At this year’s EGA Hermes Awards during the Con-Lo-Con Conference in California, the entertainment industry turned its attention to the creative and technical achievements defining the future of localization.
For TransPerfect Media, the evening marked a milestone, with nine nominations and five wins spanning dubbing, vocal performance, music adaptation, and audio mixing. This industry recognition reflects the extraordinary craft, collaboration, and innovation at the core of TransPerfect Media’s approach to ensuring stories resonate authentically across cultures.
Localization at Its Finest Should Go Unnoticed
Audiences rarely think about translated lyrics, vocal direction, mix engineering, comedic adaptation, or cultural nuance when they’re emotionally immersed in a film or series. Yet those invisible creative decisions are precisely what allow stories to transcend language barriers and connect with people worldwide. Excellence in this creative decision-making is at the heart of the Hermes Awards, an industry program that celebrates the art and science of global storytelling.
This year’s recognition highlighted the breadth of talent across TransPerfect Media’s international teams and studios—from Sweden and Poland to France—while reinforcing the growing role localization plays in shaping the global entertainment experience.
Localization as Creative Storytelling
Entertainment localization has evolved far beyond translation. Every localized production must preserve the emotional integrity of the original while making audiences feel as though the story was created specifically for them.
That challenge becomes even more complex when music, comedy, vocal performance, historical atmosphere, or large-scale cinematic sound design are involved.
The projects recognized at this year’s Hermes Awards each demonstrated a different dimension of that creative process.
Sweden Studio – Spermageddon for “Best Localized Song”
One of the evening’s most distinctive wins came from Sweden Studio, where Spermageddon received the Hermes Award for Best Localized Song.
The selected sequence, “Abortsången” (“The Abortion Song”), stands out not only for its musical precision but for its ability to balance humor, satire, emotional nuance, and narrative intent.
The localized adaptation carefully preserved the irony and comedic tone of the Norwegian original while ensuring the Swedish lyrics aligned naturally with the performance’s rhythm, phrasing, and musicality. Rather than simply translating words, the team recreated an experience.
Poland Studio – Asterix & Obelix for Best Overall Dubbing for an Animation
In Poland, Asterix & Obelix: Le Combat des Chefs earned recognition for Best Overall Dubbing for an Animation.
Animation dubbing demands a unique level of precision. Timing, vocal energy, pacing, humor, and emotional rhythm must align perfectly with character movement and sound design, often within extremely tight creative constraints.
The award-winning sequence moves between musical spectacle, comedic confusion, emotional tension, and ensemble storytelling, all while maintaining the charm and personality audiences expect from the iconic franchise.
France Studio – Saint Exupéry for Best Dub Audio Mixing for a Feature
For the French adaptation of Saint-Exupéry, recognized for Best Dub Audio Mixing for a Feature, the challenge extended beyond dialogue.
The film’s contemplative tone and aviation-centered storytelling required extraordinary attention to sonic immersion and historical authenticity.
Particular focus was placed on the sound design of flight sequences and radio communications, ensuring they reflected the atmosphere of the period without sounding overly modern. At the same time, recordings were conducted across multiple countries, requiring careful coordination among international teams.
The project highlights an often-overlooked challenge of localization: ensuring the linguistic and environmental nuances integral to storytelling, with every sound design decision shaping the narrative experience.
France Studio – Hazbin Hotel for “Best Voice Performance for an Animated Series” and “Best Dub Audio Mixing for a Series”
Among the evening’s standout projects was Hazbin Hotel, which received recognition in two categories: Best Voice Performance for an Animated Series and Best Dub Audio Mixing for a Series.
The series presented a uniquely ambitious creative challenge, combining musical theater-inspired performances, emotionally intense character arcs, large ensemble songs, complex vocal layering, and cinematic-scale sound design.
Anaïs Delva’s award-winning vocal performance as Charlie Morningstar captured the emotional range required to carry the character through moments of vulnerability, humor, grief, hope, and musical expression.
Already widely recognized for her work in theater and dubbing, Delva’s performance demonstrated how voice acting in localization extends far beyond synchronization. It becomes acting, singing, adaptation, and emotional reconstruction simultaneously.
Behind the scenes, the mixing teams faced equally demanding technical challenges.
The production required extensive work across dialogue, music, vocal effects, choruses, and sound design, at a level of complexity more comparable to feature film production than episodic television.
What made the achievement particularly notable was the collaboration behind it.
Mixers, directors, actors, singers, and production teams worked in constant coordination to preserve the emotional and sonic integrity of the original while delivering a seamless localized experience for audiences.
TransPerfect Media’s “Media Inspector” (Nomination)
While this year’s Hermes Awards recognized extraordinary artistic achievements, they also highlighted how technology is reshaping the future of entertainment localization.
TransPerfect Media’s AI-powered Media Inspector platform received a Technical Achievement nomination for its role in transforming how localized content is reviewed, validated, and prepared for global distribution.
Designed as a unified compliance, quality control, and content intelligence platform, Media Inspector combines machine vision, audio analysis, metadata validation, and human oversight to help teams identify issues earlier, improve consistency, and scale content delivery more efficiently.
Its nomination reinforces an important shift happening across the industry: technology is not replacing creative talent; it is expanding what creative teams are capable of achieving.
As global content demand continues to grow, intelligent workflows and creative craftsmanship are becoming increasingly interconnected.
Other Nominations
Several additional TransPerfect Media productions were also recognized among this year’s Hermes Award nominees.
In the Best Localized Song category, nominations included Faster (Los Angeles Studios), Wicked for Good (Poland Studios), and Helluva Boss (France Studios), each showcasing the unique challenges of adapting music, lyrical intent, and vocal performance across languages and cultures.
The company also received a nomination in the Best Overall Dubbing for an Animation category for Exorcism Chronicles: The Beginning (Los Angeles Studios), further highlighting the range of storytelling genres and production styles represented across its localization teams.
Together, the nominations and wins underscore the collaborative work of directors, translators, lyricists, engineers, actors, mixers, and production teams across TransPerfect Media’s international network.
The Future of Global Storytelling
Streaming platforms and international distribution have fundamentally transformed audience expectations.
Today’s viewers expect stories to feel authentic in every language, every market, and every format. That means localization is no longer a secondary step in the production process but an essential part of how stories succeed globally.
Behind every adapted lyric, emotional performance, carefully timed joke, immersive soundscape, and seamless dub is a global network of artists, engineers, translators, directors, technologists, and production teams working together to create meaningful audience experiences.
This year’s Hermes Awards celebrated that invisible craft.
For TransPerfect Media, the recognition reflects not only creative excellence, but also the passion, collaboration, and innovation that continue to shape the future of global storytelling.
And as entertainment becomes increasingly borderless, the role of localization has never been more important.
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