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Codemasters’ Amandine Mairiaux discusses the key skills needed for her role as an assistant localisation manager at the studio behind racing titles such as Dirt, F1 and Grid.
What is your job role?
I coordinate the translation of all Codemasters assets – everything from in-game text and speech to manuals and promotional materials – into several languages.
I liaise every day with external translation vendors in many countries and our internal teams in Birmingham and Southam to make it happen.
How would someone become an assistant localisation manager?
There are several ways: the ‘classical’ path, which I took, is to get a degree in translation first. Then, get a junior position in a localisation department for a developer or a translation agency specialising in video games.
What qualifications and/or experience do you need?
You need to be at least bilingual, have good communication skills, but also be good at multitasking among other things. The best experience you can get is by being a localisation intern for developers while you’re still studying.
It builds up your network of contacts and you get to learn a lot about video games localisation, which is quite a specific domain.
If you’re interviewing someone to join your team, what do you look for?
Someone with an attention to detail, multilingual, flexible, but who is also sociable as you need to liaise with many people. Being a gamer is not essential, but it does help when anticipating/discussing issues.
What opportunities are there for career progression?
You can either progress vertically and manage a localisation department, or horizontally by joining a development team after a few years as an associate producer, for example. You then become the point of contact for localisation but on the studio side.
Why choose to follow a career in your field?
If you’re passionate about languages, games and a little crazy, then look no further and hop on the localisation train.
