Casino translation: 5 things you need to know before getting started

The global online gambling market is forecast to reach £46 billion by 2020, already having more than doubled in value since 2009. This is a truly worldwide market, but there are significant linguistic and cultural barriers that brands in the online gaming field have to navigate.

Overcoming these barriers is going to influence everything you do as an online casino, from the content you publish to the way you code your website and market your games to different audiences around the world. Here are five things you need to know before you get started.

#1: Casino terms can be tricky to translate

The first thing you need to know about casino translation is that casino terms can be tricky to translate. While a sport like football originated in England (at least, at the official level) and spread throughout the world, casino games have deep roots in every corner of the planet and this results in a dynamic range of localised vocabulary.

There is also a lot of gambling slang you need to consider, too.

Then you have the international terms that might be best left untranslated for certain audiences. The trick is to know which terms to translate and which ones to leave alone – something that can vary from one market to another. In some cases, there simply is not a translation for certain casino terms and you need to decide whether to use the international standard or try to localise an alternative.

#2: Building a multilingual online casino site requires some fancy coding skills

Building any kind of multilingual website brings a number of unique challenges to the table and translation is just one of your priorities. We have already talked about these challenges before on our blog and you are going to need some specialist coding skills from programmers with experience in the following:

• Coding a website for multilingual SEO
• Coding a website for efficient casino translation
• Coding a website for language selection
• Optimising elements such as images, videos and page content for different languages
• Optimising for user experience across multiple languages
• Optimising for mobile

You are also going to need designers on board who understand how to design multilingual user interfaces, localise visual content and select fonts and design for users from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

#3: Building multilingual casino games requires even fancier coding skills

All of the same challenges of building a multilingual website apply to developing mobile casino games, but the coding requirements are even more extreme. The key is to make sure your game code is structured in a way that makes it efficient for translated content to be added and users to select their language choices.

Unlike multilingual websites, where you are essentially developing a separate website for each language, your casino games are coded as a single game that needs to pull the correctly translated content into the game and this requires a highly optimised approach to coding your games.

#4: Different casino games are popular around the world

Whether you are building an online casino site or developing games, it is important you understand how the popularity of different games varies around the world. While poker might be the most popular game in many Western markets, you might need to focus on games like Sic Bo and Mahjong in Asia and a range of other games in other regions.

We have talked about this before at Jackpot Translation.

This needs to be reflected in your website content as well. For example, on your homepage, which might need to feature different games for certain markets more prominently. You may also need to give certain languages or cultural factors a higher priority for certain types of games – e.g.: making localisation choices in favour of Western audiences for certain games and Chinese audiences in games more popular in the East.

#5: You also need to adapt your marketing strategies

You will also need to adapt your marketing strategies for each target audience and there is a long list of things to consider:

• Localising offers and promotions for market interests
• Adapting your content for local holidays and events
• Prioritising different games for certain markets
• Using the most relevant marketing channels for each audience
• Gambling and advertising laws across markets
• Device usage between markets (e.g.: mobile vs. desktop; personal devices vs. internet cafes, etc.)

If you simply translate the same marketing messages for different audiences and run them across the same platforms, you are going to get limited results. The more diverse your range of target audiences is, the more diverse their range of interest is also going to be – and this needs to reflect in the marketing messages you target them with (as well as the channels you use to reach them).

If you need more advice on how to build an online casino fit for global audiences, get in touch with our team of experts today.