Roadgames was founded in 2019 and is part of the ‘Draugiem Group’ technology company. Roadgames creates team games for company employees to improve their engagement, communication and overall work culture. Team building events using the Roadgames app are very popular, and judging by how many games have been played, they are a real adventure and an interesting experience that everyone finds memorable. We were the first in Poland to experience this, and we can recommend the app as supplying an interesting range of urban games, in a slightly different format than usual.
Before playing one of the games available on the Roadgames app, we were tasked with translating the content on the Roadgames website and on the dedicated apps for Android and iOS phones. The entire localisation process was carried out with the help of the Lokalise platform, to which we were given access. We carried out the translation from English into Polish. The files on the Lokalise platform were prepared by the client, split into two sections – the Roadgames app and the Roadgames web – which corresponded to the content on the client’s app and website. There were just over 32,000 words in the total pool.
We already have some experience of working with Lokalise, as this project is the second one that we have had the pleasure of translating using this platform. This time, however, we started by translating the presentation in a pptx file. We discussed with the client how formal or informal text should be and for what kind of audience it was intended. This allowed us to understand what the client wanted to offer its audience and allowed us to understand that adapting the game names was key to maintaining the client’s point of view. It was a logical move to leave some of the task names in English, as we believe that the users would better associate with the English name of the game rather than a Polish equivalent.
In the next step, once the localisation of the larger part of the text from the Roadgames-web website was complete, we proceeded to test the website in Polish. We managed to catch a few errors, mostly caused by a lack of context or too literal a translation, up to the eight-fold absence of the letter ‘w’, which should be included in the question for each of the games available on the Roadgames app. For example: “Jak grać w Matchmaker?”, which was ‘How to play Matchmaker’ in the original.
Working with the tool provided by the client would have been quite demanding for the translator, mainly due to the very large number of tags encountered in the translated content. Instead, the client told us which tags were to be left untranslated, and it was clear that these were probably variables that we could not modify. For this type of project, testing the finished website or application is very important and ensures that the product will retain its functionality after translation.
Working with the Lokalise platform was also quite demanding. It was possible to leave a comment in each of the translated segments, which allowed the client to answer our questions in a simple way. We were also asked not to change the currency from euro to the local currency, zloty, in the translation.
A minor problem we encountered was that the finished content from the Roadgames web section was not automatically transferred to the Roadgames app section, even though it was the same. Here, unfortunately, only filtering and manually copying segments that we had already translated before helped.
Ultimately, we consider the project to have been very successful, and we had the opportunity to test our translation on our own during a company integration event in Łódź, which was the first city game using the Roadgames application in Poland
If you have similar projects then you are welcome to contact us and make use of our services. We have considerable experience in translating websites, games and apps, and are constantly expanding our portfolio of creative services clients.
