We've all seen bad translation jobs in games before, but when you have a two-million word Korean MMORPG to make accessible to the West, where do you even start? The NCSoft team sounds off on the monumental task of localizing a game like Aion.Tell me if this sounds familiar to you: You find out about a new free-to-play MMOG from across the Pacific, and for whatever reason it catches your fancy. Maybe it's an interesting setting, maybe it's some cool concept art, but whatever: It's free, right? You're playing it, you're having a good time, you're immersed, and then you turn in a quest, and see, "You did make the congratulation!" A poorly localized game can color your whole experience - and that's exactly the pitfall that the NCSoft team is looking to avoid with its upcoming wing-based MMORPG, Aion.

But to properly do its job, the team couldn't just feed all of that text into Google Translate and call it a day - the inherent difference between translation and proper localization, said Fran Stewart, is that while translation "lets you use what I've made for myself," localization "means changing a product I made for me into something FOR you." Localization, in other words, is to ideas and concepts what translation is for words. "If we can get gamers working their way through the game without even realizing that it started out in a completely different language, then we've done our job," added Conor Sheehy.