Amazingly, some languages, like Chinese, did get completely retranslated before Gibbous’ launch, due on the most part to well-wishing translators working tirelessly for what Boar admits at this point was very little money.īut not everything could be saved. We were weeks away from release and we had blown all our localising budget.”įacing releasing a supposedly unintelligible game to the public, and after struggling to fix the issues with the original translation company, the team were forced to scramble together a hodgepodge of freelancers and helpful players to localise the game against the clock. “We started asking people about the other languages it turned out that they were just as horrible too. “We started getting messages from Russian players saying, ‘are you aware that your page reads like it was translated with Google Translate?’” Boar recalls. That was something we were very excited to be able to provide, because those people are just completely ignored on Steam and GOG.”Īccording to the developer, alarms bells only started ringing a couple of months before the game was due to launch, when the team also localised their Steam page into the same different languages. “What was cool was they were offering languages that not a lot of people localise in,” Boar explains. Localising such a long text is no mean feat for even the most experienced translators, and at first, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, the small team’s aim was only to contextualise it into what’s known in the business as ‘FIGS,’ or French, Italian, German, and Spanish, using established freelancers.īut when a company offered the team the chance to localise their game into six more languages, including Russian, Chinese, and Korean, they, perhaps naively, jumped at the chance to showcase their hard work to a wider audience. The Lovecraft-inspired adventure game features, according to lead developer Liviu Boar, “over 100,000 words,” which he estimates is roughly the length of the Greek epic poem The Iliad. The incident with Gibbous wasn’t quite so funny. “As a result, people had a terrible time with that puzzle. “The tool is called a spanner in England, so the pun (was) lost,” LucasArts designer David Fox recalls. Unfortunately, not many people living outside of the US at the time knew of the term. Players needed to pick up a monkey and use it to tighten a pump to turn off a waterfall – a clever reference to the American term ‘monkey wrench’, referring to a specific type of house tool. Consider a translator losing the context when localising RPG Grandia 2 into German, and so translating the word ‘MISS!’ – in the sense of not hitting the mark – into the German word ‘FRÄULEIN!’, meaning a ‘miss’ of the unmarried woman variety.Īnother example of the importance of good localisation as opposed to direct translation is a well-known in-joke among the adventure games community – that is, the infamous ‘monkey wrench’ puzzle of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. Get it wrong and games can become laughably absurd. The skill of a true ‘localisation sensei’ (not, I’m told, their official title) is to think about what the essence of a game’s words and phrases mean in its original language and translate that contextual meaning, as opposed to merely the literal one, into the new language too.Īs with many nuanced jobs, if the localiser does their job well, you probably won’t even realise the game has one. Sometimes they can come close to ruining your game. The direct translation from Japanese into US English should have been ‘Puck-Man’, but fears that the game’s literal name would cause childish vandals to deface the arcade machines with obscenity meant that a cleaner sounding ‘80s phenomenon was born instead, and localisation along with it.įast forward to the present and, as Stuck In Attic, the developer behind recent point-and-click game Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure discovered to its horror, sometimes the ambiguous lines between good and awful localisation don’t just add up to embarrassing mistakes. The first ever example is thought to be Pac-Man. Game localisation, the art of not just translating a game’s text into a new language but shaping it so that the words also make cultural sense, has come a long way. In the beginning was the word – and it was poorly translated.
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