23 Studios
Four years at a games localisation studio in Ankara, writing Turkish update logs and blog content for Ubisoft, Sports Interactive and Plarium, and supporting the Turkish campaigns for Rainbow Six Siege. The longest run on my CV and the first place I did marketing at all.
The job
Games do not travel on translation. Turkish players had their own vocabulary for a game long before its publisher did, and a patch note that is technically correct while reading like machine output costs a studio credibility it does not get back cheaply.
23 Studios in Ankara does that work for publishers abroad, and has since 2009. I was there for four years, February 2016 to March 2020.
The work
Localisation of update logs and blog content for Ubisoft, Sports Interactive, Plarium and Caravan. Alongside it, support on Turkish marketing campaigns for those publishers, including Rainbow Six Siege across Years 3 to 5.
An update log is not marketing copy and it is not a manual. It is read within the hour by people who know the game better than whoever wrote about it, who will argue about it in public, and who spot a mistranslated ability name immediately. The tolerance for approximation is zero, the deadline is set by a patch that is already built, and there is nobody to escalate to.
I was the junior end of this and the verbs on my CV are the accurate ones: supported, assisted, localised. I did not run those campaigns and I did not decide what they said. What I had instead was four years at close range while global brands decided what a local market was allowed to say in their name, which is not a thing you can usefully read about.
What it taught me
Two things I still use.
A campaign that had worked elsewhere, translated well, usually failed. The translation could be flawless and the thing would land wrong, because what was being sold was not the same in Ankara as it was in Paris. It took me longer than it should have to see that this was not a language problem. It was the first positioning I ever did, several years before I had the word for it.
The audience audits you, immediately, in public. Games marketing has the fastest and least forgiving feedback loop I have worked in. A community reads a season announcement and tells you within a day whether you understood the game, at length, and it is right more often than the people who wrote the announcement. Nothing I have done in paid media since has produced a response that quick or that honest, and it is most of why I distrust a report that only ever agrees with itself.
Afterwards
Localisation is what happens when a languages degree meets an industry that ships on a fixed date. I was reading French language and literature at Hacettepe over most of those four years, and the job I had alongside it was writing about video games in Turkish for publishers abroad.
The line from there to Google Ads accounts in Haarlem is not obvious, and it is straighter than it looks. Both jobs are the same question asked twice: what does this actually mean to the person on the other end, and how would you know if you were wrong.
Worked on, through 23 Studios
- UbisoftTurkish localisation, and campaign support on Rainbow Six Siege for Years 3 to 5.
- Sports InteractiveTurkish localisation of update logs and blog content.
- PlariumTurkish localisation of update logs and blog content.
- CaravanTurkish localisation of update logs and blog content.
