Automating the Workflow, Protecting the Craft:
Curiosity as the Core Code
At Altagram, we believe that our greatest asset is our team, and the expertise they have gained from the wildly different career paths that brought them here.
That's exactly why we're launching this interview series: to shine a light on the expertise, personalities, and stories behind what makes us excel at video game localization. Our team spans an incredible range of roles, nationalities, and backgrounds. We believe that diversity is something worth celebrating, because it is the very source of the expertise that sets our work apart. This is how we think at Altagram: Every team member has a story worth telling.
Antonio Manuel Beleño Rodríguez joined us back in July 2021 as Localization Engineer, and we figured he'd be a great person to kick things off.
This conversation was led by Giacomo Marinsalta, our Marketing Manager, who sat down with Antonio to dig into his journey, his perspective on audio localization, and where he thinks the industry is heading.
Localization Engineering: From Regex Patterns to Python Scripts
Some career paths look like straight lines on a CV. Antonio Manuel Beleño Rodríguez's would read like a well-designed quest: each new role unlocking a set of skills that the next one would need. From an initial career as a freelance translator to his current position as Senior Audio Localization Technical Manager at Altagram, the progression was not planned so much as discovered.
"Language and technology have always been both my passion and area of expertise," he says. "But the real secret has been curiosity. Language and technology are the path, but curiosity has been the engine."
Antonio traces an early instinct for coding in the small customizations that came with one of his first roles as a Junior Localization Engineer: basic Excel formulas, CAT tool filters, the occasional regex pattern, unglamorous but precise tools that sit quietly at the heart of a lot of language engineering work. Nothing that felt like the beginning of anything particular at the time. "It wasn't coding per se," he admits, "but it was the beginning of the seed being planted." In short, there was a quiet sense that there was a better way to do things. That instinct grew steadily, first into file preparation work as a Localization Engineer, then into real programming exposure while training a voice assistant for Samsung as a Computational Linguist. By the time he joined Altagram, where each gaming studio brings different workflows and manual localization tasks can quietly swallow time, that pursuit of automation had become impossible to ignore. He enrolled in an online Python course, and from there the question was no longer whether to code, but what to build next: "At that point, coding stopped being optional and became crucial."
Automation as Care
At Altagram, Antonio found the role that brought everything together: the linguistic background, engineering instinct, and an understanding of how audio production flows. Most of the tools he has built share the same starting point: reclaiming time lost to tedious tasks that had quietly become accepted as just "part of the job." File renaming, script merging, delivery checks, word and line counts: all manual, error-prone, and so embedded in daily routine that they had gone unquestioned. "When you can automate a task and someone realizes they've just gotten half a day back in their week, you learn a lot about how normalized inefficiency can become." The first toolset, built just months after joining the audio team, was made to ease the juggling of multiple simultaneous projects, and made the impact visible across the whole studio. "Not just because we had created something great, but because we could see the impact it had on the people around me." That moment reframed automation for him, not only as a technical achievement but as something closer to a form of care.
Among the tools developed at Altagram alongside the Alocai team, the one he speaks about with most pride is the Audio Quality Assessment (AQA) system, now used across Altagram's audio projects. AQA takes on what used to be one of the most time-consuming and costly steps in audio QA: having a native speaker listen through every recorded line to confirm it matches the script and to catch issues like file-naming mismatches, wrong lines making it into the game, or bad cuts left over from post-production. The tool transcribes each recorded file, compares it against the recording script, and flags discrepancies in minutes; the native reviewer then focuses on the flagged items instead of working through every file. "The most compelling aspect of this tool is that it does not replace the human reviewer, but rather assists them," he says. "It takes care of the mundane task of checking so that the human reviewer can concentrate on the aspects that truly
Speaking of quality in audio localization done right, Antonio has three titles in mind, each for a different reason. Escape from Monkey Island (LucasArts), for how its directors handled comedy before localization precedents existed, playing with accents and timing in ways that felt crafted rather than converted.
Blasphemous (Team17), which, as an Andalusian, he values for its rare commitment to Sevillian culture and dialect. Finally, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (Deep Silver), whose Spanish voiceover, handled by the team at Perfect Sound, sustained strong casting and adaptation quality across a production of staggering scale.
Drawing a Line on AI in Audio Localization
As both a technologist and a voice acting enthusiast, Antonio sees genuine value in AI for process optimization, project management, and systematic QA, with the AQA tool as his reference point. When the topic comes up with clients, the conversation tends to center less on the technology itself and more on expectations around what it can realistically deliver. His role in those moments is to offer a clear picture of where AI genuinely adds value in the workflow, and where human skill and judgment remain irreplaceable.
But there is a line, and in audio localization it runs through the creative core of the work. "Audio localization isn't just a technical process. It involves artistic sensibility, emotional performance, and genuine human expression. Those things are not incidental to the product. They are the product."
On voice actors' rights, his position is unambiguous: "A vocal performance is a biological fingerprint and a unique artistic creation." Any use of it in an AI context requires prior, informed consent and fair compensation. "Using that to train a model without consent, or worse, to clone it, is not only ethically wrong. It should be explicitly illegal." Emotion, nuance, the specific humanity of a performance cannot be replicated without cost. When AI is positioned as a cheaper substitute for human talent rather than a support for it, that is, for Antonio, the red line.
Curiosity as the itch
If you could hand one ability to any localization professional navigating the current technological shift, what would it be?
Antonio's answer is curiosity. Not as a motivational catchphrase, but as a practical orientation toward the work. "This industry is changing faster than any course or job description can keep up with. You can't future-proof yourself by mastering the tools that exist today. By the time you've done that, there are new ones."
What holds, across every role and every tool, is the habit of questioning whether the way something has always been done is actually the best way to do it.
It's what led him from regex patterns to Python and production automation, and from there to a firm position on where technology earns its place and where it doesn't. Less a career strategy than a way of staying honest with the job.
QUEST COMPLETE:
"Stay curious, stay a little uncomfortable, and never fully accept that something can't be improved." — Antonio Manuel Beleño Rodríguez, Senior Audio Localization Technical Manager, Altagram Group
