Nevertheless, the question “should video game translators be gamers” pops up once in a while in various communities, most recently I saw it asked on Linkedin, where a lot of people provided valuable input. Still, when reading this questions, I think of answers involving the Pope being Catholic and something about a bear in the woods. Try this one: “Should legal translators have a background in jurisprudence?” Or: “Do you consider it important for a medical translator to know what s/he is doing?”

I might exaggerate here a little bit, forgive me. Our work as game translators is not nearly as important as the output of our colleagues in the medical field. We do have an educative responsibility, especially when translating for children, but this one might deserve a post on its own.

So the answer to the somewhat rhetorical question is: Yes, please!

Now for the twist: Should gamers be video game translators? Very often indeed!

Every day somewhere on this planet, a group of fans of a particular game get together to localize it into their language. These people work for free, are highly motivated and will not stop until their localized version has been peer-approved and reached gold status. It will take them a lot longer than a team of professionals and the localization won’t be as good. But sometimes it can be even better because they do not care if the translation of some obscure Japanese game will take them two years.

I for example enjoy a good football manager simulation, and by football I mean soccer. The best game in this genre is Football Manager, developed by SI and published by Sega. Due to licensing issues, the game must not be distributed in Germany, where competitor FIFA Manager controls the market and holds the valuable DFL license. So no German version, even if you live in Canada, where none of this should matter.  Anything football related, I enjoy playing in German, the language I grew up in, played football in, usually lost matches in. Enter a bunch of guys. Every year they translate the new version of Football Manager into German. This is my shout-out to them: Though your translations are sometimes clunky, your file is naturally not supported by the developer, difficult to install and crashes my game once in a while, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Keep up the good work.

No more muzak

We did not have bad times but none of the to us so familiar Resident Evil feeling ever came up. First of all: What happened to the typewriter rooms? It used to be such a relief to open a door, be greeted by muzak and the opportunity to save your progress, only to realize that you have no ribbons left. No saving for you! Now there are checkpoints, good old, boring, predictable checkpoints.

You call that a zombie? Srsly?

I have killed my share of zombies. I have watched my share of zombies killing humans and eating their flesh, which makes the killing of said zombies so much more enjoyable. Zombies are slow, dumb, ugly and go “ARRRRRGGH”, mostly with their hands stretched out to grab some delicious human flesh. In this game, we have none of that. The mobs are fast and use all sorts of weapons. Okay, the chainsaw dude was kinda cool. Ugly they are. Zombies, they are not.

Too many shinies

I like achievements and trophies, they are a neat and somewhat recent addition to the gameplay (and to my word count when I translate and bill). In RE5, there are all sorts of things to look out for: some sort of emblem to shoot and collect, gems on the walls to sell and upgrade you weapons and of course containers to break, gasoline barrels to shoot (boom) and apparently power relays you can also shoot in order to kill you enemies with the current (we never found any though). This all leads to conversations like this:

Wife and backseat player: “There is something shiny.”

Awesome me who just headshotted some scary guy: “Where?”

“It was there, to the left.”

I have a look around.

“To the left, you moved.”

I move 2.5 degrees relative to my original position to the left.

“STOP MOVING.”

I stop moving.

“Now I can’t see it anymore.”

I ponder my actions. To move a little or not too move a little? It could be sweet shotgun ammo. It could be a stupid gem. It could be that I am more afraid of my wife at this point than of any fake zombie.

Many extensions you have installed in the last year or so leave a footprint in the context menu (highlight any word on this page and right-click it, voilà). Maybe you don’t actually need all these addons. Feel free to disable or remove some (CTRL + SHIFT + A gets you to the list).

If you want to keep an addon but not its entries in the context menu, check the options of the particular addon in the same list. Most of the time, you can uncheck a box somewhere to make those entries disappear. I am down to six in my context menu.

The fewer entries, the faster you work. When we translate, be it video games or UN resolutions, we mostly need a quick way to search for a term on different websites. The addon context search simplifies the configuration of your particular needs and works with the search engine box in the upper right corner of your browser.

You can get the pictured drop-down menu by clicking on the icon to the very left (in my case the Google icon). You add new sites by clicking on the same icon while being on the site you wish to add (this all works independently from the addon “context search”). You will then see the option “add site” in this drop-down menu.

With context search installed (and Firefox restarted), you can now right-click on any highlighted word to see this in your context menu:

As you can see, my menu really is down to six entries and I added five search engines so far.

By the by, the keyboard shortcut to the search bar is CTRL + K.

]]> http://www.germanservices.ca/index.php/2011/03/firefox-4-time-for-a-spring-cleaning/feed/ 1 http://www.germanservices.ca/index.php/2011/01/play-to-stay-in-touch/ http://www.germanservices.ca/index.php/2011/01/play-to-stay-in-touch/#comments Tue, 18 Jan 2011 22:55:13 +0000 Patrick http://www.germanservices.ca/?p=451 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.

(pcgames.de)

A popular topic when gamers from different cultures, countries ore continents are sitting together with a cup of coffee: How come a game such as Anno 1404 is so popular in Germany while nobody knows of it in the US? Nice compilation by German magazine PC Games, no need to speak German, just click through the gallery.

2. Funny Mox is funny

As a German, I have no sense of humor, but one of my French colleagues recommended this cartoon blog about the life of a translator to me. Even though the punchlines escape me, I am quite impressed by the masterful stroke of MS Paint.

3. The internet is for rants

(EA Louse, anonymous)

By now everyone and his Kodo have heard about anonymous blogger EA Louse. I hope it’s all a fake, especially the doomsday remarks about how bad SWTOR is going to be. Should the investment really be 300 million dollars and the game will not end up as a at least somewhat serious WoW challenger, it would be very bad for the MMO industry indeed.

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?

The free to play model is increasingly popular, and I love it. The Wall Street Journal has recently written about this development in the gaming industry and I will add to this very good article a short list of games that are already, and have been for a while, F2P. So, if you are a translator trying to get a foot into the wonderful world of MMO localization, try them out – for free.

• Allods Online. “The free WoW”.
• Dungeons & Dragons Online. F2P since September 2009.
• RuneScape. A browser game. Old school and still rocking the F2P world.
• Silkroad Online. Set in the 7th century in China and Europe. A lot of grinding, but worth it.
• Free Realms. Very cute game for a younger target audience.

(cnet.com, Josh Lownsohn)

Ubisoft is just one of many game publishers to only make digital manuals available for the players. I say, good riddance. I still need to localize it into German. Especially good when renting console games from your neighbourhood game store. The booklets are missing anyway. On top of that, Ubisoft plans to deliver the games in a “a 100 percent recycled DVD case made up of polypropylene”. Replace polypropylene with cardboard and you are on the right way, guys.

2. How to detect bad games before spending money

(videogamezone.de, in German)

This is a nice top ten. My favourites: 3. Game and movie are released at the same time. So very true. When was the last time we got excited about a game released with a movie? Stop thinking about it. 6. No German speech, no German text. Yes, if the makers don’t invest into localization, they either have the best game of the century or one for the bottom of the barrel.

3. When the most powerful man mentions video games…

(Gamasutra, Kris Graft)

…we should quote him: “With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.”