This two-part episode came out of a discussion at one of my meetings, when Harrie shared about her work as a board games translator. I thought this was interesting, both to learn more about this work and to see how people are using board games for language learning – in terms of adults improving their skills, parents with multilingual children, and teachers in the language classroom.
It’s not a topic that I know a lot about. As someone with a visual impairment, it’s hard to find accessible games for me in English, my first language. It’s even harder in my additional ones. So I put up a poll on LinkedIn to see what others thought about the topic and then asked if some of them would like to come on the podcast for a group discussion. In the end, we had 6 people who wanted to take part, so I made two groups. This is the first one, with Harrie, Gabriela, and Raquel.
We talked about:
Experiences of playing games in additional languages
Localisation choices that are made to improve the user experience and how those choices can be affected by attitudes toward the original language
How playing games with multilingual children can help them to develop their language skills and discover more about language and culture
The balance between localisation and keeping terminology consistent for player discussions online
How to manage cultural references and deal with names in games
Links between board game and video game localisation
What to do when an English word is already being used, but not in a way that makes sense to an English audience
Why it’s important to encourage children’s curiosity and give them access to other languages, even if you are monolingual and can’t give your children a multilingual experience
How about you? Have you played board games in a language that wasn’t your first language? What did you learn? If you’re a translator, have you done any work in this area?
Find out more and connect with my guests on the show notes page: https://englishwithkirsty.com/podcast/episode317/
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