AI Post-Editing for Games

AI Post-Editing vs Machine Translation

We get it. Translation engines like DeepL are fast, cheap and they let you upload extensive glossaries.

The problem is that, unlike an AI, you can’t give them context. They don’t really understand where a string appears or what’s happening in the game, and they translate mechanically.

Even with a frontier AI model, what makes the difference is who’s using the tool. As localization professionals, we use our own AI trained on game localization, paired with our experience and knowledge of the ton of issues that occur with AI translation.

On top of it, the unskippable part: actual human professionals checking the draft against the source text, editing and de-slopping the translation.

When AI Post-Editing Makes Sense

Always keep in mind that AIPE does not replace fully human localization at a cheaper price. It lets you have your game localized by professionals, but the results, while correct, fluent and consistent, will surely be less creative and engaging.

Therefore, by logic, the less creative the text, the more you can be confident AIPE is a great game localization option. Here are some examples of games that can highly benefit from AI Post-Editing services:

• Tight budgets, or games with little creative text, like management sims and sandboxes full of menus, stats and little to no dialogues or lore
• Smaller markets that have a strong community, but bring in less revenue
• Hybrid projects, where dialogue, lore and marketing get full translation, while menus, item descriptions and patch notes go through AI post-editing

Let’s say your RPG has 15,000 words of dialogue and 35,000 words of item descriptions and menus. The dialogue gets full translation, the rest goes through AI post-editing, and what you save into four European languages is about enough to pay for a fifth language.

When to Choose Fully Human Localization

If your game has deep lore, a ton of dialogue and heavily depends on context, we highly advise against AI Post-Editing. We’ll go as far as saying that, if you go for AIPE, you’ll waste your money.

This service is a great budget option to localize your game professionally, but it’s only feasible for gameplay-focused games, not for lore-intensive games like RPGs. Let’s put this logically, if you spent months working on a deep and immersive lore, we are sure you don’t want to let all your work go to waste.

How Much Does AI Post-Editing Cost?

AI post-editing is priced per word, with no minimum order and no project management fees. These are our rates from English:

For comparison, a 10,000-word indie game into French, Italian, German and Spanish costs €2,600-3,200 with AI post-editing versus €4,000-4,800 if you were to order fully human localization.

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