There are not many people who know it, and the degree of discussion in China is not high.
Wiike played 200 hours of “Remaining in the Subway” one after another because he is a loyal “radiant” player. “I played “Fallout 3″ in junior high school, and later I went back to fill up the first and second generations,” Wiike recalled. “Fallout, “Fallout 2” and “Fallout 4” played dozens of hours, “Fallout 3” and “Fallout: “New Vegas” is 200 hours up.”
“I think that in the process of playing, everyone will gradually develop their own game aesthetics, whether “radiation” or “Remaining in the Subway”, they all have my appetite.” Wiike prefers game mechanics and For games where core loops are prioritized, it is believed that everything else can be sacrificed and reduced. He also believes that the game should give players the freedom to choose whether in character construction or the direction of the story.
“Descriptively, it means ‘radiation’ in the end.” Wiike said with a smile.
In “Remaining in the Subway”, merchants only buy a small amount of the items they need. It will not be as unlimited as many games, and they will receive everything, so there are many hard-core designs in the game.
More than a year after the release of “Metro Survival”, at this point in 2017, Wiike found that there are not many types of “radiation” games on the market. Among similar games released in the past few years, “Metro Survival” is still Sinicization has not been launched for a long time. In Tieba, there are news that the Sinicization group is “doing it” every once in a while, and even a friend who claims to be a member of the Sinicization group said that the text has been exported, as long as someone is willing to pay 1,000 yuan to start work. All these and some did not end up without the following.
“If I didn’t do it, no one would do it. I started with this idea at the time.” Wiike recalled, “There is no chance, just think of it and do it.”
He replied: “Isn’t folk Sinicization like this? After learning a new language, I always want to translate something.”
If you are an old player of the “Radiation” series, you can definitely feel the “Radiation” smell of “Remaining Metro” overflowing the screen on this page
Wiike was working at a mobile game company at the time, responsible for copywriting and localization. Before he decided to Sinicize “Metro Yu Sheng”, he was already active in the folk Sinicization group and participated in several projects, including “Undertale”, which has no official Chinese yet. In terms of ability and experience, Wiike believes that he is competent and will be able to complete as long as there is sufficient time.
“The most indispensable thing about folk Sinicization is time,” Wiike said. “After all, it is completely out of hobby, and there is no agreement on which point in time it must be completed.”
On February 19, 2017, Wiike ambitiously posted in the post bar: “UnderRail’s localization work is restarted, and people with lofty ideals are welcome to join. There is a lack of translators.” He also posted the QQ group number.
Not many people responded to the post, and it sank quickly. Wiike was a little embarrassed to find that he seemed to have overestimated the popularity of “Remaining in the Subway” in China. Many people join the group, but they often don’t have enough time and energy to invest in it.
Wiike’s programming ability is not enough to cope with some technical tasks. There are three programs involved in the front and rear, including entry position retrieval, unpacking, text export and import, etc., which gave a lot of help. He was once in the Chineseization of “Undertale” post bar. The main program “Good Man III” (Lyra), which fought side by side, contributed a lot.
Wiike also asked the developers for help, but was rejected. “The developer made it clear that before the official localization tool is launched, no language patch will be adopted as an official translation.” The Sinicization of “Metro Yusheng” is a spontaneous project of folk enthusiasts, and “does not receive any official help.”
Wiike thanks everyone who participated. “Most of the players in the group did not directly contribute to the translation, but their testing of the patch is also very important.” In addition, the translation of up to 700,000 words of text must be done by Wiike alone.
There are only 5 replies to the post of Wiike recruiting localization personnel
After Sinicization was launched, Wiike began to understand why the government would adopt a conservative attitude. “Because this game was not developed for commercial purposes at the beginning, but the developer Styg did it himself. The whole project was built at will, full of old code.” Wiike gave an example, in order to facilitate the localization, he once tried I found out where the character names are stored in the game, but I didn’t expect the result to be “everywhere”. He had to give up the localization of this part of the content.
All in all, now, Wiike can only rely on Wiike for the localization of “Remaining in the Subway”.
4 years to move the mountain
4 years ago, not long after Wiike started working, he tried to complete a huge Sinicization project on his own. He optimistically estimated that he could “perform 15 thousand a week and finish it in one year.” After some time from the official start, I realized that I had far underestimated the workload and technical difficulty.
“It was really young and vigorous at the time.” Wiike couldn’t help sighing, thinking of all the past.
Difficulty comes first from translation style. The translation style in the game is affected by two factors. One is that the development team is from a non-English speaking country and is afraid of making mistakes in the early copywriting, and the words are simple and straightforward; the other is that the game is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and the level of education of the game characters is generally low. , The southern subway area where the story takes place is even more backward, and most people can’t make two long sentences. “I especially hope to retain and convey the unique ‘earth-shell turtle’s taste’ of this post-apocalyptic game”, which has largely affected the overall translation style of the game.
The first enemy the player encounters in the game is called “Rathound”, which was originally literally translated as “Rathound”. This is a mutant giant mouse all over the subway. It is named after its size as a dog. It is a newcomer killer at the beginning of the game. Rathound in NThere are a lot of PC conversations, and they are mostly used as derogatory meanings. Therefore, in some character conversations, they are adjusted to fit the daily tone more closely, which is a bit of “dog rat” with the taste of Northeast China.
If the Southern Metro is already a backward hillbilly that is despised by the Northern Metro, then the core city, the largest concentration of population in the Southern Metro, is simply a gutter. The most stinking thing in the gutter is the core city slums, where people are exploited by the three pinnacle families, and threatened by poverty, gangs, diseases, drugs, and robbers. There is no light at all.
Wiike said: “Such a hell on earth is the most’soul’ place in the game. The huge population, the pressure of survival and the bad environment are intertwined to form a unique humanity and slang, because it is interesting and catchy. It even began to spread to the rest of the world for “Remaining in the Subway”.”
In the game, the core city slums are often insultingly called “Dropzone”, Drop, falling, falling; Zone, zone. It seems that it can be simply translated as “falling zone”, but it is difficult to reflect the decent upper-class citizens’ contempt for this place and the acceptance of the self-rejection by the poor. In the end, Wiike borrowed a familiar word “A Fei” from Hong Kong movies and translated “Dropzone” as “dead zone”.
Besides the consideration of translation style and the huge amount of text, the updates released by developers from time to time are also enough headaches. Each update will disrupt the fragile balance between the Chinese patch and the game code, requiring a lot of manual adjustments.
Working environment
There is no doubt that Sinicizing “Remaining in the Subway” is a difficult project. Wiike realized that this pit dug on a whim had almost become a bottomless pit, devouring his spare time and energy. He thinks he can’t give up, and he doesn’t want to give up. Among them are the unwillingness of “I stop now and I will do it for nothing”, and the obsession of “If I don’t do it, no one will do it”.
Such obsession may be difficult to understand to others, but it is true that many folk Sinicizers ignore it.According to statistics from the Steam Database, the daily average number of online players for “Remaining in the Subway” has risen by 10%.
Wiike finally relieved the burden that had been weighing on his heart for a long time. “After finishing the Chinese version, I feel relieved all over.”
Of course, “Remaining in the Subway” is a niche game, and an increase of 10% only means dozens of more online players. However, the number of online users does not accurately reflect the changes in sales, and the sales of Steam are not disclosed. A small detail may reflect the impact of the Chinese patch on sales: Due to the influx of new members, Wiike had to clean up the divers in the player group to make room for the new group of friends.
From the data, it can be seen that after the Chinese patch is released, the daily online number of “Metro Yu Sheng” has increased slightly, but not much
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The change in game sales will not bring benefits to Wiike, after all, this is a project entirely out of personal interest. As a Sinicizer who uses love to generate electricity, he just hopes that more people will share the results of his years of hard work, and that more domestic players can enter the weird underground world in “Remaining Metro” through the Sinicization patch.
Looking back at this Chineseization, Wiike believes that this state is completely different from when he was doing professional translation. When he finished “Remaining in the Subway” in Chinese, he could not care so much about gains and losses, and he did not care about giving and rewarding so much. Professional translation is sometimes not possible, there are more restrictions, and you must consider the issue of return.
There is no official support for folk localization. Fortunately, localizers are completely familiar with the game and can consume time and energy to make up for their shortcomings. After the production is completed, there is also time to test and modify, so the quality is high, and it is in line with the idiom of the player group. Even if it is an official Chinese version, the translator often cannot see the game when translating, only the documents. For example, the name of an enemy, an object, whether the enemy looks like a cow or a horse, and what the object is for. These have a great influence on the translation result, but sometimes it cannot be reflected in the foreign name.
A very small number of developers will write detailed documents with in-game pictures for localization. If there are any, translation is naturally the easiest, and the correct rate of first translation is also high. Unfortunately, most developers just export text in batches and perform simple annotation classification. Some are even exported out of order. The preface is not followed. Players see that “Play” is translated into “Play” in the main menu. “That’s why-of course, players can see this kind of low-level error, and there are other factors behind it, such as testing and release time.
“Therefore, there may be some unsatisfactory aspects in the official Sinicization, which is determined by the nature of the Sinicization.” Wiike concluded, “In general, there must be advantages and disadvantages. The official Sinicization is more restricted. , But the commercialization has a big impact; folk Sinicization depends entirely on the dedication of the producer, and players may not be able to get a stable experience.”
Chinese documents will look like this
So, looking back on the four years of work, it cannot be said that there are no regrets. “Sinicization takes a long time, and my personal ability, translation concepts and styles have also undergone major changes in the process of Chineseization, and the level of text localization is uneven.” But Wiike has a high pursuit of this work, and he repeatedly emphasized ：”Accuracy literally is not the end of Sinicization. Above accuracy, there is still a long, long way to go.” To achieve accuracy and even surpass accuracy, the pursuit of more appropriate and beautiful expression requires time, enthusiasm and Degree of contact.
In the process of Sinicization of “Remaining in the Subway”, Wiike does not lack time, nor does it lack enthusiasm and contact. Excluding the DLC with a large number of Russian and Serbian texts, and some of the content that cannot be directly Chineseized in the code, Wiike has basically completed the Chineseization of more than 99% of the ontology text. Some enthusiastic friends will also provide Wiike with help within their capacity: translate a short text, provide comments on the translated name, simple proofread, test the stability of the Chinese patch…
Is Wiike’s achievements in folk localization satisfactory? Up to now, the post has been read more than 10,000 timesThe volume and more than 1,100 post replies, most of the players gave praise. This is a satisfactory result for folk Sinicizers. It seemed that Wiike could breathe a sigh of relief and looked down at a high mountain.
However, the story is not over yet.
unfinished story
Folk localizers like Wiike, who volunteer to localize games out of their love and passion for games, do not ask for compensation, and they often face huge problems. This problem may come from developers.
Shortly after the end of the Spring Festival holiday, just two weeks after the Chinese patch was released, the developer Stygian Software carried out a large-scale version update, and adjusted the value, UI and its corresponding code. In Wiike’s player group, many players who have applied the Chinese patch have feedback: Upon waking up, their character disappeared from the screen-this is just one of the many Chinese-language bugs caused by the update.
The scale of this update is quite large. It has not only adjusted the balance, but also added some new content
Wiike is busy again. “I don’t have a Debug tool, so I can only manually’find the faults’ in more than 2000 files, and find them one by one.” Wiike was a little helpless about the update.
As an experienced Sinicizer, Wiike has encountered many situations that affected the stability of Sinicization after game updates, but none was more difficult than this one. “The main reason is that this game is always updated, and the old content is often adjusted. Many games I took over will also be updated for three or four years, but they often have better localization support, which is easy for developers to change, and it is easy to change the localization. I have to unpack and find new texts by myself every time I update “Remaining in the Subway”, which is very difficult.”
As for when the official localization tool will be launched, it may be far away. The development team is currently developing a sequel to the game. I think there is no energy to specifically produce localization tools for the previous game, but Wiike thinks there may be a glimmer of hope: “After all, this game has been updated for more than ten years, isn’t it?”
Wiike did not release a provisional version until March 6, so that players will not be unable to enter the game after the update. From a bachelor who has nothing to do with translation after work, to a family to take care of, Wiike may not have so much time for the localization of interests in the future, but he intends to continue the localization of “Metro Yusheng” as a long-term project, as the game is updated follow up. It is foreseeable that every update will take Wiike a lot of maintenance energy, but he will not give up.
“If I give up, who else will do it?”
This article is from WeChat official account:Touch Music (ID: chuappgame)< span class = "text-remarks">, author: WANG Yi-like