Safaquel
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If we could just keep the discussion to the point? Thank you.
I am against changing the game name by default. In actual entries we may have certain leeway, and there are certain phrases, in both entries and the game itself, where the word looks natural.
And I again point out that the percieved ridiculousness is in this case mostly that: percieved, not necessarily existing.
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With all due respect, a333, I think it's your own preconcieved ideas talking, on that particular subject.
Latinisms have long been a legitimate part of russian language; it's american comics-english that actually bastardized it all, along with shounen anime.
Also remember, that while we are talking about russian texts and translations, 'Xenonauts' is an international-project in-game, hence the designation could be virtually anything.
But by all means, I am open to suggestions if you can come up with anything better.
One thing to beware when translating -- don't let your own complexes and insecurities clowd your judgement. It's the same as 'The Fury Interceptor', which sounds perfectly fine as Перехватчик "Фурия", unless you don't know deeper meanings of the word 'fury' and see it as an equivalent to 'rage'.
Regardless Xenonauts, it's 'alien cosmonauts', and ксенонавты conveys the message perfectly, adding a little twist of humor.
And just for the sake of mentioning, you don't even want to type a standard russian name for a para-military or top-secret organization here.
You raise a somewhat valid point talking about USSR and the eighties, but don't forget that names of different USSR organizations were often quite degenerate to begin with, piling one inane shortening on top of another, arriving at, curiously, ГлавНачПУПС. They are, in many ways, waaay more hilarious and inane that the direct translation of the 'xenonauts' which caught your attention.
I propose a timeout on this particular issue until monday, when I can fully dig into the entries in detail and study the context.
P.S. Do not be overly serious. While being an overtly dark and serious-toned game, X-COM was full of allegory and parodies, which Xenonauts more or less overtook as a spiritual successor. This means some things don't have to be emulated precisely.
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Omg so many points to answer.
Get back to you all in the morning, but for now...
Xenonauts = Ксенонавты, no other options make any real sense in both meaning and aestethics. It's a particular case where excess russification would only hurt perception. As for the entries, we'll have to judge by the context, but that particular translation should just about cover most cases.
And as for the Fury interceptor, trust me -- Furie is exactly the word needed. Fury even names both the emotional state and the creature in english, and comes from ancient greek, if I am not mistaken. Who are we to argue with the Ancient Greek?
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Maybe I'll provide a list of what each name is meant to evoke.
Actually a very good idea. That, and cultural references, if there are any. Might be a tad obscure otherwise.
Other points noted.
Also, Chief Scientist is a female? I didn't quite bother to connect the image with the writing style, I admit.
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I suggest that we gather our, uh, suggestions for the future guidelines for translators, and, preferably, the rationale behined them, here, in this thread. Afterwards I presume Chris will make those official, which would help, but some discussion prior to that point is, I think, mandatory.
I will add them to this particular post by copy-paste or links, including, dear readers, your contributions.
Here they are, in no particular order.
*** TRANSLATION GUIDELINE SUGGESTIONS ***
0. Read dem books. A lot.
Without reading classic literature or a lot of classicised translations in your chosen language you cannot get anywhere near the vocabulary you need to translate something. Even english, which seems to most foreigners remarkably simple shows surprising complexity even in its more known americanized form.
It is also nice to read translation-related literature prior to translating a large project, to get the feel of the language necessary. For example, you might want to read military logs and some of the officer diaries available if you are translating something with a heavy military team.
1. Allow yourself to feel and understand the game.
Rationale a.k.a. rant:
Regardless of what many people with higher education in translation and linguistics might be led to believe, the most important part is getting the feel of the message, its base, the idea behind the images and sensations it conjures. You normally feel things, or possibly see the images, or, while reading a particularly evocative piece of literature, may even imagine the smells of things described. This is where the true translation and understanding starts. Once you completely (insofar we're capable of) understand the idea, you are free to express it in your own way, as long as you convey all the same emotional shades, overtones and basic information.
For people with more logic-oriented thinking it is good to ask yourself some questions. For example, what is the setting? What are people doing? What is the style of their communication, and are there any reasons for it?
All these things help a lot in progress.
2. Localize the game.
That means, if you're German, make the game feel as if it were made by germans. Or at least as if the germans were watching over the designers' shoulders and pointing out how their inferior design should strive to meet the uebermensch standards. It also means you germanify all the names, because you don't really want the game to sound foreign to the players (it kinda defeats the purpose of translation and localization).
Rationale a.k.a. rant: True localization allows the player to be imersed in a world he understands, one that, while being unfamiliar, does not feel foreign. Foreignness hurts immersion in more way that one, and may well leave the game a slightly blander experience than it would otherwise be. I have seen this happen often enough, as well as the opposite thing happening also (though much rarer).
3. Be creative, but not overly.
This means your creativity should not be allowed to ruin the game's message, but should be used as much as possible to convey the original meaning to the local audience. Don't hesitate to use some words that are not commonly used, if you believe they convey the message better than more commonplace ones.
4. Do your homework! Research the topic in question for language style and commonly used words and phrases.
This helps a lot when making translator decisions, and it also helps to get a message across in a way that doesn't feel totally foreign.
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Coupla valid points here, but I am a bit apprehensive about the 'not one-man show' thing. It is understandable, but if the two guys differ vastly in style, it's going to be noticeable. Something to be mentioned in the guidelines, definitely, and probably 'the Chris' is going to have his own two shillings' worth to add there.
I will try and gather my thoughts on the translation guidelines and post them later today, maybe this evening.
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Just a little thing, the strings.xml and the Xenopedia are still missing quite a few entries, therefore an assessment of the total workload right now would be just a wild guess. On the other hand, several of the tooltips for item descriptions use almost the same text with only minor additions on what has changed in a new version of the item, e.g. from ballistic rifle to laserrifle, the basic text is virtually the same, with addition on how stats would change for the laserrifle. This reduce the workload on some of those descriptions, as you can just copy and paste and add/adjust what is missing/needs adjustment.
Thank you for that, I extrapolated the probable workload by the unwritten but confirmed entries.
In the final version the workload may well be over 400000 letters, so it is a somewhat valid point.
I will post the rationale in the 2nd post, so eveeryone can review it from the start and we can share opinions on some of the translator decisions.
My current dilemma has to deal exactly with the fact that the beta has not yet come and it is unclear what the xmls will look like.
I intend to appeal to Chris for helping us with that, putting priority on the strings and xenopedia entries that are least likely to change.
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A short explanation of the draft approach used below:
Draft 1: Possibly publishable draft which, though, may not be optimal from the point of view of style or immersion, or may contain basic spelling mistakes.
Draft 2: Aesthetical, stylistic and grammatic corrections are applied where necessary to Draft 1 upon review.
Draft Final: A draft where the translation is finalized and set, and not subject to furhter changes.
Admittedly there might be a draft 3 somewhere in there, or Draft 0 (something the end user should not see, ever), but by and large we try to avoid this kind of thing.
The stages are as follows:
Stage 0.
This is where a kind of pre-work happens. This is where we actually think about the project and how we use the words, and which words we would use rather than others, and make a mental picture of all the translator decisions we will be making.
To do here:
* Assess workload
* Conduct research into military style written documents
* Think and choose a possible style for the russian translation
* List the translation options for character statistics and primary strings (i.e. world map, start menu, options and base menus)
Stage I. Preproduction.
This is a preliminary stage which will allow us to work on strings and xenopedia entries separately.
To do here:
* Choose translation for all primary unit stats
* Choose translation for all race and weapon names
* Document or at least make note of all the strings relative to their position in the game context
* Choose a general approach to translating plurals
* Implement the choices made by translating most visible strings (world map, base construction, research, main menu)
Milestones:
1. Position of all the strings in the game and their context is clear and noted
2. Listed choices are all made and may be interpreted as a guideline for translation
Stage II. String translation.
This is where we actually translate all the strings.
Current Strings.xml file contains roughly 59k digits of translatable text.
Since I would like to do this with drafting approach, milestones will probably be 20k digit chunks of text, and look like this:
Milestones:
1: Draft 1 of Batch 1 (20k digits);
2: Draft 1 of Batch 2 (20k digits);
3: Draft 1 of Batch 3 (20k digits); Draft 2 of Batch 1;
4: Draft 2 of Batch 2; Draft 2 of Batch 3;
5: Draft Final of Batches 1, 2 and 3. Draft Final is the one version of the translation that will not be changed and will go into the final version of the game, unless the original text is changed.
I think we will arrive to Final draft state much sooner for most of the strings, as there are only so many ways of translating Baghdad or September, but there are some trickier strings that will require drafting and playtesting.
Stage III. Xenopedia translation.
The current Xenopedia contains 111 entries and some of those descriptions have yet to be written. However each entry is a size-able chunk of text (ranging from a bit under 1800 digits to about 3k), so this can be segmented any old how.
Since I'd like to do the draft approach on this one, I think these should be sub-divided into categories.
The milestones, hence, look like this:
Milestones:
1: Draft 1 of all racial autopsies;
2: Draft 1 of all ballistic weaponry;
3: Draft 1 of all basic vehicles and fighters;
4: Draft 1 of all alien weaponry;
5: Draft 1 of all laser weaponry; Draft 2 of all racial autopsies
6: Draft 1 of all alien vivisections; Draft 2 of all ballistic weaponry
7: Draft 1 of all alien interrogations; Draft 2 of all basic vehicles and fighters
8: Draft 1 of all armor research; Draft 2 of all alien weaponry;
9: Draft 1 of all UFO analyses; Draft 2 of all laser weaponry;
10: Draft 1 of all tank types; Draft 2 of all alien vivisections;
11: Draft 1 of all uncategorized research; Draft 2 of all alien interrogations;
12: Draft 2 of all armor research; Draft 2 of all UFO analyses;
13: Draft Final of any 6 of any categories;
14: Draft Final of all Xenopedia entries.
This will probably look a bit different in practice, but that largely depends on how the beta will progress.
Now for the timeline.
If I commit full-time to this project, I can probably do it in six weeks' time, if I work alone. A second translator would probably cut this time to 5 weeks or a month (depending on how good the man is and how compatible our styles), and yet another translator could reasonably get us into three weeks' deadline.
Optimistic prognosis says the project is doable in 4 weeks.
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In this thread I shall post the progress and plan for translation of Xenonauts, and will post the rationale for translator decisions.
I intend this rationale as suggestions for the future translation guidelines.
In this post I supply the copy of my old forum post regarding translations. Will post something more... tasty as time goes, but nothing can beat a task name with a green 'complete' on the right of it.
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Also, I will open a new sub-forum for translations then.
If I may say so, w00t.
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So Chris, I don't really know why you are unwilling to spend money on something that would most definitely be profitable. A community-based translation might do for hardcore gamers, but it won't appeal to the public in general nor will let you launch a game properly via standard or non-standard channels (magazines, mouth to mouth, free demos, etc.). In this, quality is important.
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I think you rather mix 'community translation' with 'unprofessional translation' and 'poor quality translation'.
The former does not imply any of the latter.
Zum beispiel, I work as a translator and interpreter. I am also not part of GoldHawk Interactive, so technically I am a member of the community.
As for the pros and cons, you should have seen all the early russian translations of Terry Pratchett's novels, all those... names, man. I can't even begin to explain it in this post, but the variation was hilarious.
In the end someone took over the commercial translations, and that guy obviously loved both Pratchett's books and russian language, which is why we ended up with new translated editions that are decent.
And as far as marketing is concerned, it is tougher still to judge.
You have to remember that by and large, while a cult in and of itself, X-COM was a niche game. Xenonauts appeals to the same crowd. I think... yeah, I believe that what they are doing right now is correct.
This game may not even need any marketing.
Also what I think you're missing is that Chris so far is laying ground to possibly distance GoldHawk from community translations. If people like it -- okay, if not - GoldHawk's game had nothing to do with it.
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Hah, there's lot of opinions going on there. But personally I would like a separate sub-forum for discussions of translations. Very sound idea, and we can go with multiple threads for weighing opinions.
My personal decision with Xenonauts was to attempt to localize the game as much as possible, using traditional terms and words sometimes exclusive to classic literature, where applicable. It helps, I think, to actually immerse a local player into the spirit of the game, like translation of character's name and surname can give us both immersion and additional understanding of the character.
The game should not sound or read or seem foreign, really. That is the actual difference between a translation and a localization.
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Well, here's the news.
I have the projected figures and milestones for the russian translation, and an approach in mind. You can approximate the timeline from there.
The whole project roughly translates into three stages, two of which (II and III) can be done simultaneously by a group of people with minimal interdependence.
A short explanation of the draft approach used below:
Draft 1: Possibly publishable draft which, though, may not be optimal from the point of view of style or immersion, or may contain basic spelling mistakes.
Draft 2: Aesthetical, stylistic and grammatic corrections are applied where necessary to Draft 1 upon review.
Draft Final: A draft where the translation is finalized and set, and not subject to furhter changes.
Admittedly there might be a draft 3 somewhere in there, or Draft 0 (something the end user should not see, ever), but by and large we try to avoid this kind of thing.
The stages are as follows:
Stage 0.
This is where a kind of pre-work happens. This is where we actually think about the project and how we use the words, and which words we would use rather than others, and make a mental picture of all the translator decisions we will be making.
To do here:
* Assess workload
* Conduct research into military style written documents
* Think and choose a possible style for the russian translation
* List the translation options for character statistics and primary strings (i.e. world map, start menu, options and base menus)
Stage I. Preproduction.
This is a preliminary stage which will allow us to work on strings and xenopedia entries separately.
To do here:
* Choose translation for all primary unit stats
* Choose translation for all race and weapon names
* Document or at least make note of all the strings relative to their position in the game context
* Choose a general approach to translating plurals
* Implement the choices made by translating most visible strings (world map, base construction, research, main menu)
Milestones:
1. Position of all the strings in the game and their context is clear and noted
2. Listed choices are all made and may be interpreted as a guideline for translation
Stage II. String translation.
This is where we actually translate all the strings.
Current Strings.xml file contains roughly 59k digits of translatable text.
Since I would like to do this with drafting approach, milestones will probably be 20k digit chunks of text, and look like this:
Milestones:
1: Draft 1 of Batch 1 (20k digits);
2: Draft 1 of Batch 2 (20k digits);
3: Draft 1 of Batch 3 (20k digits); Draft 2 of Batch 1;
4: Draft 2 of Batch 2; Draft 2 of Batch 3;
5: Draft Final of Batches 1, 2 and 3. Draft Final is the one version of the translation that will not be changed and will go into the final version of the game, unless the original text is changed.
I think we will arrive to Final draft state much sooner for most of the strings, as there are only so many ways of translating Baghdad or September, but there are some trickier strings that will require drafting and playtesting.
Stage III. Xenopedia translation.
The current Xenopedia contains 111 entries and some of those descriptions have yet to be written. However each entry is a size-able chunk of text (ranging from a bit under 1800 digits to about 3k), so this can be segmented any old how.
Since I'd like to do the draft approach on this one, I think these should be sub-divided into categories.
The milestones, hence, look like this:
Milestones:
1: Draft 1 of all racial autopsies;
2: Draft 1 of all ballistic weaponry;
3: Draft 1 of all basic vehicles and fighters;
4: Draft 1 of all alien weaponry;
5: Draft 1 of all laser weaponry; Draft 2 of all racial autopsies
6: Draft 1 of all alien vivisections; Draft 2 of all ballistic weaponry
7: Draft 1 of all alien interrogations; Draft 2 of all basic vehicles and fighters
8: Draft 1 of all armor research; Draft 2 of all alien weaponry;
9: Draft 1 of all UFO analyses; Draft 2 of all laser weaponry;
10: Draft 1 of all tank types; Draft 2 of all alien vivisections;
11: Draft 1 of all uncategorized research; Draft 2 of all alien interrogations;
12: Draft 2 of all armor research; Draft 2 of all UFO analyses;
13: Draft Final of any 6 of any categories;
14: Draft Final of all Xenopedia entries.
This will probably look a bit different in practice, but that largely depends on how the beta will progress.
Now for the timeline.
If I commit full-time to this project, I can probably do it in six weeks' time, if I work alone. A second translator would probably cut this time to 5 weeks or a month (depending on how good the man is and how compatible our styles), and yet another translator could reasonably get us into three weeks' deadline.
Optimistic prognosis says the project is doable in 4 weeks.
P.S. I have been adding information to this post by editing so as not to accidentaly delete it all. Thank you for bearing with me.
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I have an approximation of the workload, will post milestones right here later in the day.
I project the complete volume of translatable text to be about 300 000 digits without blank spaces.
Pure typing should take about 83 hours with the complete version of the file, and that's realistic.
Optimistic prognosis is 60-65 hours.
Pessimistic prognosis doesn't deal with hours at all.
That is pure typing, not taking thinking time and assessment into account.
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I think this should be paused for now. Devs have other priorities, plus some content will probably be redone. And work will be wasted.
Nah, it never is quite wasted, there isn't going to be a serious overhaul this time around. I think what is going to happen is some changes to descriptions, some added content, some altered xenopedia passages, but by and large that'd be it. Most of those things can be done and re-done within a day, especially if most translator decisions are already made by the time.
There is a bit of additional work in patch-notes, if these are to be translated into russian, a decision of which I am a proponent of.
It's not much work, but one we cannot do without Chris's approval and contact.
Right now I am banking on the assumption that by the beta-release 90-95% of the text elements in the game will already be implemented. Translating those would then involve making 95-98% of global translator decisions, and we could just implement the changes as soon as they appear in the english version, or within a day, tops.
I'm not sure if it's worth mentioning here, but I have been working as a translator/interpreter for some time now, freelance, which I suppose makes me a professional (people have vastly different views on this, surprisingly).
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Some of your concerns go for Russian version as well, hence the question.
Would like to hear Chris's opinion on this, and also possibly on how some of the names for the aliens were chosen (if there was a particular cultural reference, it might not be noticed by a translator).
Either way I think we will have reasonable translation milestones by monday or tuesday, which I will post here.
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O-kay. so where exactly do we go from here on out?
Do I just get to work on the files I got and then post them, or do we do it differently?
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Thank you for uploading the symbols, this is a way forward indeed.
Looks like we'll have to make some translator decisions within a week.
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Won't you be open for bugs and hacks and crashes if you add those symbols? Doesn't the script language use them for purposes of synthax?
Anyway I think we'll go ahead with Research Tree translation then as soon as you go beta.
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So what's the bottomline?
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Guys, stop this bullshit. The worst thing that can happen to the game now is featurecreeping.
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I'm not sure Cyrillic fonts will be supported by Xenonauts. Not because we don't want to, but because the developer has taken the engine and all the associated tools offline and it turns out the font importer isn't packaged with the installer (which we backed up).
So we can't add any more fonts to the game, Cyrillic or otherwise (or even edit the existing ones). Which is a shame.
Which automatically means no real localization and no russian/greek translation. You floored me with this one.
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My stance on this hasn't changed. Even if we wanted to change to a 3D Geoscape now, the time requirement would be prohibitive as it'd involve redoing pretty much all of the Geoscape code.
Save this for v0.99, maybe?
I have to say, though, the current implementation works fine and is recognizable.
Turning the globe (and possibly switching country colors) was just one of those small things.
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I'm pretty sure that community-translation would be the option to go for here. Professional localization can get expensive, and it's only really needed if you are selling boxed versions with an official release date. For fairness' sake perhaps give out some rewards (along the lines of Kickstarter tiers) to the people who successfully do it, then post links to their sites and stable versions for upload on the web.
Plurals can be difficult though. It may not be reasonably possible to do them right for every language. Separate entries for singular and plural are a given, but more is hardly doable. Best option is probably to try and use plurals with variables in nominative case only. For instance, "Medkits: 32" rather than "32 medkits".
Re point 1: It is fairly difficult to assess the quality of translation into a language the devteam is not familiar with at all, so the question of rewards is more of a moot point.
Re point 2: DO NOT DO THAT.
1st and foremost, programming the right plurals and cases is entirely possible but takes additional effort and coordination between programmers and translating teams. In russian it is fairly easy but I will have to play through the game once to assess all the context and tricky places where some changes are necessary, as set in the examples of medkits.
Also I feel I should dissuade you of thinking of changes to descriptions in the manner you suggest in order to simplify translation. This is simplification through a process very similar to butchery, but in design context. You will strip the game of something strong and beautiful for no real reason.
If that's the cost of a translation into a different language, I don't want it.
P.S. I've seen games translated like that, most notably Heroes III, which had undergone at least 3 translations in Russian, and it didn't make things better to any degree at all. So all in all doing what you describe would be a bad designer choice.
Suggested translation guidelines
in Translation Discussion
Posted
Sure.
My old friend and I had all sorts of fun yesterday trying to translate the word 'xenonauts' into old russian, passing through "чужелазы", which is a very literal translation derived from 'aquanauts' as translated into russian, and arriving at "странноборцы" in the 'olde tongue'.
Hilarity insued, if only for some minutes.
Speaking of seriousness of the Soviet naming system, you'd actually be very surprised that the names of serious projects are in no way serious at all. We even name our missiles after trees, and pistols after birds. Anyone here want a Woodpecker fired at them?!