Happy birthday, Logrus IT! For almost three decades, since 1993, we’ve been translating and localizing games, software, and documentation while also working on dozens of other important projects. Over the years, we’ve grown, opened offices all over the world, and learned how to handle the most demanding projects in the business. To celebrate our birthday, we’d like to invite you to take a look back at the preceding year and reminisce with us about the most significant projects Logrus IT completed in 2020–2021.
Game localization projects are Logrus IT’s calling card. We’re deservedly proud of our partnerships with leading developers and publishers. In November 2020, the long-awaited title Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, the latest entry in Ubisoft’s massively popular series, was released. Valhalla broke sales records during its first week, overtaking previous games in the Assassin’s Creed universe. It later became Ubisoft’s best-selling PC release of all time.
And we had a hand in this success. Logrus IT’s specialists translated the game and handled voiceover. It took a lot of work to keep all the historical sites and quirky character names straight. Speaking of the game’s characters, the protagonist can be either male or female depending on the player’s preference. This is great, but it led to some extra challenges when it came to translation and voiceover. English adjectives and verbs don’t change based on grammatical gender, but in Russian, verbs have different masculine and feminine forms in the past tense, and adjectives have gendered endings as well. So for every phrase in which the main character talked about something they did in the past, or other characters use an adjective to describe them, we had to either find a gender-neutral variant or prepare two different translations. In the end, the Russian localization was over 700,000 words!
Another important project for us was localizing Watch Dogs Legion. It sold 1.9 million copies in its first three days after release. For each of the game’s 20 character archetypes, we recorded all sorts of different phrases that then had to be combined into coherent lines — without any pauses, odd inflections, or grammatical errors. In addition to gender, subject/verb agreement made things challenging here — a seemingly simple phrase like «go to the station» had to be translated into a dozen or more Russian phrases for various situations, from poyekhat’ na vokzal («to go to the station») to idut na vokzal («[they] are going to the station»).We’re proud to have worked on such important projects, and we also localized other releases such as Immortals Fenyx Rising, Hyper Scape, and Farm Manager during the last year.
We translate more than just games, of course. For example, in 2020 we translated informational materials for the cutting-edge Airbus 350 passenger plane, which was added to Aeroflot’s fleet. Although relatively small in scope, the project was extremely important — our company’s translations will be used by all the airline’s engineers. We took all the technical details and the client’s preferences into account and translated these materials into twelve languages, including Hindi and Hebrew.
In general, we had a lot of technical translation projects during the last year. Our stalwart specialists are more than up to the task of tackling industrial safety instructions, electronics manuals, valve diagrams, circuit breaker catalogs, offshore installation construction contracts, and regulations on the use of chemical components in the food industry.
But we’re no strangers to loftier topics. One of our most fascinating projects from the last year involved translating a book about masterpieces at the Mauritshuis museum in the Hague.
We’ve upheld our tradition of working on IT translations and are constantly localizing blogs about information security, reference materials, and software UIs. We work on an extremely wide range of topics, including legal, automotive, insurance, cryptocurrency, marketing, advertising, computer peripherals, and much more.
Language Quality Assurance
It’s hard to imagine any major localization project without translation QA. Language quality assurance or LQA identifies linguistic and stylistic errors, typos, incorrect text layout, and other issues that could spoil the impression from a localized product.
Logrus IT is a trailblazer in the LQA field. We evaluate our own translations and those performed by others based on standard metrics and use our own proprietary innovations. For example, Logrus IT CEO Leonid Glazychev has developed a special methodology that evaluates a text’s overall attractiveness, formatting style, and much more.
One of our standout LQA projects during the last year involved checking the quality of a translation of Perfect World Mobile, a mobile version of the popular MMORPG. For this project, we evaluated translation accuracy, identified terminological inconsistencies, and helped the client find other errors. We’re justifiably proud of the results — gamers ended up with a high-quality translation of a game with three races, six character classes with unique abilities, and an entire fantasy universe.
Logrus IT’s methodology is uniquely flexible and can be applied to any content whatsoever. This flexibility isn’t just limited to translations with various styles, genres, and themes. For example, we’re currently working on project involving the analysis and optimization of advertising texts for one of the largest online retail platforms in the world, and these texts were written by… an AI!
AI might still be learning to write texts, but we do it for a living — and that includes e-learning courses. We also film videos, draw and animate clips, record audio, etc. This year we developed a house style, design, and courseload for the state-owned corporation Rosatom’s Online Management School. This project required us to create 70 lessons with a wide variety of tasks. These included interactive exercises, video clips, case studies, tests, best practices, recommendations for further study, theoretical materials, and much, much more. The courses are used to train Rosatom’s middle and senior managers.
Logrus IT has continued its successful e-learning collaboration with Kaspersky Lab. Last year we developed five topic-based sections from scratch for their new educational platform. We prepared scripts, developed an original design, and storyboarded and compiled video clips to teach cybersecurity to people who are uncomfortable with modern technology. Our company also contributed to Kaspersky Lab’s internal training programs. Over the last year, Logrus IT developed about 30 new courses for managers and sales partners. In addition, we updated and localized completed courses, translating them into six European and two Asian languages.
Geologists and metallurgists at the company Nordgold now learn technical processes through e-learning courses in English and Russian developed by Logrus IT. We wrote scripts, storyboarded videos, recorded voiceover, and combined multiple courses into one while adjusting them to work with the client’s distance-learning system.
These are far from all of our e-learning projects. To this day, over 250,000 people have completed courses using interactive textbooks developed by Logrus IT.
We love everything that’s new and out of the ordinary, and we’re always willing to look to the future. So when Korean auto giant KIA decided to create video instructions for a user’s guide with AI functionality, we jumped at the chance to get involved. We worked on over 70 slick, stylish video clips that were added to the company’s mobile app for customers. We also translated them into 30+ languages.
While working on KIA’s interactive app, we wrote scripts for its promo video and created animation using pseudo-3D graphical elements. Our specialists translated the video into five languages and recorded voiceover for it. These materials were later used to promote the brand in various countries.
Another extremely interesting project gave us the opportunity to work with the Chinese company Chengdu IData Plus, which specializes in AI innovation. As part of this project, Logrus IT recorded thousands of minutes of speech in order to train the AI. Our primary challenge wasn’t actually linguistic, but rather organizational — we had to find people who were willing to talk on the phone about sports, art, education, relationships, and other topics for an extended period of time. Moreover, the participants weren’t engaged in ordinary conversations, but rather exchanges of monologues — they all had to talk for about a minute without stopping. On top of this, we also had to account for the client’s restrictions on OSs and phone models, the complexity of the app, and the need to oversee the activities of a large number of employees and freelancers. Now do you understand why we consider the project managers who worked on this assignment and had to answer a thousand questions from the recording participants real heroes?
We’re still going strong! We’re incredibly excited about the future, and we can’t wait to engage with new projects and clients. But Logrus IT’s birthday is about more than just the company’s success. It’s also a celebration of our employees, clients, and partners — everyone who’s walking this challenging, but exciting path with us. We wish you all another year of bold new challenges and stunning achievements!
