Translators of the Songs of Shinar describe the translation of a fictitious language

Songs of Shinara 2023 language puzzle game from Rundisc, uses fictitious languages ​​but was developed in French and English. “Our choice of vocabulary, riddles and puzzles was made to suit both languages ​​from the start,” creative director Julien Moya told Polygon, referring to how players who speak those languages ​​might approach solving translation puzzles in the game. However, many other languages ​​have a different structure, which means localization. Songs of Shinar required a thorough process.

“I know that later things were much more complicated with some languages, such as Chinese, which have completely different structures and principles and require a lot of adaptation,” Moya said.

Naturally, this became a problem for translators involved in translating a game about translation into different languages. While Rundisc handled English and French on his own, he turned to narrative localization studio Riotloc for help expanding the game’s reach. Translators for the Russian, Portuguese, Japanese and Spanish versions of the game spoke with Polygon via email about the process of translating the “translator’s mind,” as Russian translator Anna Kiseleva put it, for Songs of Shinar.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity..

Polygon: What’s it like localizing a game in an invented language? I’m sure it’s both interesting and challenging.

Anna Kiseleva, Russian translator: Strictly speaking, in Songs of Shinarthe original language is still English. There are four artificial hieroglyphic languages, but the goal of the game is to translate these dictionaries into your own language. This game is more about the thinking of a translator than about invented languages. The authors spoke English, so they created an English translation process, and if your player speaks another language, you need to carefully adapt that process to accommodate that new language. In my case it is Russian.

Fortunately, we are translators ourselves, so we understand this process well, and this is how we make a living. First you decipher the words. Then you combine these words. And then you try to find meaning in this combination. These three stages are implemented in the game itself: first you see a sequence of hieroglyphs, then you begin to understand some of them and they are displayed as words. And finally, when you’ve deciphered all the words in a sentence, things get even more interesting.

This third stage – giving meaning to words – is the most difficult. So difficult that the developers had to make it relatively simple compared to the real thing, but still make this part of the puzzle interesting. I think they did a wonderful job finding the perfect balance. As an example, I’ll show you a string of hieroglyphs and its “official” English translation from the game:

ME ME SEEK/WANT GO/PASS UP/GREAT means “We want to rise.”

About the ME ME part: To make the player think, the developers included features in invented languages. For example, the Devotee language creates plural words by repeating a singular symbol (WE = ME ME), while Warriors, etc. have a separate symbol that means “plural”.

Bards use the word “you” as a synonym for “me” and have the word order reversed:

BROTHER PLURAL YOU PLURAL BE means “Brothers, we are.”

To draw a little more attention to this step and the fact that the translator needs to create a sentence out of words rather than just throwing them together like ingredients in a salad, I went a little further and made two translations for the feature strings, showing them both to the player after complete decoding. It looks like this (all in Russian, of course):

Stupid Warriors! (Warriors are stupid!)

I’m looking, but I’m not. (I’m not looking.)

Camila Fernandez, Portuguese translator: This is certainly true! Because the translation work was ongoing, we did not have access to all the characters used in each language created for Songs of Shinarbut we were dealing with concepts transcribed into English. So for the Brazilian Portuguese localization team it was an EN-PT translation. The main challenge was to understand the context and choose the right words in Portuguese so that no message would lose its meaning. Fortunately, the client’s team was able to provide all the information we requested. Along the way, the story unfolded through words, sentences, and half-sentences, making me eagerly await the game’s launch in my language so I could explore it as if I wasn’t helping translate it (LOL).

Iori Honda, Japanese translator: Early on in the project, I felt that this game might be difficult for casual players. For Japanese players, learning English can be especially difficult due to significant differences in language structures. This problem affected all languages ​​represented in CoSwhich makes me worry that the game may not be suitable for Japanese players.

Since not every player is good at learning foreign languages, my approach to translation was focused on making it “easy for beginners” and “player friendly”.

One of the most challenging aspects was a task in which players acted as translators between groups, creating sentences based on individual images. The tone of the translation was intentionally neutral, using simple words that players could use to derive relevant terms, and also taking into account the word order in each language. Anticipating that some players may forget the grammar rules by the end of the story, I included hints in the translation, offering grammar and verbal hints whenever possible.

To my surprise, many players liked it CoS after its release. They had fun guessing words and making sentences, and some players and reviews even noted that the translations were well done. I didn’t expect such a positive reaction from players and was pleasantly surprised by how much they enjoyed the language learning aspect of the game.

Fernando Moreiras, Spanish translator: Newly invented languages ​​are indeed common in cultural products. As a fan, I had some knowledge of languages ​​like Quenya or Klingon, and had read about the processes the authors went through to create them. My first difficult encounter as a translator with invented languages ​​came as a literary translator, when I was commissioned to write a book by George Orwell. 1984featuring Newspeak. The use of Newspeak in English was beautifully described by Orwell, so first I had to adapt the reasons leading to changes in English to the needs of my target language, which was Galician. After the creation of the grammar and neology of Galician Newspeak, everything went quite smoothly.

Are there different ways to “translate” these invented languages ​​for different countries/markets?

Kiseleva: In this particular case, the whole question was precisely to show how to translate these hieroglyphs into Russian, using Russian words and grammatical structures. For example, there are no modal verbs in the Russian language, so a construction like “You are looking for, you are” is even less understandable to a Russian player, because we never say “you are looking for,” we say “you are looking for.” Here I used the same method as above, since for a Russian player bards and Englishmen are equally foreign, so it made sense to treat them the same.

Mulberry trees: Personally, I believe that the real difference is not in countries or languages, but in genres. Constructed languages ​​for drama, like the ones I’ve already mentioned, tend to have some strict rules that you need to follow, or at least reflect or adapt them to your target language. On the other hand, artificial languages ​​for comedy (like Smurf or Minion languages ​​or even some uses of mock Latin) don’t really have any binding rules, you’re just making jokes that work for the target audience and getting a few laughs.

What experience and research are used in your work on Songs of Shinar?

Kiseleva: In this particular case, we needed to make our own workflow public, so I guess all it takes is to be a professional translator.

Fernandez: In addition to knowing the source and target languages, you must always pay attention to ambiguous words taken out of context. But this applies to most game localization projects.

Mulberry trees: In fact, it is enough to know several grammatical systems well and read or watch works where artificial languages ​​appear. I already had this basis when I was a teenager, not only for full languages ​​like Quenya or Newspeak, but also for involution or evolution of languages ​​like those that appear in films like Looking for fire or A Clockwork Orange. Being a nerd prepares you for this kind of work.