Casino translation is a highly-niche language service that comes with unique demands compared to your typical translation project. The complex nature of online casinos means you can have dozens or more individual games to translate and localise for multiple audiences, platforms, operating systems and devices.
The amount of work involved in achieving this often comes as a surprise to new brands getting into the online casino industry and ensuring the same level of quality across every game can be a real challenge. Luckily, there are five key steps that you can follow to nail casino translation every time – and here they are.
The 5 key steps of casino translation
Here at Jackpot Translation, we have helped hundreds of clients translate online casino games and websites, so we have learnt a lot over the years about what it takes to achieve the right quality every time and here are the five key steps implemented into every project we handle:
- Use specialist casino translators: The first thing you need to do is get professional translators with experience in working on casino games and the unique challenges of this kind of project.
- Understand the local lingo: Local slang, terminology, in-game phrasing and other vocabulary can vary in different markets, deviating from the typical translation of certain words – something you need to get right every time.
- Localise your games: You also want to localise the code, design and marketing material of your game to facilitate the translation process and make each version more relevant to each market.
- Know what not to translate: In casino games, there are certain terms that remain in English for some markets, but are translated in others – you need to know which ones.
- Language selection: Know how to deliver the right language to each audience most accurately, but also allow users to change language settings easily.
We can’t emphasise enough how important it is to get specialist translators on board who have worked on casino translation projects before. As you can see from some of the other items on the list above, specialist knowledge is crucial because the regular translations of many words are incorrect in many cases. Language pros who have worked on these kinds of projects before will also know what localisation challenges lie ahead. For example, the danger of text expansion breaking user interfaces, how to optimise game code to add/edit languages and the importance of localising your web content for different audiences, too.
Engaging casino players in every language
The translation process itself is only one stage in the much larger task of delivering and engaging experience for casino players in all of your target languages. Your ability to deliver this translated content in the most effective way is crucial and this is what ultimately defines the success of your online casino.
This starts with expert translation, but you also need to make sure the technical side of game translation and localisation is taken care of. So make sure you work with a company that can also help you adapt your website and games beyond the basic translations, so players from every market can enjoy the most immersive experience possible.