With 5,381 people listed in its credits, CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the game industry’s largest productions to date. And as it turns out, almost half of those people contributed to the game’s localization.
As part of Polygon’s Culture Shock issue, we asked developer CD Projekt Red to shed light on the work involved in localizing a project of this scale — an open-world game containing approximately 1.1 million words translated into 19 languages, and nearly 82,000 lines recorded by voice actors in 11 of those languages. The studio broke down the numbers, and talked us through why it took thousands of people to properly prepare Cyberpunk 2077 for a global audience.
It’s important to note that CD Projekt Red came to its sci-fi role-playing game with more resources than are available to most studios, thanks to the success of games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which has sold more than 50 million copies. That enabled the team to bite off a project of this size to begin with. However, just as other parts of the studio ran into roadblocks at launch, that didn’t stop the localization team from hitting a few challenges along the way.
So why did it take so many people to localize the game? In short: voice acting.
Localization by the numbers
According to CD Projekt Red’s numbers, 2,456 people contributed to Cyberpunk 2077’s localization — more than 45% of the people who worked on the game in total. That included 20 people on the internal localization team; 117 translators, editors, and proofreaders; 120 localization quality-assurance testers; 233 project managers, voice-over directors, voice-over engineers, and production roles; and 1,966 voice-over actors.
This week on Polygon, we’re looking at how cultural differences affect media in a special issue we’re calling Culture Shock.
Some caveats: When tallying up numbers of this sort, it’s nearly impossible to account for every edge case. Consider: If a designer made a localization suggestion in a meeting, do they count toward the group involved with localization? (In this case, no.) It’s also difficult to classify certain roles; if an artist spent time drawing graffiti in multiple languages, do they count? (Also no.) In addition, the provided totals don’t take into account writing that was cut or rewritten during the development process, only what ended up in the game up through the release of version 2.0. Nor do they account for staff that dealt with local ratings boards and adjustments like censoring nudity. And the big one: These weren’t all full-time employees.
The great majority of people accounted for in those numbers were not CD Projekt Red staff, but contractors or employees of external agencies. The team made a point of hiring specific agencies for each language — rather than outsourcing all languages to a single company — to improve quality control, says CD Projekt Red expert localization project manager Alexander Radkevich. That added to the overhead required to manage the different points of contact.
The numbers reflect a sprawling cast that could bring verisimilitude to Night City. CD Projekt Red localization director Mikołaj Szwed estimates that, for each language, the company brought in 120-200 actors, and says that it wasn’t always a simple process of finding the right people for the roles. In the case of the character Takemura, who was designed to not be a native English speaker, the team struggled to find actors in certain languages; it brought in an actor who commuted between Berlin and Tokyo to record lines for the German version of the game.
For text translation, the team planned schedules around a baseline pace of 2,000 words per translator per day. By that math, it would have taken a single translator about 550 weeks to cover a single language, not accounting for quality assurance, voice acting, and other steps in the process. The team split each language into groups to distribute the work. For QA alone, the project averaged four to six testers per language.
Another big part of the process involved translating the script into English in the first place. While CD Projekt Red is based in Warsaw, Poland, and the Cyberpunk 2077 script was originally written in Polish, Szwed refers to English as the “most important” language — both because it reaches the largest number of players and creates a base for translators to then bring the game into other languages, as it’s easier to find translators to work off an English script than a Polish one. (Cyberpunk 2077 is also set in a futuristic United States, and CD Projekt Red says that a larger percentage of players in Poland played the game in English than did with The Witcher 3, which Radkevich attributes to the game’s setting.)
Because of the need for English as a base, CD Projekt Red employs an English adaptation team that translated the Polish text at an early stage, with that group starting the translation process at the same time it began writing the primary version of the script, and starting background work even before that — which Szwed says made the localization team feel like a central part of the overall project.
“For me, it’s always funny when people say, ‘Oh, I want to play in the original language,’” Szwed says. “For us, it’s like, ‘OK, so… Polish, or what?’ English is already an adaptation of the Polish source, so if you want to play in the original, play in Polish, even though the English voice-overs are recorded first. So it’s not that easy to pinpoint.”
Challenges with scope
When a project involves thousands of people, even the slightest change has magnitude.
While a studio working in a single language without voice acting may be able to make significant script changes late in production without issue, late changes on Cyberpunk 2077 required a major lift. Tweaks to translated material meant matching the changes across multiple languages and wrangling actors back into the studio to record new lines, says Szwed.
Szwed and Radkevich both point to additional voice recording sessions, or “pickups,” as the hardest part of the process, since they wanted the game’s story to be as strong as possible but also had to manage the schedule. The two goals were often at odds.
The team also didn’t have in-house project managers covering every language they planned to release the game in. So while Szwed oversaw the external team working on the German translation, and Radkevich oversaw the external team working on the Russian translation (and others handled different languages), CD Projekt Red didn’t have equivalent team members to oversee every localized version. Szwed says it’s important to make external agencies feel like partners, and in some cases, the team had to trust its partners without being able to check the work internally.
Szwed says having a manager in place for every language is the localization team’s “ultimate goal” for future projects. But even having someone internal doesn’t always make it possible to check everything, according to Szwed, given the quantity of text and voice-over lines involved.
One specific challenge the team ran into came in September 2023, when CD Projekt Red released Cyberpunk 2077’s 2.0 update. The massive patch fixed or improved a number of the game’s technical and gameplay issues and added a Ukrainian language option, but the Ukrainian translation included anti-Russian statements, such as, “Go fuck yourself in the same direction as the ship did,” as reported by Rock Paper Shotgun.
The CD Projekt Group has publicly supported Ukraine in its war against Russia, halting sales of its games in Russia and Belarus and donating money to help Ukrainian refugees, but said that it didn’t intend to include negative in-game commentary. The company said those translations came from an external agency that didn’t follow the studio’s guidelines.
“This is a very, very difficult situation, and we as a company, we have been very vocal on where we stand on the matter. Also in the sense that, for example, we decided to create, and provide our Ukrainian fans with, a Ukrainian localization, and do it after the release of Cyberpunk, and do it both because we feel that the market is promising but also as a statement of our support to the Ukrainians,” says Szwed. “And with such a huge project with so many people involved, there are always some rogue things happening — you cannot control everything — so, I mean, that was one of those situations.”
“The games are huge,” Szwed adds. “So of course we try to check as much as we can, but it’s never possible to read through every single line, every single string. And of course, we need to give our partners some guidelines. There was a situation here that the guidelines of what is acceptable for us in terms of changing or adding stuff to the game [were] kind of crossed. So of course, we had to kind of provide this feedback. But generally, we trust our partners, and basically, such things happen very, very rarely. We would hear much more about it if it happened regularly.”
Paying off
Almost three years after launching Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red followed it with Phantom Liberty — an expansion that added approximately 450,000 words and around 25,000 voice-over lines. Next up: The Witcher 4, alongside a variety of smaller games and transmedia projects that the localization team handles in parallel with its bigger projects.
When Szwed started at CD Projekt Red in 2013, he was the only person on the studio’s internal localization team. Now, the team comprises more than 20 people who oversee more than 2,000 external contributors, and has a hand in most of what the company does. Szwed says that working on large productions adds pressure, but is also part of what makes the job exciting.
“Working on a big game for several years is never not stressful,” he says, “because you always have this anticipation whether people will like it, whether people will like what you’ve done, not only in localization but general of the game.”
And despite the early struggles, Cyberpunk 2077 has now sold over 30 million copies — with Phantom Liberty adding another 8 million — giving the team plenty of leeway to do the whole process all over again.
