12/12/2023 0 Comments Unavowed stuck in forest![]() 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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