Localization is much more than just “translation”. This article is from the WeChat official account: game Research society (ID: yysaag) , author: Li Bai Yan, from the title figure:” The great Screenshots of the game PV of “Xianxian Simulator”
There is such a word now, “Qixia Cave Sky“.
Thanks to the conciseness of the Chinese language, when you see this word, a fairy mountain cave mansion full of sunshine may naturally appear in your mind.
But if you are given a task-to translate this word into English, it becomes a headache. There is Qixia Mountain in Nanjing. Zhang Dai also wrote Qixia in “Taoan Dream Recollection”, but throughout all foreign literature, this word is directly transliterated into Qixia. There is also “dongtian”, which is another problem.
Even though DeepL, the best translation software on the market for dealing with complex texts, faced with the four words “Qixia Cave Sky”, it chose the simplest solution like all smart AIs: surrender, not look Don’t turn over where you understand.
Only “Cave and Sky” is left
In “The Great Simulator of Cultivation”, there are more than 1,000 similar words, scattered in nearly 600,000 wordsIn the game text. The task of a group of people is to make English players understand their original meaning.
Obviously, this is not simple.
one
A few months ago, we reported on a group of foreign players who “hardly chewed” this fairy game without English.
A Russian player named Sennek, with a very basic knowledge of Chinese and reading experience of Xianxia novels, made a simple English MOD, which has also become a part of the foreign immortal simulator community. The most important “English patch”.
In fact, the English localization project of “The Great Simulator” has started in November last year. Until today, the game has graduated from the EA stage for nearly two years, and this official English version will finally meet with the majority of foreign players.
I also interviewed several translators and developers who participated, and chatted with them how this official English version was born.
Helium and Artiflex come from a domestic localization service provider Yihe (Yeehe). If you have played “The Outer World”, you may have an impression of the smooth, natural, and quite stubborn Chinese text in the game. They are responsible for the Chinese localization work.
The localization of “Tianwai World” has been well received by players
In addition to English to Chinese, they have also done many “English” projects for overseas markets, such as “Three Kingdoms Killing OL” and “Chinese Parents”. Like “Chinese Parents”, there are many colloquial vocabulary and a sense of humor in the Chinese context, which is difficult to translate. But the difficulty of the Xiu Xian simulator is probably the most special one in all projects.
“When we heard this title, we realized how difficult it would be,” He said to me.
The process of game localization is very simple. The localization team of Xiuxian Simulator consists of about six or seven people, including project managers, translators and reviewers.
After translating a batch of texts into English, the team will import this preliminary text into the game to observe the effect, compare and adjust, and communicate opinions with the game developer GSQ studio, and then GSQ will communicate with the foreign player community Communicate, test, and get further feedback.
Players’ feedback on the actual effect of the game
According to Helium, the text of the entire Xiu Xian simulator can be roughly divided into two categories-one part is dialogue, functional text, daily description, such as ordinary disciple Living, how you feel, what you have said, etc. This part is treated as a literary text according to the idea of turning a novel, and there is no problem at all.
The other part is difficult. There are a large number of terminology and proprietary vocabulary in the game, related to traditional Chinese culture, the concept of Taoist cultivation, and the strong lifeObjects, locations, martial arts… the difficulty of translating these contents is divided into two parts by Helium.
The difficulty of “hard” comes from the meaning density of Chinese vocabulary far greater than English words.
For example, Qixia Cave at the beginning of the article. “These four words can show that a heaven and blessed land that is often shining with sunshine, and the vivid word’qi’,” he said, “but how can you accurately describe it in English? A sky and a sky Where do you live? the heavenly aboard there are…… Anyway, it will be very long.”
Of course, the translator can use a long string of text to describe the meaning of this word in detail, but if it is filled into the game UI, there will inevitably be a problem: I can’t put it down at all, out of the box.
Even though the Chinese is always concise, there is not much space left in the game UI
The “soft difficulty” is to add too much information to the English text, which is difficult to understand and not suitable for players to communicate.
In the previous English version of the player, there was a technique that tortured Sennek to the point of collapse: True Solution to Jiyin’s Nine Punches and Many Treasures. For the translator, even if Jiyin and Duobao are turned out, the name will become extremely long. Even if the player can understand what it means, he can’t tell others.
It’s hard to imagine how these terms are “completely translated”
“Our method is to find the two most important words or a core word in a proper noun. For example, Duobao’s real solution, the key is’a magic weapon as the core “The training route of “,” He said, “In fact, there are some information that we don’t understand. The developers have given a lot of help, so that we can use the role of its game mechanism to infer the true meaning.”
So in the official English version, this exercise is translated as Myriad Artifact Law, “treasure” refers to the magic weapon(Artifact, artifact), not the treasure (Treasure) in the early English MOD.
And ambergris. Foreign players have always called this Dragon Fruit before, ignoring the incomprehensible “saliva”. In the official translation, the word becomes Amber Fruit.
As for why it is amber(Amber), it is because when Ambergris was first introduced to China, it was originally not called Ambergris. It is called Ahmad Xiang, which comes from the Arabic anbar, which is also amber in English.
Look at the look of Ambergris, you should understand why it is “grey amber” in English
These terms