Resources

mixi Inc.

Mixi is a Japanese online social networking service that provides communications-based services including the hit mobile game Monster Strike, which was the top grossing game worldwide in 2017. Mixi’s localization scope covers all of their five core businesses: digital entertainment, sports, live experiences, media, and wellness, focusing especially on game and lifestyle applications.

The content they localize includes UI text, system text, press releases, advertising copy, marketing documents, as well as character names, character flavor text, skill text, and item names for the games. Content is translated by a small in-house team from Japanese into four target languages: English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Korean.

CHALLENGE

Consistency, Quality, and Hard Deadlines

Mixi’s games are run as a service so live operations are a constant challenge. Texts are always changing and are also received from a variety of sources which leads to difficulty in keeping terms and tone consistent.

Another challenge they face is maintaining quality while working in limited time frames. “We have very hard deadlines which need to be met; for game events that must start on a certain day, the start of a marketing campaign, or when a new version of a game or app is released. All these areas are usually connected, making it difficult to delay one without delaying everything else,” said Peter Ma, Localization Manager at mixi.

Problems

Spreadsheets: Work was done through Google Spreadsheets where multiple
localizers worked simultaneously. This resulted in work sometimes being overwritten and a translation history which was hard to track.

Terminology: Finding previously used terms and sorting through a glossary took time. Terms needed first to be searched, then copied and pasted.

Consistency: Game terms were not always translated the same way by different localizers.

Enter Memsource

After introducing Memsource, mixi developed a process which helped cut out the time-consuming back and forth steps.

“We were not using any technology before integrating Memsource into our workflow. Most of our work was done through Google Sheets and project management tools like JIRA/Confluence. The biggest change was not the flow itself but making a Memsource template to help us import into the system better,” said Peter.

When a job request is received, the project manager fills in the template which is imported into Memsource. Translation and review are done in one collaborative environment, are confirmed, then exported from Memsource and sent back to the requestee.

SOLUTIONS

• Spreadsheets became less of a crutch as translation, revision, and final checks are done through Memsource for multilingual projects - making it easy to see all previous translations.
• Translators can now find terms in the term base, eliminating time spent searching through glossaries.
• Not only did term bases make the process more efficient, they also increased overall consistency (along with perfect matches in translation memory).

Memsource solved mixi’s biggest pain points but Peter also noted some additional benefits. Being able to adjust particular settings allows project managers to have more control of projects, ensuring a high level of quality and consistency. Customizing QA options helps to identify mistakes more quickly and decreases the time spent on QA checks. And thanks to Memsource’s new Continuous Job feature, when a change is made in the original file, the corresponding job in Memsource is automatically updated and a notification is sent to the Linguists working on that job, which helps with version control.

RESULTS

Memsource has helped mixi save up to 10 hours of manpower per week and translators are spending less time fixing mistakes. And, most importantly, the overall translation quality has improved remarkably. Mixi is able to outsource work when necessary as the vendor has access to the term base and translation memory.