ROBOTO GLOBAL

ROBOTO Global is a Warsaw-based localization studio working across gaming and esports. From mid-2021 through mid-2023 I was their English-to-Arabic game localizer, handling 25+ projects in MemoQ. The two flagship engagements were the Valorant Champions tournament websites for 2021 and 2022, where Riot's competitive scene met Arabic-speaking esports fans, and the Kingdom Guard mobile game launch into Arabic markets. Both required getting the localization right the first time, because gaming audiences notice mistakes immediately.

Game localization is not the same problem as documentary translation. It is closer to performance. A line of dialogue in a mobile game has to read fluently in the time the speech bubble is on screen, which is roughly half the time the English original had. Esports site copy has to carry the energy of competition without sounding like a press release. Names of in-game mechanics have to feel native to a player who has never read them in English, while staying recognizable enough that community-made guides still apply. The work is closer to acting than to translation, in the sense that you are performing the original in a new language at speed.

Arabic gaming audiences have a long history of being served badly. A generation of players grew up with rushed, machine-translated, or culturally tone-deaf Arabic versions of titles that the English-speaking community took for granted. The result is that the audience is unusually attentive to localization quality. Good Arabic in a game still surprises Arabic-speaking players; bad Arabic still confirms their suspicions. The bar for the work is set by readers who are looking for what is wrong before they are looking for what is right.

What I learned at ROBOTO Global about Arabic audience expectations now sits at the center of The Architect AI's bilingual thesis. The platform is being built in English and Arabic in parallel from the start, with full feature parity, because that is what Arabic-speaking users have been routinely denied. Equal treatment is not a feature, it is the minimum bar for being taken seriously by an audience that has seen worse done to its language by every previous wave of foreign technology.