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Interesting challenges in your localisation: approaches, time warp, trouble and the like

A topic by Azatiron created Jul 05, 2021 Views: 453 Replies: 9
Viewing posts 1 to 6

Hi there. I wonder what was the biggest or most interesting challenge for your when localising Adventures from Another World into your language (or in general)?

I found the "approaches" tricky and I have seen quite some variantion when comparing the German translations.

And what about "trouble"? It can cause trouble but is also some kind of weakness, too.

How did you tackle the "time jump", when the Fate Dice and the Deck of Fate are mentioned, purchasable on www.evilhat.com? Did you keep the years 2013/2014 in it? And have you kept the "future" tense in "The Deck of Fate will be available from Evil Hat in 2013 or 2014"?

I am curious about your ideas.

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In general, I found it effective to make the key terms more abstract and literary. The vagueness somehow made them both more iconic and "elastic" (at least in Italian)


Aspect>(Dettaglio) Detail, Approach> (Stile) Style, Trouble> (Sventura) Misfortune, High concept> (Quintessenza) Quintessence


For the Fate Dice anachronism,  I first updated it with a reference to the official Fate Dice app (really, it's a thing)
But then I went back and actually pruned all references to Fate Dice and Decks besides mentioning Fudge dice once and how you can replace them with plain ones
It seemed fair, given the extra distance from Fate (Fate Core>Fate Accelerated>Adventures from Another World > My translation)

(And yes, I translated it all, but I won't share it until voting is over)

Deleted 1 year ago
Critical hit on the likeliness of that translation ever seeing the light of day

For my team, the biggest challenge was making the translation gender neutral in French, since the source text was neutral as well. That was really hard, but hey, we decided to add this extra challenge ourselves xD

We found the "approaches" rather easy, we agreed on most of them quickly, except "flashy" and "forceful". Flashy was definitely the hardest one, because we had to find something that would work as an adjective and a noun. My favourite proposition was "tape-à-l'oeil" but unfortunately it didn't work as a noun, so we went with "exubérant". Sometimes, you have to kill your darlings :(

For "trouble", we went with "un mal" (literally a fancy way to say "something bad"), but now I'm kinda jealous of Alain's "misfortune" X)

For "high concept" we went with "concept clé" (key concept) which we all liked a lot.

However we REALLY struggle with how to translate "aspect", especially since, in the source text, it sometimes looked like they used the word "aspect" even when they weren't talking about the actual game mechanism? In the end we decided to use "attribut" (roughly "characteristic")

The time jump was pretty easy because we studied how to deal with them in class, we switched to the present (after making sure they were still available on the website) :) But I didn't know about the app!!

It was my very first jam, very first rpg translation and, much important, very first time working on HTML. I went and found a program which enable to only change the text and leave the code alone, but the final save bugged and I had to make it into PDF instead, so that was the biggest challenge for me XD

As for the translation itself, it was a lot of fun.

For the time warp I decided to leave things as they are, but now I'm not so sure. I thought it would be best to keep the original dates, I felt it would be bad to change things that are "official" of sorts.

Now, when it comes to approaches, I've found quite a lot of variations in the other translations (French translations) and I'm amazed how much creativity there was, we all found different... approaches. Favorite approach so far (and the hardest for everyone as far as I can see) was "flashy". Someone used "panache" and I was a bit ashamed I forgot such an amazing word (I went with "tapageuse"). I also really like Alain's "quintessence" as a translation for "high concept", it really gives a strong vibe to the term. Personally I went with "concept fondateur" since I like to stick a bit close to the original terms.

For "trouble" I didn't think long and really like the sound of "désagrément" so I went with that. The most challenging was actually "stunt". I wanted to make the term a bit spectacular, so I went with "coup d'éclat". Someone used "tour de force" and I like it a lot.

All in all, I think the most challenging part of the jam was technical. Not just because of the HTML, but also how to manage time working alone on the translation, correction and how to deal with the whole HTML/PDF shenanigans (love this word).  Other than that, it was more fun than challenging ^^

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You know, personally, I like "tapageuse" better than "panache" :P

Congrats on making the whole translation on your own! That's really impressive!!

Thank you so much! I think "panache" has this kinda "ol'timey" vibe to it that adds a lot of charm ^^

Yeah I agree! And given the illustrations, that "ol'timey" vibe is very fitting ^^ Only issue I have with it is that you can't change it into an adjective when you need to describe an action, which is annoying for the translation :/

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If anyone's curious, this is my take.

  • Public domain repositories like digitalcomicmuseum.com, oldbookillustrations.com and reusableart.com are an amazing way to get around the lack of artistic talent
  • Ditto with bulma.io for web design
  • Streaming is a performance. While it might look like Fabiowas merely revising on camera, it was more like a real-time documentary, distilling concepts and discussing them with the audience. Very hard work, but fascinating
  • Even little things like making a few example characters feminine can make the text more inclusive with little effort
  • Re-theming is a bit of a gimmick, and sometimes goes against the accuracy of the content (Flashy>Rocambolesco ["Swashbuckling"]), but I think it's needed to stand out in a jam. It's also great fun.

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The most interesting part was deciding how to translate the terms "Aspect" and "Stunt." I was surprised that all of the other members who were present during that discussion thought it should be transliterated "アスペクト" and "スタント." The argument was that these English terms grow on you while you say them during the game - they are fun to learn and use, and provide a unique feel and identity to the game.  These are not English words that everyone knows, but that was considered an advantage because the word would be a blank slate for players; Aspects in this game work in a special way to drive the story, and if we used a similar concept in Japanese such as 側面(side) or 要素(element), it might not fit the special meaning that the term "Aspect" takes on in this game.

I was very surprised by this argument.  It made me think about the difference between the expectations of Japanese gamers and English-language gamers. 

Many English games/IPs use common words imbued with a special meaning specific to that setting (especially in capitalized form), such as "walkers" "The Awakening" or "The Warp." (Although Japanese doesn't have capitalization, it's still possible to show that something is a game concept by putting it in brackets.) In contrast, maybe the audience  of Japanese games/IPs have more tolerance towards new words and can even relish learning them. If this was a Japanese game being translated into English, I can't imagine the translation talking about "Character Yousos" and "Scene Yousos" (Youso means "element") so that the word can be a blank slate, and so that players can enjoy learning it and saying it. 

Personally, I prefer to only leave a term in the original language for the sake of flavor if it's something easy to grasp like "Chi points" or "Pikachu." But if the word or concept is more abstract, and is there to help players understand how the game works, I think it's important to make it a word where the player can get the overall gist of it just by looking at it. Learning several such concepts at once can be confusing, and if possible, the words should help the player instinctively see how they all fit together as a system.  In this case, the word "Stunt" in English automatically communicates that they are something a character "does," unlike Aspects.  I think it would help players grasp the system better if it was translated into a word that Japanese players could automatically recognize as a kind of action.

As a compromise, we decided to add more explanation to the sections describing concepts such as "Aspect" and "Stunt." We also added specific examples of Stunts and Situation Aspects in places where the original text didn't have any.