O Tannenbaum: Interjections in video game localization
The other day I was proofing a dialog script translated by a German colleague of mine and had to smile a little when I saw that he translated “woah, hang on” with “brr, warte mal”. It happens quite often that excellent translators stumble over interjections and onomatopoeia. It usually means they were not as addicted to comic books in their youth as I was. Very often it also means that the game writer has a few things to learn.
Here are some examples we video game translators encounter quite often:
Argh, he stabbed me with his dagger.
Grr, why did he have to stab me with his dagger?
Whoa, what are you doing with that dagger?
Oops, I forgot my dagger.
Wow, where can I get a dagger like that one?
Take the second example, grr. Dude is angry. Well, he just got stabbed. He is growling. If we are translating an in-game text which is not voice-overed, we want to show the player/reader how angry he is. By the way, grr is enough, no need to write grrrrrrrrrr, grr.
Many game writers still write like it’s 1984 and recorded sentences such as the above examples would take up 70% of your floppy disk. This leads them to write as if nothing ever got recorded and played back in game. They write like a comic book author. However, today nobody reads in AAA games anymore, we listen to well directed and voiced dialogues. We should write accordingly, just like those guys who write for older media (something called film and television). We write scripts. We translate scripts.
VO scripts are used for mainly two purposes. They are used to record in-game dialogues (and monologues and everything else) in a nice recording studio with expensive beverages and beautiful assistants. And they are used for the subtitles of the recordings. Now imagine you are a voice talent and your beautiful assistant is handing you a glass of champagne and today’s script with the line “Grr, why did he have to stab me with his dagger?”. Are you actually going to say “grr”? Try it out at home while I get a coffee.
Grr, that coffee is too weak. Did you say grr or did you growl? This is why the line in a script should look like this:
Lara Croft: [growls] Why did he have to stab me with his dagger? The black text is then extracted for subtitles in which the grr is also not necessary because the growling can be heard.
When nothing is recorded and we communicate with the player by text only, onomatopoetic interjections are a valid and inevitable tool to make us understood or to add flavor to the text. But only then. And many of them do not translate well. Grr does (into German), whoa, the example from the beginning, does not. Whoa originated as a command to give to a horse: Stop. So when you look it up in a dictionary, you find the German equivalent: Brr. Which sounds like freezing cold. (By the way, the German command to a horse for “go right” is hott, which sounds like, well, hot.)
Without getting too grammatical, there are differences between your grrs, your wows and your oopses. And sometimes, even when they are grammatically the same, they behave differently in a script or a text. What to translate and how is a matter of experience and immersion in both your source and target language. Oops is such an example. In a medieval RPG, you might be able to use Huch. Wow is never wau, please (which is woof in German). And argh can be ach, ah, au…
The O in “O Tannenbaum” is by the by not an interjection but an article. If you know what a vocativ is, that’s it. If not, be careful or you end up like Brian in the video below. The same sound as an interjection is used in: Oh, Tannenbaum, what have you done now?
Everything I know about interjections I learned from Schoolhouse Rock.
Thanks Stephan. I actually heard this song a few weeks ago for the first time (on the radio). And now I know what is was!