I am a representative of a relatively young team of translators and would like to tell you a little about our, so to speak, everyday life. We started a couple of years ago as a bunch of porters of other people’s translations to all kinds of different consoles. But then something changed, I wanted to do something of my own, something big. And since the beginning of the year we have gained many new people, overgrown with a bunch of large amateur projects and a couple of small officials.
In our group, a small series of notes from our translators and editors began to publish, telling about the difficulties that we encounter by translating games. I would like to share some of these notes with you.
"Difficulties in translation"
I will turn the calendar and again ..
– Zhen, don’t even try!
Okay, all ah! Let’s postpone the unfortunate calendar and talk about the eternal. About translation, that is. The heading is called – "Translator Notes". Sometimes the name is suitable for them is the "difficulties of translation".
"You are talking about" Difficulties of translation "?".
No, exactly about the difficulties.
But what difficulties he https://casinospingenie.uk/bonus/ has, this translation? Easy, Medium, Hard? Is it possible to carry out some kind of gradation in terms of complexity there? Or the translation process is more like a game in which there is no choice of difficulty, and the process of passing throws up problems that becomes more difficult and more complicated?
No, of course, the translation process is very uneven in complexity. The level of translator’s reservation in each case depends on his social status (in a wound) of experience, knowledge of the context of the game or its moment, how much the translator understands the topic, which concerns the text. Even where there are no technical problems (the text does not contain tags and other “garbage”, it goes in order, there is a developer’s comments) in unexpected parts of the script, difficulties may arise, from which the speed of translation is sharply reduced and the feeling that “what is not going on today” appears ”. The last such case that happened the other day, and brought me to the idea of writing this text.
We started working on one of the sections of the game, the translation of which will be officially released at Nintendo Switch. We divided this fragment of the text with another translator. When I started the translation, the work went slower than I expected. The text concerned the description of objects and it was some kind … Well, you guessed, it was a difficult. Often came across unfamiliar words, plus everything became more complicated by the fact that the game has a rather interesting and peculiar ENT. After a couple of dozen such items, I saw a comment from a colleague in Discord – as it turned out, she was also quickly tired of the translation of these objects. We finished the section for a day with a little, but we did not leave the feeling that we were working at a pure desire to finish it and finally start the main text of the game.
So, let’s go in more detail. What moments can cause difficulties when translating? Well, firstly, this is still an inconvenient text for translation. In the texts pulled out of games, this occurs entirely. You gradually get used to that the text is torn in the middle of the sentence of some [Xeno: Wait Wait = Key], and string transfers are often recorded in a symbolic form as “\ n”. Sometimes the translation is so saturated with such expressions that it becomes difficult to focus on the text itself. And if the translator came to the translation of games precisely from the translation environment, then such interspersed code in the text often scare away or irritate them. I’m not saying which Beliberd is given out machine translation systems if the “raw” text is launched into them – either they will try to translate the tags, or they simply will not see the connection between the parts of the text and translate Abracadabra (you can also write more than one note about the “bad” translation).
Different characters are found in games, they can communicate in different ways. Some are laconic, others are talkative, someone is pushing with scientific terms, and someone is corny by gopnik. These and other characters need their own approach, their character must be reflected in translation. We can say that their speech has a different style. And when an unfamiliar or unusual style comes across a translator, he has a plug with this character. In addition, the game has the text of the description of objects, notes, synopsis, which in themselves are another type of text. In games they like to stylize the text to show the difference between the races (a striking example is the Dragon Quest series), for example, a people speaking the Shakespearean language or a rustic people, barely connecting simple language constructions (Xenoblade, I look at you).
There are also specific perversions of the initial text, for example, muging characters. Strongly burping characters. Aggressively trapeling characters, whose replicas must first be decoded to normal English, translate and again "spoil". I myself have not come across such a text yet, but in Trials of Mana there is such a character, and the phrase “fanatically ruggs” after the start of the translation test became another internal meme of our team.
– Charlotte, where we need to go further on the plot?
– *Speaks inaudible
– Where?!
– *fanatically rugged
– Okay, I’ll look at the questil.
All this list I led to the fact that if the translator has difficulties with a specific speech style or letter, it will be at least difficult to translate to him. It is logical that the editor with such text will have to work more. The moment associated with the style is a vocabulary. Often the transition to another style is due to the fact that the words used by the characters change to those close in meaning, but unfamiliar to the translator. If before that the proposal could be translated immediately, then with such one has to first deal with the puzzle.
It happens that the characters of the game begin to discuss something specific, for example, the art of the early Middle Ages and the influence of ancient philosophy on it. The translator may not be fundamentally familiar with such a topic of text, it may not be interesting to him. For example, these can be very technical descriptions of the mechanisms and parts of some furs or a recipe for obtaining a philosophical stone. It’s hard for me to translate the description of the weapon, because I do not understand it, so I am happy to throw it to the guys who are closer.
A huge layer of difficulties and the most common (as it seems to me) problem is a lack of context. It would seem difficult to translate a long sentence with unfamiliar words. But the translation of unfamiliar words can be clarified, and the translation of the entire sentence is made in parts. Sometimes simple phrases like "yes, it does" come across. Everything is clear, yes? But what exactly does the character mean? In this example, both the verb can be translated in completely different ways, and the subject that we are talking about can be in the Russian “he”, “it”, “it”. Or it should be translated somehow impersonally. If the text goes in order, you need to see what went before and after this phrase, but sometimes everything is not so clear and such phrases are ruled at the last moment when the game is dismantled/tested.
It is sometimes difficult to translate funny moments. Firstly, it is necessary that the moment remains funny. And often you have to look for analogues of idioms and stable expressions. You can not steam and translate only the meaning, but the game will lose some of the emotions from this. These are not our methods.
From what came to my mind – sometimes in games there are poetry. And they must be translated as poems. Or songs – and they must be translated as songs. You can give this to the side or to someone who understands, but then it will be necessary to explain the entire context, etc.p.
As you can see, many moments are subjective and depend on how much this or that translator is ready for translation. Restrictions on two sheets of text tell me to round. But finally, I wanted to add that in one of the following notes I will try to build games, in which I participated (there seems to be more than 7 already, I lost my account), in order – from the simplest for me to the most difficult translated. I think it will be interesting. And, since each translator has such moments, perhaps, in one of the following notes, one of our translators will be written out of his position.
Well, something like that. Such notes have been published with us every week for a couple of months and, if you are interested, then we would be happy to publish them here and here.By the way, if you are interested in what kind of projects we have in our work, then here is a small video for familiarization.
Naturally, not all of our projects are in the work (some have not yet been collected, but we can’t talk about some yet).
