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.” 

Now they made a mistake . They translated “leader” with “Führer.” Yep, the word you English natives pronounce like furor.

I have been in this situation many times and always chose the word “Anführer” (synonym), Blizzard’s team corrected their mistake and replaced it with “Leiter” (synonym).

A mistake it was. In German, we try and avoid the stand-alone version of the word (”Reiseführer” (guide) is just fine). Since there are so many synonyms, really not a problem.

It’s not a big thing. It was corrected. Let’s move on. Lest we forget.

Links to discussions about this in the German WoW forums here and here.

I have been using Firefox now as my primary browser since September of last year, and I was quite happy with it. It crashes more often than Opera and doesn’t come with everything I need (a few addons will rectify this) but overall it is a good tool for my work in video game localization. We localizers need to research a lot, be it in our target language (German here) or in English. We need a reliable, fast and very, very secure browser. Why so secure? As a translator of sometimes obscure expressions, acronyms and just plain weird stuff (I worked on Silent Hill, just to give you an example) we need to click on the links our parents warned us about. Well, they should have.

Those links might lead us to sites running malicious, evil, sneaky and really mean scripts which could make your computer go boom. Or steal your passwords. So every translator who needs more than Leo and is even a little bit concerned about his and his clients security uses Firefox with an addon called NoScript running. NoScript lets the user browse the web without having to fear those scripts. NoScript also allows the user to choose which of the scripts he wants to execute. For the uninitiated: Many popular web sites run a lot of scripts while you are browsing them. A couple of Google scripts, one from Facebook, one from Twitter… The Toronto Star web site runs scripts from eight different sources. It also runs a lot of faster if you use NoScript.

Now, you can disable Javascript in all of the big browsers. However, only with NoScript can you see and select those scripts. This was the reason why I switched to Firefox last September (Opera has nothing like NoScript). Which means, I switched from a proprietary application to a free one. Totally stuck it to the man, yeah!

So I installed all these addons to make Firefox look and work like Opera and never looked back. Well, I do check from time to time if Opera finally has something like NoScript in the newest release so I can dump this bloated and crashing piece of digital garbage called Firefox and return to the man, hug him, nibble gently on his corporate ear lobe and tell him that I will never, ever leave again.

Why all the ear nibbling all of a sudden? Because the addons are not being updated! I rely on one in particular: Hyperwords. Makes it very easy to search specific terms on various web sites, is configurable and in my right-click menu. Just like in Opera. Those lazy bastards who don’t get a penny to write and update Hyperwords haven’t updated it yet for the newest Firefox release. So my work flow is interrupted. I am inconvenienced and won’t stand for it!

Sometimes, proprietary is good.

(wow.com, Adam Holisky)

No need to read this article, I just mention it here to demonstrate how huge the iPad is. It even makes non-news.  “And many of you began writing into us as soon as the iPad announcement was made, asking if we knew about WoW running on the iPad. The answer is no, we have no information, and there is no indication that WoW will run on the iPad.” I understand that it also does not make mocha cappuccinos.

2. The iPad Will be Great For Games Because I Think it Will Fail

(Negative Gamer, John “Wardrox”)

The editor-in-chief of Negative Gamer predicts a bright future for the device that I wanted since Captain Picard put a cup oft tea, Earl Grey, hot, next to it. “Embrace the awkwardly size, finger-print covered screen, un-cost effectiveness, ugly as sin design, 10 hour battery life, everything is proprietary, casual-or-crap-games-only future… I know this will come true because I am almost always wrong when it comes to predicting technology trends. The DS (nobody needs two screens), the PSPgo (download only is the future), social networks (who cares?), anything other than Compact Flash for storage (SD cards are too small), MiniDiscs (I still have a pack of brand new discs as spares; they’re making a come-back, just you wait). Using logic it seems only to make sense that the iPad is the future.”

3. Analysis: The iPad – Good For Gaming?

(Gamasutra, Christian Nutt)

Well, you tell me, Christian. “It’s hard to think of the iPad as “essential” to anybody right now. But there’s a chance it may catch the wave of a new audience that doesn’t want a full-fledged PC. If ever a device had that chance, it may be this one. And those people, like any, will certainly want a chance to play games.“

4. Future Ubisoft Games To Require Constant Internet Access

(Slashdot, Soulskill)

That we need the internet for an MMO makes sense. But for Beyond Good & Evil 2? “Then comes those who own gaming laptops, who now will not be able to play games on trains, buses, in the park, or anywhere they may not be able to find a WiFi connection (something that’s rarely free in the UK, of course – fancy paying the £10/hour in the airport to play your Ubisoft game?). Then there’s the day your internet is down, and the engineers can’t come out to fix it until tomorrow. No game for you.

5. CitiesXL to close multiplayer features

(Massively, Rubi Bayer)

Another one bites the dust. “Three months after launch, CitiesXL was forced to make a difficult decision. An email was sent out to all players this morning informing them that as of March 8th, Monte Cristo will be putting an end to the Planet Offer.”  I am qfting Xugu Madison’s comment: “Cities XL always seemed like a mediocre SimCity clone with a chat room and trading options stuck to it. Quite why they thought the incredibly limited interaction was worth $10 a month, I will never know. Love creative MMO ideas, but they need to succeed at the implementation as well…”

6. Das Web-Movie des Jahres heißt „The Dark Knight“

(Bitkom)

So close! A few replacements and this headline could have been all in English! Maybe next time, Bitkom. “Web-Movie”? Heiliges Kanonenrohr.

I want to localize your new MMO “Lego Universe” into German. Real bad. I would do it for free. Hell, I’d pay you money for it. Most probably.

While awaiting your response, I shall be watching the trailer below over and over again.

Kind regards,

Patrick

P.S.: I would not use words such as “hell” in my translation. Promise.

10. Games that go boom

Start>Programs>Games>Minesweeper. I could tell you my high score but it would embarrass you so very, very much.

9. Eyesight 20/20

Trying to decipher down-rated comments on blogs like wow.com. You know, where they go darker and darker until they are just a black box with dark grey text. Great idea to let your readers be editors!

8. No Russian is only a suggestion

Totally disregard the “no Russian” rule and mumble words like Dowarisch, Dozwidanja, Njet and Pektopah while mowing down civilians at the airport. Bonus points if you do it indignantly.

7. What? CR9 only has 19 points in heading?

Editing the database in Football Manager 2010 for five hours without actually using it in a game.

6. KOTOR is more than one game

Playing Knights of the Old Republic for the only purpose of playing Pazaak. True role-playing!

5. Drama class

Reenact your favorite Youtube video! I suggest you start with this one:

4. Mind Game

Analog Chess. Great replay value.

3. Elder Scrolls Extreme

Installing Morrowind with all official extensions, download and install all 38 “must have” mods and take 4 hours to create a new character including a tense and exciting backstory. Repeat.

2. Hell hath no fury like a spoilered fanboy

Google “I am your father” and leave comments such as  “Thanks for spoiling it for me, douche.”  Advanced version: “Soylent Green is what?”

1. Game Show Hosts do it better

The Wikipedia game (for two players). Click the Random Article link and make the other player guess the entry (20 questions style).

A new definition of chutzpah: Starting a class action lawsuit against Microsoft on behalf of peeps who don’t pay.

One other thing Microsoft could be spending some time on: Make consoles that don’t break.

The movie is Der Untergang (Downfall), starring Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler.