Finding the Right Words: Dancing in Chains
The Loca Quest Log returns for its second entry. In our first article we introduced Antonio Manuel Beleño Rodríguez and the technical side of audio localization: Python scripts, automation tools, AI quality checks. This time we move to a different kind of expertise, one that is harder to script and impossible to automate: video game culturalization. Xuan Pan joined Altagram in 2020 as Chinese Editor and Project Coordinator, and was recently promoted to Senior Chinese Editor.
This conversation was led by Giacomo Marinsalta, our Marketing Manager, who sat down with Xuan to dig into her journey from her childhood in China to the front lines of Chinese game culturalization in Germany, and what it truly takes to make a game feel native to one of the world's most demanding audiences.
The Destined Game
As a child growing up in China, Xuan had little interest in foreign languages. With over a billion people around her speaking Chinese, it didn't feel like a survival skill. What changed her mind was a video game she couldn't stop playing yet couldn't understand: StarCraft (Blizzard Entertainment). In the late 1990s, officially released titles barely reached China, and those that did rarely came with any meaningful localization. Determined to understand what was happening on screen, she transcribed every line of dialogue by hand, worked through it with a paper dictionary, and ended up spending an entire winter vacation teaching herself English through the game. She even saved up to buy an electronic dictionary just to keep pace with the vocabulary she was collecting. "To this day," she says, "I can still recite many of those lines word for word."
That experience also deepened her attachment to StarCraft. Wanting to properly own the game, she began saving up for a legitimate copy, setting aside her breakfast money every day. After about a month, her mother found out. Rather than scolding her, she went out and bought Xuan her first official copy of a video game. It was not a small gesture, the game cost around a tenth of her mother's monthly salary. "I've always been very grateful to her for that," she says. "Even though she wasn't a fan of me playing games, she still gave me a lot of support. Thanks to her, I was able to balance gaming and school, and continue pursuing my passion for games."
That experience left a lasting mark on her thinking around what translation really means: translation is not merely about transferring content, but a process of "deep understanding and creative re-expression." She also knew, from her own experience, exactly what it feels like to play a game you can't fully follow. Years later, when she found herself choosing between a job offer at a fashion company and one in gaming localization, she didn't need long. "My choice was clear," she says, with a laugh.
The Cultural Landmine
Before joining Altagram, Xuan had been working as an interpreter in Germany, a discipline far more demanding than written translation. Short-term memory, fluency in your native language, the ability to carry meaning across cultural contexts in real time: interpreting is, she argues, "a continuous process of culturalization." Rendering German socio-political concepts for Chinese audiences and Chinese cultural references for German ones helped her understand what bridging two worlds actually means. Finding the right word is rarely enough. Sometimes the word exists, but the context behind it doesn't, and no amount of linguistic precision fills that gap.
That lesson came back sharply early in her time at Altagram. Without breaching NDA, Xuan recalls the story of a video game she worked on reaching players with politically sensitive imagery that triggered a serious backlash in the Chinese community. Due to a lack of full visual context during the text localization stage, a line of text which carried associations with wartime trauma in China had made it into the final game. Though the line in isolation might be dismissed as mere coincidence, when placed alongside sensitive visual assets, it left no room for ambiguity. "What seemed like a minor detail became a significant cultural landmine," she recalls. Such issues are normally caught at the LQA stage, but cultural sensitivity requires more than standard testing protocols — reviewers need to be actively assessing visual assets and text in context together, not in isolation. The lesson she drew? LQA teams with in-game visual access need comprehensive culturalization guidelines, and "no potential risk should be overlooked, no matter how minor it may seem."
"Dancing in Chains"
Much of Xuan's day-to-day work involves adapting Western games for Chinese audiences. However, when working in the other direction - that is, Chinese games reaching Western markets - her role shifts from translator to cultural consultant, helping colleagues understand specific terms and the context behind them. The Western-to-Chinese direction alone comes with enough riddles. English puns, for instance, almost never survive direct translation. In many cases, entire sentences need to be rebuilt just to preserve the spirit of the original. Poetry is similarly tricky: rhyme, rhythm, and literary register can all demand that a translator replace rather than render. And when those elements are tied to a puzzle mechanic or a key plot point, the margin for creative freedom shrinks further.
Xuan has a striking metaphor for the balance this requires. She calls it "dancing in chains": staying faithful to the original text while allowing just enough room for creative adaptation. "While our work requires creativity," she says, "it is essential to remember that we are not creating an original piece but building upon an existing one."
Take one Souls-like game she worked on: an item description built on alliteration and attributed to a renowned literary master. There was no direct Chinese equivalent for the device. The first pass rendered it as a simple rhythmic jingle. Xuan set that version aside and spent nearly two hours crafting her first palindromic cross poem, a form that could carry not just the meaning but the literary ambition of the original. The goal was to give players who read closely the same immersive experience they would have had in the source language. A small, invisible effort that most players will never notice. That, she suggests, is usually the point.
Two Worlds, One Asymmetry
When asked which direction of culturalization is harder, adapting Western games for Chinese audiences or helping Chinese culture reach the rest of the world, Xuan doesn't hesitate: exporting outward is harder. Chinese audiences grew up reading Western literary classics in school, watching international animation, playing globally-released games. The reverse doesn't hold. Most Western players have had far less exposure to Chinese cultural touchstones. "Before China's rapid economic rise, its cultural export was relatively limited," she says. "Many cultural elements originating from China were sometimes perceived internationally as belonging to Japan or Korea."
Black Myth: Wukong (Game Science) is, for her, a clear sign this is shifting. Released in 2024, Altagram has been responsible for the text localization into French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Brazilian-Portuguese, Turkish and Czech. The game is based directly on Journey to the West, the 16th-century Chinese novel that follows the Monkey King Sun Wukong on an epic pilgrimage, and one of the most foundational works in Chinese literature. Xuan had followed the game since its first trailer in 2020, and when Altagram was given the chance to pitch for the project by performing a test localization based on some of the game's content, she even postponed her vacation to take part. Working as a cultural consultant for the internal team, she prepared what she thought was a thorough reference document with background information, excerpts from the novel and trailer references, only to find she had "underestimated the depth of cultural content embedded in the game." Colleagues asked what a circlet actually was; whether Kunlun was a mountain; what exactly made something a fabao. Things she had assumed were self-explanatory turned out to carry a significant gap for people outside the Chinese literary tradition. There were subtler decisions too. When a colleague naturally reached for the term tithe to describe a rent payment in a journal entry, the religious connotations weren't obvious to them. Xuan caught it in time.
The moment she remembers most clearly from that period: a four-word English gloss in the source file that turned out to be a Tang dynasty quatrain. The client had not provided the original Chinese text, so she had to trace her way back to the source poem from the English translation alone. The feeling, she says, was "comparable to finding the most hidden key in the Water Temple of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time."
She quotes Feng Ji, the game's producer: "Telling a good Chinese story doesn't necessarily mean telling a story about China." Japanese RPGs have been doing something like this for decades, embedding a distinctly Japanese sensibility into Western fantasy settings. She thinks Chinese games can do the same, as long as the localization behind them trusts players enough to try.
The Long Game
When it comes to games that have genuinely won over Chinese players, her standout example from the West is World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment). When it launched in China in 2005, full Chinese voice acting and a properly localized version of the game were a rare exception. Official Chinese support across the industry was often nonexistent at the time, leaving players to rely on fan translations just to follow the story. Even today, many major titles ship without Chinese voice acting at all, which makes Blizzard's early investment all the more striking in retrospect. The localization wasn't flawless, she notes, but it gave Chinese players an immersive experience they hadn't had before and built a loyalty that has lasted two decades. A long-term bet that paid off.
Eventually, as for a power-up she would hand to any developer or publisher wanting to genuinely reach Chinese audiences, Xuan replies: Respect. Something that actually shows up in how the game is made: real attention to localization quality, awareness of what is culturally or politically sensitive, and the honesty to acknowledge that the China most outsiders picture looks quite different from what it actually is. "When developers demonstrate genuine respect for their audience," Xuan says, "they are more likely to build a positive reputation and cultivate a loyal player base. In return, the significant purchasing power of Chinese players offers a tangible reward for that respect."
QUEST COMPLETE:
"While our work requires creativity, it is essential to remember that we are not creating an original piece but building upon an existing one." — Xuan Pan, Senior Chinese Editor, Altagram Group
