I've been thinking about survivorship bias in the translator career for quite a while now — it's been on my mind for a few years, to be honest — and I hope I'm not the only one. It's a somewhat hard subject to tackle, and I don't want to write a full-fledged manifesto, so I'll try to talk about it in a few paragraphs. So, here's the thing: being good at my job took me far, but there was also a lot of luck involved. I got into gameloc at the right moment — just when the Brazilian market was heating up again — through a friend with whom I played Ultima Online 10 years before that — and hadn't met in person at that point yet — and, when the first agency I worked with was bought out and our contracts were cancelled, I was able to get in touch with another one that quickly put things in motion, so I had no downtime and didn't have to live off savings. I understand that many people may look at my portfolio and think it's impressive — and I agree it is, when seen from the outside — but I was very lucky to be at the right place, at the right time, with the right people. It's important, for me at least, to never forget this, because no matter how competent or good someone is, not everyone has, had, or will have the same chances to dazzle people with their words. Now, why am I saying all of this? Because I think that for veterans like me, we have to be careful when advising newcomers on this career so as not to be blinded by our own history of success, and to remember that a lot more people have failed to keep up their careers through no fault of their own. And please, do not take it wrongly, I'm not calling anyone out, and I think it's perfectly fine to celebrate our own success — we just have to be mindful that the path we followed might not exist anymore, and that stories of success aren't always the norm or repeatable. Many times I think about when I almost got out of localization altogether, and I've met many people — good and skilled translators in their own fields — who decided to jump ship because their life events weren't just lining up the right way or at the right time. As freelancers, we are always at the whim of the winds guiding us. So, I don't know, I don't have any conclusion for this. Be proud of where you are right now, but also be humble, I guess.

Lourdes Localizes

It's a weird feeling to have a game you worked on be re-released and to see your translation revisited 11 years later. I'm not gonna lie, there are a lot of things I would've changed if I had, at the time, all the knowledge I currently have, but I guess everyone would do the same if they could. The original translation is still in the game, and it's from a time when gameloc was just being restarted in the Brazilian market so, for many of us, we were going blind and just trying to do our best with what we had in hand. Nonetheless, it's an interesting exercise to see it resurface like that, and a kind of window into my past self and all the work that led me to where I currently am. I find it cool that CDPR kept the credits of the base game, expansions, and the remastered version all accessible within the menus. That's super important! I've been showing around screenshots of the remaster credits — which have me as reviewer and another person (also from the original team) as a translator — but the credits from the original release are still there and have all seven people who worked on it. Getting credit as a video game translator is somewhat new in the industry — in the past, of the big ones, only Ubisoft used to do it consistently — and I'm glad that CDPR is one of the companies that has always shown us support and respect too. When The Witcher 3 was originally released, companies were just starting to notice the Brazilian market again1. Most of the Portuguese translations available were for European Portuguese at the time, so I got into the industry right when the scales started shifting towards the Brazilian variant. Some games would still be released for both languages (and many today still are!), but I guess that ~3/4 of all Portuguese speakers in the world being Brazilians helped a bit2. Back then, there was no proper "localization industry" in Brazil — people with years of experience were few and far between — so we went all in blind. It all worked well in the end but man, as I said before, there were so many things I'd do differently if I knew then what I know now. Anyway, I still haven't had the time to play the remaster, and don't know when I'll be able to, but I hope people find it as enjoyable as when it was released, be it in whatever language they play it. * * * 1. For a time, in the 90s, we had PC games officially translated and dubbed in Brazilian Portuguese, but it all went away in the 2000s.↩ 2. And let's not forget: it's the 5th most-spoken language worldwide at native level, the 3rd most-spoken European language in the world, and the 2nd most-spoken Romance language.↩

A great portfolio is one of the most powerful tools in a translator's arsenal - Beyond showcasing your experience and projects, it reflects your own style, vision and facets of your personality that g...