’m keeping track of all of these new game modes or new characters or new releases, but sometimes something sneaks in, and I take it in and then forget to communicate it to the right people.
Becca Guttentag
So we recently had an asset that’s going to be released, that is a, for me, a totally new form of media that we are localizing into. And I have colleagues who have done that before. So let’s say for example, it’s not but let’s say it’s a book. So I’ve had colleagues who have done book publishing like our Ruination novel. And so I communicated to my production teammates, I talked to the marketing producer who’s working on this, I understood what he was planning and said, Great, do you have a timeline? He said, Not yet. But I’ll get that to you soon. I said, Great. Okay. And I completely forgot to follow up with him in time. And as I did remember, I, you know, I came to his doorstep to say, do you have that timeline? And he said, Yes, we have it. Here it is. And I looked at it, and it was meant to start the next day. And suddenly, I’m realizing, I have not communicated this to the because it’s not only you know, going into English, it’s going into one language for print earlier than others. And that team is sometimes so overburdened with other work that language team that giving them something late can mean really crunch timelines.
Becca Guttentag
So suddenly, it was me trying to understand the schedule, understand what was what could be moved, what couldn’t in this big long Gantt chart that we have, what is the actual follow through of which item unblocks each of these steps, so we can know, you know, maybe we can give two days to this, maybe we can’t take two days away from this because that asset has to be ready that day from this other vendor team. So when you realize you haven’t properly communicated a schedule, until you’re really too deep in the weeds, it can feel really awful. But thankfully, things have a way of working out in the sense that it may not be perfect. And, you know, you may end up making a couple people a little mad. But like you said, that failure, I am so locked on to the next time I have this kind of asset. They people talk about you get traumatized by your failure, like certain failures so that you know that you’re not going to make that mistake again. And that’s the good lesson to take from it and something that I constantly try to remind myself, because it’s better to admit to those failures and make a promise to learn than to kind of try to hide them away and pretend like it never happened at all.
Nina Hampton
Can you talk about your proudest accomplishment and the time that you’ve been at Riot?
Becca Guttentag
Yeah, so this is going to be kind of a weird one. But when I joined Riot, last February, I was supposed to come into a team that was working on the currently live games. So it’s a backup system, we call them pods. And for my pod, since we were doing some shuffling around with me as the new hire, they said, We’ll give Becca League of Legends because it’s the most long standing one. It has a lot of history, the people who work on it have been working with look for a really long time. And I was like, Oh, this is so great. This is like the game. And then a week after I was hired, the producer on Valorant said, Hey, guys, I’m leaving next week. And suddenly, we were thrown into chaos. Because you know, my other person on my pod, besides the one who was leaving works out of Dublin.
Becca Guttentag
So suddenly, we were realizing there were going to be five hours a day that I did not have support from another producer. And not only was I handling League of Legends and learning League of Legends, suddenly, I also had to be balancing Valorant at the same time, and Teamfight Tactics at the same time. And this is for me as like not only new to Riot new to the production role, new to all of these products. And I was terrified. I was absolutely mortified and terrified.
Becca Guttentag
And to the point from earlier, feeling like I didn’t know anything was so much more terrifying because I had so much on my shoulders to kind of bear the weight of when my other producers weren’t online because of time differences. So I think my proudest accomplishment really was is kind of twofold. One, it was just surviving that and having an amazing team who was able to guide me through it and teach me how to fail so that I could learn and become better. But it was really interesting having that experience of having to shoulder multiple products and learn all of them at once. It gave me really unique insight into okay, well what is working on League that’s not working in Valorant, what has Valorant been able to do being said, like a newer product that has been able to learn from the lessons of League, and like from the get-go us that maybe we could bring into Teamfight Tactics.
Becca Guttentag
And so that was a huge accomplishment to me. In the sense of I, I was able to forge I guess alliances with people on dev teams across multiple products, learn from them bring things from League world into the Valorant world, Valorant world back into the League world. And I would say that I’ve come out stronger from it, but so have our practices in both of those products in many ways. Also we did a lot of our documentation, there was a huge problem where our documentation was out of date. And I was realizing as the new person that no one had updated this in X amount of years. So I’m just going to tinker with these and make it work for me. And that way when we have a new person, maybe it will work for them. And so that thankfully worked out really great.
Nina Hampton
I’m sure all the new hires appreciated that.
Becca Guttentag
I’ve heard a lot of good sentiments about that. It felt very good. It was a good pat on the back.
Nina Hampton
So for my final question, can you give a piece of advice to my students that want to break into game localization?
Becca Guttentag
So, really, the game industry is I mean, it’s a newer industry, it’s an, a form of media that is, in many ways kind of starting to gain legitimacy among a greater population, because people from my generation, like maybe 10 years older than me as well have grown up with games. And so what was once a hobby is now really a fully fledged industry that is becoming just as profitable, if not more profitable than the movie industry in the television industry. So there is a balance between understanding your passion for the games that you love, and understanding where the job begins. So I would say to people who want to get into the industry, chase your passions, know what it is about games that you love, take from those experiences, especially in the local industry, where there are people from all around the world who have you know, for me, it was games from Japan brought into English because Japanese was my second language, it was learning that that could be you know, the amount of work that goes into making something feel made for me as an English speaker, and then vice versa.
Becca Guttentag
That’s what got my passion for this industry going. So understanding that, but then also knowing when to kind of put the fan-girling and fan-personing aside to make sure that you are giving the best advice to your game teams as possible. Learning from other points of the other games in the industry, seeing from other companies, what they’re doing better to address global audiences, and always learning and adapting that as far as being a student and getting into the industry, like the people who work in here, really do love games, and you will never feel like you need to hide your love of games. It’s a boon rather than, you know, a nerdy interest. So don’t be afraid to speak to people in the industry to reach out to just, yeah. Oh, there’s so much that you can do. But it all comes down to passion.
Nina Hampton
Thank you.
Nina Hampton
Thank you for listening to this episode of ROAR, a MIIS podcast bringing together global voices from the localization industry. This episode was made possible with the help of the faculty and students here at the Middlebury Institute and by listeners like you. Thank you. For future episodes, be sure to check out our website at sites.miis.edu/ROAR. You can find more podcasts on Spotify. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you in the next episode.