Play to stay in touch
So how do you stay in touch with your mother tongue and culture as a translator living abroad? The answer comes easy to me: I play MMOs!
I do all the other things my unfortunate colleagues do, those who don’t localize video games but translate business reports or medical examinations. O how I pity them. I watch German TV. I have German friends. I visit Germany and am surprised as to how many cooking shows are on in prime time. I read German books. Also, this internet thing, they just got it over there too.
I have to play video games, it comes with the job. When I work as a project manager, I often ask my translators questions about the games they played recently. Detailed questions. But this is another post, let me just say that Duke Nukem is by definition not recent.
Playing MMOs on German servers or realms gives me also the opportunity to catch up on German gaming slang. Mostly, these are terms I would never use in localization, as we translate not only for the hardcore players out there. Any game text should be accessible to beginners, so when I read “spec your alt” or “when you are oom, drink a pot”, I know that the game was written by a gamer, not a writer. Hard to find both it seems, just as hard as finding gaming translators. Again, another post.
One of my favourite pseudo-anglicisms is “Skillung”. We all know what skills are and how they differ from talents (see the above spec). For some reason, the German term for spec or talent tree is Skillung, whereby “Skill” is skill and “ung” simply a German suffix. Ironically, is is mostly used to nominalize verbs. Real anglicisms sometimes make sense and can be explained. For example the use of “item”, the German “Gegenstand” is just too long it seems. But how did it happen that Germans use “account”, since the German “Konto” is even shorter? Sounds too much like a boring bank?
Even better to stay in touch with your native language and your localization field: Join a guild and hop on vent (or in Germany, the more popular Teamspeak). There you might hear sentences such as: “Okay, du pullst den Boss, dann atten wir, bis er sein Loot droppt.” You don’t have to read German to not understand this sentence.
I have had a look at a few of your posts in the past, and was reminded to check back when someone tweeted that they were looking for an into German games translator – I linked them here.
I totally agree with the power of video games to keep a language fresh. I hope you don’t mind my posting a link to my own blog here… but on http://translatorsteacup.lingocode.com/?p=91 you will see I recommended computer games as a way for young language learners to learn a foreign language.
I also agree that it is important people play games if they are translating them. RPGs are probably the most wordy of all, so it is pretty important that translators of these know a bit about them. I once met a “games translator” who had not heard of Neverwinter Nights… or Fable… yet said their last project “had a medieval theme”.
If you are on twitter, please say hello at @lingocode – I don’t really use RSS much, but it would be great to keep up-to-date on your thoughts.
Thank you, Rose!
I never mind a link to a well written post. I was just recently reminded of the translator’s responsibility as an educator when I worked on a game for kids.