During last year’s PUMWI (PUBG Mobile World Invitational), ESL leveraged Tarjama’s expansive language expertise, effectively tripling its social media engagement and making it one of the biggest gaming tournaments of all time.
The Client:
ESL Gaming is an international e-sports company that hosts online gaming tournaments, and has upwards of 1.3 million active players in more than 180 countries. The company organizes some of the most prestigious events in the industry, such as Intel Extreme Masters, ESL One, among other widely popular contests.
ESL have been reshaping the market and driving esports and gaming innovation across the most popular video games for more than two decades, bringing mainstream attention to the world of online games.
The Challenge:
From June to August of 2022, ESL, in collaboration with Gamers8, Tencent Games, and KRAFTON, ran its global esports championship, in which hundreds of gamers were competing in the final stage of PUBG, Rainbow Six, and Fortnite. The event was held at Riyadh Boulevard in KSA, and the final brought together 18 teams from regions around the world.
With these games being widely popular in Asian countries both in the far and middle east, coupled with Saudi’s dominantly Arabic population, there was a need for specialized interpretation, translation and localization to engage players and spectators across the board.
For social media especially, where Tarjama played the biggest role, there was a substantial gap in language diversity in past tournaments, where the organizers put out content mostly in English. The other two languages included in previous events were sparsely catered to, with lapses of up to 2 days without any fresh content being updated on social channels.
Set against the backdrop of a highly vibrant audience, in the fast-paced gaming world, Tarjama was brought in to localize content for 15 target languages. Tarjama’s adaptable scaling model, its wide language range, and experience in producing high quality output within restricted timelines made them a perfect fit for the task.
The Solution
ESL needed real time language support in 15 languages to keep their audience updated on the events of the tournament. First, Tarjama dedicated a team to work round the clock on subtitling for all the matches. This had to be done in adherence to the strict match schedule, maintaining the pace of the event so all attendees could participate.
Tarjama also received ESL’s PSD assets in English to reproduce in the target languages. Using Tarjama’s secure, centralized, data management system, it was simple for the translators to access and work on the content as soon as it was made available. With Tarjama’s support, ESL’s social media channels were receiving content up to three times a day in all the languages. Although the texts were fairly short, the cadence was quick, meaning the translation turnaround time was fast.
Tarjama’s tech-forward model, adopts the best-in-class technology and combines it with human expertise for the best outcomes. In the case of PUMWI, the use of Tarjama’s proprietary translation memory ensured that the translators’ input was expended only on unique words, resulting in an overall cohesive exercise.
The Event in Numbers
Timeframe: 2 months
Languages: 15; Arabic, Russian, Turkish, Spanish, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malay, Vietnamese, Thai, and more, while 8 languages were subtitled.
PSD Assets: 81
Assets per language: 3K words (for all the assets) per each language, and a total of 24K words translated for all languages
Multimedia: 648 Desktop Publishing assets handled and flipped
Quote:
“Tarjama’s ownership of the project was impressive. The team worked tirelessly to ensure we were in constant communication with our audience. Their expansive command of Asia and its languages helped us capture an audience that would have otherwise remained unreachable to us.”
Maximillian Bauer, Social Media Manager PUBG Mobile, ESL
