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I can't take credit for Beelzebeef I had called the character Cowthulhu, but the name had already been taken by a T-shirt company. While I was searching for a new name, we got the French translation of the dialogue, which had rendered "Cowthulhu" as "Beelzeboeuf". I liked it so much, I persuaded my team to change it in the U.S. version.
Posts: 1539 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Yeah, really good translator! I didn't even realize that video games needed French translators, maybe my friend from high school and I can work together some day!
This looks like the kind of game I could really enjoy... looking forward to it! Posts: 1681 | Registered: Jun 2004
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Yeah, our translators are pretty cool. I basically gave them free reign to reinvent the humor, since so much of it is based on English wordplay.
Like the words that appear while loading ... Maxis has a tradition of displaying nonsensical technical messages, and I wrote a bunch of them, but almost none of them would even make sense if translated directly. Like "Revamping Irrefligible Haemovores".
I did have to explain to the translators what it meant to "reticulate" a "spline" ...
I heard an anecdote that when the original Sims went into localization for the first time, the loc testers complained that "all the dialogue is in English" ... because the Sims spoke this English-sounding gobbledygook called Simlish that no one ever intended to translate
One of our biggest problems was trying to create UI and text boxes that were small enough to fit comfortably on the screen, yet large enough to hold the German translated text, which is, on average, 150% to 200% longer than the original English. (Note that in the screenshots, all the English text has plenty of margins ...)
Posts: 1539 | Registered: Jul 2004
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So are game translators usually in-house, or sub-contracted out or something?
I'm intrigued, when my friend went off to graduate school to study French translation, I had no idea this was a possible career path. Posts: 1681 | Registered: Jun 2004
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My mother (much to my annoyance) is always looking for jobs where I can use my German, and this summer she came across a job translating games. It was a sort of temp thing--a few months? I didn't think about doing it at all, so I didn't look into it and I'm not sure on the details.
Posts: 3801 | Registered: Jan 2000
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And good luck. Any game with Beelzebeef in it deserves success.
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