Hiring a Japanese translator for your game: what to look for and how to brief them
General translation ability and game translation ability are related but not the same skill. A translator can be excellent at legal or business documents and still struggle with dialogue that needs to sound like a specific character speaking naturally, or with UI strings constrained to a handful of characters. Hiring for a game means evaluating for the right thing.
This is especially true for Japanese, where register, sentence-ending particles, and pronoun choice carry character voice in ways that do not map cleanly from English. A translator without game experience may produce grammatically correct Japanese that no character would actually say.
Game experience versus general translation experience
Ask specifically about games, not just translation in general. A translator who has worked on games has already dealt with the recurring problems your project will hit: text with no visible context, variables that get substituted at runtime, character limits imposed by a UI, and dialogue that has to sound spoken rather than written.
General translation experience is not worthless — strong general language skill is a prerequisite either way — but it does not by itself predict how someone will handle those game-specific constraints. Ask for game-specific examples of past work, not just a general portfolio.
Ask for a paid sample of your actual text
The single most useful evaluation step is a small paid sample translated from your own game's actual text, not a generic test passage. Generic tests measure general translation skill; a sample of your text measures whether this translator can handle your characters, your tone, and your specific technical constraints like placeholders and line breaks.
Paying for the sample is the honest version of this: unpaid 'test' translations are real work, and asking for free labor as a screening step is a bad way to start a working relationship with someone whose judgment you are about to rely on.
Give context and character notes up front
A translator working from a bare list of lines with no context will guess, and Japanese in particular has enough register and pronoun options that a wrong guess is easy to make and hard to catch later. Before sending any text, prepare:
- Who is speaking each line, their age, personality, and relationship to the person they are speaking to
- Where the line appears in the game and what happens around it
- A glossary of proper nouns, recurring terms, and any names that should not be translated
- Notes on tone — is this line meant to be formal, casual, comedic, threatening
Agree on register and terminology before volume work
Before committing to translating the bulk of your text, agree on register (how formal the game's Japanese should read overall) and settle key terminology — character names, place names, item and skill names — in writing. Changing register partway through means re-translating everything that came before it, and inconsistent terminology is one of the most common and most visible quality problems in translated games.
A shared glossary that both you and the translator can reference and update is worth setting up even for a small project; it is the cheapest way to prevent the same term from being rendered three different ways across the game.
Evaluating consistency without reading Japanese
You do not need to read Japanese to catch real problems. Consistency is checkable mechanically: does the same term in your glossary appear the same way everywhere it is used in the translated file, do character names stay consistent, do placeholders and formatting markers survive translation unchanged, and are line breaks and character limits respected.
For anything about whether the writing sounds natural or matches a character's voice, you will need a second opinion — a native speaker not involved in the translation, even someone outside the industry, can flag lines that read stiff, inconsistent, or out of character, even without knowing anything about game translation specifically.