German - Rolf Klischewski - Teamed with Josué, Recommended by Sergei Klimov.French - Words of Magic - Teamed with Josué, Recommended by Sergei Klimov.Spanish - Josué Monchan - Recommended by Sergei Klimov.Japanese - PLAYISM - Japanese distributors for the game.Italian - Alain Dellepiane - Met in person.
I also searched for previous games done by each person/team and checked reviews, particularly from bilingual players. I collected all the candidates for each language and sent them the general stats for the game (~12,000 words, pixel art, low-resolution challenges, etc). He’s got loads of connections and put me in touch with a bunch of good people. Unfortunately this wasn’t possible but I did get in touch with him again to ask for localization references. Based on the way the Russian market works, Sergei strongly urged me to have a Russian-language version ready to go for the initial release. When I released the game initially, GOG put me in touch with a Russian producer, Sergei Klimov. Papers, Please was well enough received that many people expressed interest in localizing it from very early. To cover the other languages, I contacted people who’d already offered their help, followed up with contacts made through one of the game’s distributors (GOG), and asked on twitter. That put me on track to find individual localizers for each language instead of a single company that would subcontract everything. He was already a fan of the game and very knowledgable about how it should be translated to keep the nuances intact.Īfter meeting Alain I was certain that his team should do the Italian localization for me. I met him at an industry party and we chatted for a bit about the challenges of localizing a game like Papers, Please. The first person I talked to seriously about localizing the game was Alain Dellepiane from GLOC. We had a pretty rough experience with that and I wanted to avoid the same thing this time. The best we could afford given our limited time and money was a one-stop shop that subcontracted all the work for cheap. They had a reliable stable of voice and writing talent around the world, in every language.
Two of those were big AAA games with the full weight of Sony’s worldwide resources behind them. Finding Localizersīefore Papers, Please, I’d worked on three games that went through the localization process.