Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English-language Translation

Jiří Petrů

Video Game Translation in the Czech Republic - - from fan era to professionalism

Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek

2011 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………..

Jiří Petrů Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Milan Czarnowski, Aleš Kopřiva, Jiří Matyskiewicz, Pavel Mondschein, Václav Poláček, Karel Pospíšil, Adam Rambousek, Marek Tvrdý and Radek Zelycz for their free time and the willingness to be interviewed, without which this thesis would be inconceivable; and Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek for his kind supervising and providing valuable insights from the point of view of an industry outsider. Table of Contents

Table of Contents...... 4

1. Foreword...... 6

1.1 Thesis Structure...... 8

1.2 Methodology...... 9

2. Introduction to Translation of Video Games...... 13

2.1 The Place of Translation in the Video Game Industry...... 17

2.2 Source Languages...... 19

2.3 A Note on Terminology ...... 22

Why video games?...... 22

Why translation?...... 23

3. The Development of Video Game Translation in the Czech Republic...... 25

3.1 From the Fan Scene to Professionalism...... 26

1990s – The Birth of a Community...... 26

Around 2000 – The Gold Rush of Fan Translation...... 30

Early 2000s – Gradual Professionalisation...... 34

Late 2000s – The Decline of Fan Translation...... 38

3.1 Comparison to Other Countries...... 40

4. The Process of Game Translation...... 43

4.1 The Process of Professional Translation...... 44

4.2 The Process of Fan Translation ...... 53

4.3 General Challenges for Video Game Translators...... 60

4.4 Translating PC games vs. Console Games...... 63

4.5 Dubbing and Subtitles...... 65

- 4 - 4.6 When Things Get Done by People Outside the Industry...... 66

5. Special Topics in Game Translation...... 69

5.1 Game Translation, Legality, Piracy...... 69

‘Stolen’ translations...... 71

5.2 Quality of the Translation...... 73

Terminology...... 73

Domestication and Fidelity to the Original...... 76

Style and Creative Translation...... 78

Quality...... 82

5.3 User Feedback, Translators’ Motivations...... 84

6. Conclusion...... 86

Sources...... 89

Written Sources and Interviews...... 89

Video Games Mentioned in the Text...... 95

Summary...... 98

Resumé...... 99

- 5 - 1. Foreword

From the pastime of bespectacled nerds, video games have over the last four decades developed into a mass entertainment enjoyed by people of both genders and all ages. An oft-quoted piece of data poses the video game industry against the film industry which is traditionally seen as the largest segment of the entertainment industry – however with $33 billion in game sales world-wide in 2010 (Mazel 2011a), the game industry actually surpasses the film industry’s $31.81 billion (Frankel 2011). But while film studies have long been a part of curricula, academia still have to catch up with video games. Game studies are a fledgling field of scientific interest, still struggling through their infant phases, but slowly establishing themselves on universities around the world.

Video games, of course, are an interesting object of study not only for media scientists or sociologist, but even for the student of translation – we are, after all, talking about a huge world-wide industry that localises its products to many world languages. Still, translation studies have been slow to notice this new phenomenon. The first studies on this topic have been published merely some ~5 years ago, and remain a field of interest only for a limited circle of academicians. We are still in the very beginnings and a lot remains to be learned about translations of video games.

At first glance, game translation might simply seem as a subset of software localisation, which already is well known and well described in the field of translations studies. But this perception could not be farther from truth – while video games are indeed software, in the sense that they do require a computer or a console or a smart-phone to run, this is where the similarity ends. There are many differences that will be described in detail later, but for now let it simply be said that comparing translations of games to translations of general software is like comparing translations of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels to translations of wash-machine manuals.

1 These numbers are to be taken with a grain of salt, but I did my best to provide comparable data – the game industry revenues include sales of brand new copies only, not counting e.g. used games or gaming hardware such as game consoles. The data on the film industry similarly include box office revenues (i.e. cinema tickets) only, ignoring DVD sales or home electronics such as DVD players. Both ignore minor local companies not producing for the established global networks.

- 6 - “Another difference between game and software localisation lies in the fact that whilst functionality has been the key priority in the software localisation paradigm, in a game this functionality must be achieved with a high degree of creativity and originality. (...) This is because the main purpose of a game is to entertain the user, whereas the utilitarian dimension is the goal of business software.” (Mangiron and O’Hagan 2006)

This misperception is perhaps the reason why academicians dealing with game translation have for the most part focused on the texts themselves, advocating their unique stance as a separate type of translation. A large part of the available texts on game translation describes the specific challenges and other characteristics that differentiate video games from other forms of translation (see for example Bernal Merino 2007). The other main line of discourse examines the need for and the use of creativity in video-game translation, and concepts like cultural domestication or style (see for example Mangiron and O’Hagan 2006 or Di Marco 2007). The scope of this thesis will however be slightly different – I would like to ‘zoom out’ of the texts themselves and focus on the industry as a whole, the people and the communities involved in video-game translation. To make this task a little less daunting, I will limit myself on the specific case of the Czech Republic.

There is a reason for the choice of the Czech Republic aside of the fact that it is my native environment. Czech Republic, as a marginal market of little import for foreign distributors, has had a very lively ‘fan scene’ of amateurs organising themselves over the Internet and translating games for ‘free’ where the official publishing chains did not provide Czech versions of their favourite games. The fan enthusiasm has occasionally reached stunning heights, as evidenced by huge projects like the translation of Baldur’s Gate II (2000), where dozens of fans joined their efforts to translate a game spanning over 3200 pages of text2.

The presence of a fan scene allows us not only to study video game translation in general, but also to take a closer look at fan game translations in comparison to

2 Numbers taken from Wójcik (2008) who did a case study on a Polish translation of the very same game.

- 7 - professional game translations, and examine their mutual interplay or differences3. The case of the Czech Republic is made even more interesting by the fact that the local professional scene has in fact gradually evolved from the fan community. What began in late 1990s as a hobby of amateur translators lacking any formal training, continued through 2000s with them forming professional teams. Not only this is an interesting thing to study, it’s also an exciting story to read.

The goal of this thesis is therefore to provide a complex description of how video games have been translated in the Czech Republic. While it is a story on a single country, it is also a story about video game translation and fan translation in general, and I believe it might very well provide some valuable insights for translation studies. The limited scope may actually be of benefit, for it allows us to go into closer detail than what would be possible in a world-wide environment.

1.1 Thesis Structure

Disregarding this foreword, the thesis is structured as follows. The chapters begin with a general focus but get gradually more specific as the text progresses.

• Chapter 2 introduces the reader to translation of video games. Following some basic characteristics of the game localisation industry, it explains the terminology used in this thesis and also sets game translation in the context of game industry as a whole.

• Where the previous chapter has been more general, chapter 3 deals specifically with the Czech Republic and provides an exhausting history of the development of game translation in the country. It is this chapter that describes the gradual professionalisation of a formerly amateur translation community.

• Chapter 4 is a more technically oriented chapter that goes further in detail and

3 Fan translation, coincidentally, is another new field of interest in translation studies. In English- speaking countries, fan translation is strongly connected to anime/manga fandom, i.e. fans who translate their favourite media products from Japanese – products like film subtitles (fansubbing), scanned copies of comic books (scanlation) or, of course, video games. We will encounter many references to fansubbing throughout this thesis.

- 8 - examines the actual process of game translation project from its conception to the point where the translated game is released for the market. Separate descriptions and comparisons of fan translation and professional translation are provided. This chapter also explains in more detail the challenges and specifics of video game translation.

• Chapter 5, the ‘misc. chapter’ focuses on a couple of very specific points of interest that have arisen as I was working on the thesis, like legal issues or the question of translation quality.

The thesis has been written with the assumption that the reader has at least a superficial notion as to what modern video games look like and what kinds of texts the translator might encounter. Just in case, let me state that a video game translator might be required to translate anything from film subtitles, novel-like dialogues, poems, encyclopedic texts, technical descriptions of car engines, up to IT-manuals for server set-up in scope of a single project. A more detailed description is provided in chapter 4.44.

1.2 Methodology

By far the biggest challenge to be overcome while working on the thesis was the dire lack of any sources on the topic. While there are quite a few academic articles dealing with the topic of game translation, none of these, predictably, come from the Czech environment. They do provide valuable reference, but the data on the local translation community had to be acquired elsewhere.

There are some secondary sources to be found around the Czech Internet – web pages, news articles, discussions or even some meta-texts directly related to specific translation projects (e.g. “The making of...”). But one will find these quite lacking because they focus on minor issues and rarely go into much detail.

In the end, the thesis is based around personal interviews of the major figures of the local game translation scene. I had identified several people I saw as to be the most important or the most knowledgeable of Czech game translations, contacted them and

4 Another good method for getting at least some idea of modern video games is to visit www.youtube.com, search for “gameplay”and watch a random video or two.

- 9 - tried to arrange an interview. My goal was not to acquire a representative sample of all translators and do a quantitative study, rather I tried to find just a few, choosing those that would provide the most valuable insights:

• Amongst professionals, I contacted localisation managers from local publishing companies, preferably those who also were or used to be translators themselves.

• Amongst fans, I tried to contact ‘managers’ or organisers of large-scale projects like the aforementioned Baldur’s Gate II.

The logic for approaching organisers above file-and-rank translators was the assumption that these people would have the best understanding of the methods, processes and even ideas that accompany the translation itself. Along the same logic I chose fans who had experience with large-scale projects above those that ‘only’ produced small and quick translations in a team of say, two friends.

In the end, I have managed to interview the following people5:

• Milan Czarnowski used to be a well-known fan translator in 1990s, but in early 2000s became a localisation manager at CD Projekt Czech, the largest local publishing company that arguably played the biggest role in the gradual professionalisation of the Czech fan scene.

• Pavel Mondschein too used to be a fan translator. Later he became an editor of Gamestar, a gaming magazine that also published translated versions of video games. For the past several years he’s been a localisation manager at CD Projekt. (This was a double-interview with him and Czarnowski).

• Václav Poláček is a localisation manager at Playman, one of the smaller Czech publishers. Before that he used to be a well-known figure on the fan scene.

• Aleš Kopřiva is a localisation manager at TopCD, again one of the smaller publishers. At the same time he remains an active fan translator, best known for

5 To prevent excessive citations, I will not cite any of these interviews in the text and will instead use just the surnames. They are all cited properly in the bibliography. Whenever there is a surname with a citation missing, it is always 2011: personal interview.

- 10 - organising a couple of large-scale projects like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006) or Drakensang: The Dark Eye6 (2008).

• Adam Rambousek was a fan translator best known for organising several large projects like the already mentioned Baldur’s Gate II. As the director of a local anime festival, he is also in regular contact with the anime fansubbing scene. We met personally and he offered to bring the following two fan translators which I’ve gratefully agreed to (I have interviewed all three at once):

• Jiří Matyskiewicz is somewhat of a legend in the fan circles. He became known for a staggering words-per-minute ratio, translating huge bulks of texts quickly and most importantly generating some of the best and most memorable translations on the fan scene. He now occasionally works as a freelancer for various publishers.

• Karel Pospíšil used to translate mostly sport games in 1990s but stopped translating when things professionalised and “ceased to be fun”. He provided priceless insights on the early days of game translation in the Czech Republic. (This was a triple-interview with him, Rambousek and Matyskiewicz).

• Marek Tvrdý is mostly a fan translator with some previous professional experience. I have contacted him because he has lately been organising high- profile large projects, and is therefore on of the two still active fans I’ve interviewed.

• Radek Zelycz isn’t a translator himself, but he is the webmaster of www.cestiny.cz, the most important online community of Czech fan translators. Zelycz has been involved in organising and collecting fan translations since 1998.

6 Both are ‘fantasy role-playing games’. But unless necessary, descriptions of the games mentioned in the thesis will not be provided, both to save space and to spare the reader from superfluous detail. An interested reader might find more information on Wikipedia, or again simply by visiting www.youtube.com and searching for a video on “GAME NAME gameplay”, e.g. “Elder Scrolls Oblivion gameplay” or “Drakensang gameplay”. The “gameplay” part serves for filtering out trailers and other marketing videos.

- 11 - I have tried to arrange for a personal meeting where possible, but due to logistic issues, many of the interviews had to be done via Skype internet calls. In the end, the double- and triple-interviews were done in person and took a couple of hours each, while the rest were done via Skype and lasted somewhere from one to two hours. The interviews were all recorded but they will not be published because they were all done with the agreement that no transcript would be made publicly available.

For each interview, I had prepared a set of open questions tailored specifically to each person. The questions centred around two main research points:

1. The history and development of game translation in the Czech Republic. How it changed over time and how some fans slowly formed professional companies.

2. The actual process of translation (fan or professional, depending on the respondent). What persons are involved, what tasks need to be done and what are the typical challenges.

I took care not to force a rigid structure upon the interviews and let the dialogue flow freely whenever an interesting topic offered itself. Thanks to that, several issues I had not planned for arose during the work – these have been compiled into Chapter 5. As a result of this development, I sometimes needed to sent out additional questions to those whom I had interviewed the earliest. These additional questions were carried out via email.

It should be noted that I have personally been involved with the game translation scene on an on-and-off basis since late 1990s, albeit never in any important role and always just like a ‘hired muscle’. For example, I worked as a file-and-rank translator in one of Ramousek’s projects and in the past years I have been translating as a freelancer for CD Projekt. Although my knowledge of behind-the-scene facts was always very limited, the position of an insider was a huge advantage, as it allowed me to identify both people to interview and the topics to ask about.

I would like to thank to the respondents who were willing to sacrifice their time and

- 12 - answer my questions. Without them, this thesis would hardly be conceivable.

- 13 - 2. Introduction to Translation of Video Games

Let me start this chapter with an example from my personal experience: it was September 2009 and I had just received an e-mail from my employer, saying he had a new game for me to translate. Even though by that time I have already been working as a freelance translator of video games for a couple of years, the new task held several surprises for me. As I opened the e-mail attachment and started reading through the Excel file I was to translate, it was soon clear that this particular assignment might prove a bit problematic.

The game was Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II – Chaos Rising (2010) and I had never heard of it before. I had, however heard of the name Warhammer 40.000 and knew it as a popular franchise amongst game and sci-fi fans. Warhammer 40K, as the name was often shortened, was a label attributed to several incarnations of a popular board game, hundreds of novels, some comics and even a couple of other computer games7 – all of this became apparent as I browsed through the text assets and noticed dozens of capitalised names (people, planets, historical events, even legendary weapons) that were not explained in any way – obvious references to other works from the franchise. I knew the board game was somewhat popular in the Czech Republic, and I knew several books from the franchise had been translated into Czech too. The Czech player would know these and would expect me, the translator, to get the references right. Which was a bit of a problem, seeing as I had not played the board game nor read any of the books.

Fortunately, I had had some fleeting encounters with WH40K (another abbreviation of the same) before, which allowed me to guess things about half-right... and I knew where to look for the other half. Utilising my skills of navigation amongst online fan communities, I found a website that explained most of the references and even found some (conflicting) Czech equivalents. In the end I have not produced a generally praised rendering of the canon (in fact, far from it), but at least I have managed to avoid faux pas like translating “Terror of Xenos” as “Hrůza Xenosova” [terror of a man named

7 The game itself was actually a sequel to a previous title called Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II (2009).

- 14 - Xenos], when it is correctly “postrach cizáků” [terror of aliens]8; or leaving “Krooza” untranslated when it is in fact just the ork way of saying “cruiser”.

But the terminological traps can be subtler than that: “deathmatch9” is a term most game developers would not even consider including in a glossary because it appears in every other game and “everybody knows it”. But translating it literally as “zápas smrti” [match of death], while technically correct, would bring the ridicule of Czech players. They call it “deathmatch” too.

These examples serve as an illustration of a fact well-known amongst game translators – that the texts are literally packed with words, references and conventions that cannot possibly all be explained via official glossaries (see the discussion on ‘lockits’ in Chapter 4.1), and that the translators often have to rely on their intuition and their knowledge of the ‘gaming culture’. Let us imagine what would happen if such a text littered by hidden references and ‘gamer’s talk’ would be entrusted to a generic software localisation agency that has no experience with the translation of video games. The question is not a rhetoric one – it does happen, and the results usually tend to be sub-par. (More on this in Chapter 4.6)

Translation scholars have already noticed that the field of video game translation might be very difficult for an outsider to get into. One of the running debates asks how to find translators who have both good translation skills and an insider knowledge of video games. In Training translators for the video game industry, Miguel Bernal Merino (2008) implies that universities have not been catching up with the booming environment of new media and proposes an educational plan that would get students of translation acquainted with basic characteristics, challenges, norms or even linguistic registries of video game translation. He concludes: “Universities with translation degree programmes should start offering modules in this field of specialisation in order to meet industry needs with appropriately trained graduates (...)”

But at the same time as universities are thinking about what to do, the gaming scene doesn’t sleep. In fact, all around the world gamers have already been organising

8 The translation memory tells me that the translator of the prequel did, in fact, fall for this trap. 9 Deathmatch is a game mode where players fight each other with no defined teams or sides – in other words, a free-for-all fight.

- 15 - themselves to produce translations of their favourite games which have not been translated officially. Minako O’Hagan has been studying the fan community and notices how the lack of formal education is not enough to prevent fans from translating:

“Given the specialised nature of the tasks involved, it is doubly suprising that some gamers tackle the challenge without formal training or provision of technical support. They seem to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills through online collaboration with like-minded gamers and knowledge- bases created by the game community in addition to their own game playing experience and often extensive research.” (O’Hagan 2009)

Here in the Czech Republic, long before professional localisation companies were able to form, fans had already been producing free translations by dozens. In fact, when game publishers finally started establishing their localisation teams, they decided to hire untrained fans above formally trained translators or linguists who lacked insider knowledge of video games. And this holds up to this day – when I asked local localisation managers how many of their team members had any formal education in the field or other translating experience, they shrugged. “I think one of my translators has translated a book once,” says Poláček in a typical response. “But it was a World of Warcraft10 book so it’s still basically a game. (...) I think he studied chemistry.” Matyskiewicz says he regularly translates books or even ‘scripts’ but he did start, untrained, with video games. And Mondschein, who also has translated “a book” once (after having translated games for years), explains the hiring policy of the company he is employed at: the only thing that matters is how the applicant handles the test translation which has been meticulously tailored to include all kinds of texts and challenges one might encounter in video games. As a result, all of their translators are gamers first, translators second. “Of course it’s good to have as much previous experience (e.g. with books, films, articles etc.) as possible. (...) But the thing to remember is that we’re talking about game translation which has its own rules, distinctions, target audience etc.”

In the case of fan translators, their lack of formal training can often be “compensated for by their genre-knowledge,” says O’Hagan (2009) who has besides video games studied

10 With more than 12 million active subscribers (Blizzard Entertainment 2010), World of Warcraft (2004) is the most popular online video game.

- 16 - other fields of fan translation, like fansubbing (i.e. subtitling films, mostly of the anime genre). As we can see, fan translation and professional translation can sometimes be closer to each other than apparent at the first glance, as professional companies are often nothing else than former fan teams who simply decided to pursue their hobby in the world of business. A question begs to be asked – does this have any implication for the resulting quality? What if an professional translator, not a gamer themselves, produced a text smooth in style but with many faults in the game canon, while a fan translator provided a clumsy translation, yet true to the game? Which would be better received by the target audience? The question of quality and public reception is dealt with in Chapter 5.2.

Here in the Czech Republic, we have over the last decade seen the establishment of several professional game translation teams, all made up of former fans. This has resulted in a unique bottom-to-top creation of a professional translation community, completely independent from the already established translator circles or knowledge. This gradual fan > professional evolution is described in detail in Chapter 3, whereas Chapter 4 examines whether there are in fact any differences between fan translation and professional translation of video games. It will be shown how the mere transition into a professional environment imposes further limitations and challenges upon the translator, like ‘blind translations’ or perpetually changing source texts. In sharp contrast, amateur translators enjoy relatively more freedom and less crippling limitations.

The professionalisation has not killed Czech fan translation, though. Just this February, a fan translation of Dragon Age II (2011) was announced, weeks before it was even released (Tvrdý 2011b). While its prequel had been translated officially, the publisher has ‘abandoned’ Czech translations of the franchise, however the prequel had gained considerable popularity and a fanbase, and the fans took up the gauntlet. A team of about 50 unpaid amateurs started translating the day the game came out and one week later, they had already finished more than a half of the texts (Tvrdý 2011a). While most of them had later to be scratched or rewritten due to sub-par quality11, this example does show the incredible effort a dedicated fan community is capable of.

11 The project has not been finished by the middle of April.

- 17 - Figure 1: Video game revenues in time (“Danc” 2005).

This fan devotion and ‘self-sacrifice’ is hardly limited to video game translation. O’Hagan (2009) views it simply as part of the widespread participatory culture that permeates the Internet. Participatory culture, examined in the works of Henry Jenkins (e.g. Jenkins et al. 2006), is a term characterising the current trends in new media, where the audience cease to be passive consumers of media content and instead become content creators themselves. One can see it in social networks, blogs, Youtube videos and many other examples. Video game fans shoot in-game films (machinima), write game-inspired stories (fanfiction), hack and modify games to provide new game content or experience (modding), document their play-throughs in videos or texts, often with reader input (let’s play). The web page that helped me overcome the trouble in my opening example was actually a fan-run wiki, where fans collected facts from their favourite games or books to produce an exhausting encyclopedia that contained endless data about a fictive universe. Behind all of this hides the simple urge of fans to prove their devotion and contribute somehow.

Translation studies have so far been fairly slack in exploring their share of the global participatory culture. It is my hope that this thesis, closely focused on a single fan community, contributes to the discourse of translation studies and helps to better

- 18 - understand not only the translation of video games but also fan translation in general.

Before we go on, it should be stressed that fan translations of video games do not equal piracy. While translators do indeed hack and modify the data files or the code of the original software, the resulting translation is not distributed as an illicit copy of the game. Instead, it takes the form of a patch that must be applied to an existing installation of the original game – in this sense, fan translations are essentially mods12. Still, there are some lingering legal concerns, and we will examine these later in Chapter 5.

2.1 The Place of Translation in the Video Game Industry

The video game industry is a global gargantuan industry with its own set of peculiarities and norms. Some of these have huge implications for the translation business.

The first important fact is that video games have an extremely short shelf life. The industry is driven by AAA blockbuster titles, and these have to impress the audience very quickly before another blockbuster gets released and steals all the attention. A well- known game designer Greg Costikyan (2005) estimates that a typical game sells 80% of its copies in the first two weeks after its release. Another designer, going under the pseudonym “Danc” (2005) allows a bit more benevolence – his estimate is that game sales peak after a month and then fall rapidly (see fig. 1). In any case, games are very volatile wares – if you do not sell them quickly, odds are you will not sell them at all.

What does this mean for translators? It means they must meet the deadline at any cost, otherwise the sales will be hurt. In the past, it was quite common for Czech versions to be released weeks or even months after the original release date, nowadays a simultaneous shipment (sim-ship) is the norm. Due to the easy accessibility of Internet

12 As has been mentioned, mods, a short of modifications, are downloadable patches that alter the original game somehow – adding new levels, items, characters, sometimes even drastically changing the storyline or rewriting the code to produce a ‘different game’. They require a legally bought copy of the original game, are ‘technically legal’ (depends on the specific case), and often enjoy an explicit support of the original game developer, whose game gets improved and extended for free by the fan community.

- 19 - shops or digital distribution systems13, impatient players could easily buy the game abroad (provided, of course, they are not reliant on the translation). As a result of tight deadlines, there is a pressure to start the translation as soon as possible – while, on the other hand, the developer tries to work on the game as long as possible, to iron out the last bugs and problems before the game ‘goes gold’. This sometimes means that translations get started while the texts are still in flux and subject to change (see chapter 4.1).

For smaller markets like the Czech Republic, there is also another concern: the cost/benefit ratio of a translation. The translation might not bring enough new customers (in comparison to simply publishing an English version) to pay for itself, especially if the game is a bit ‘wordy’. Budgets are a omnipresent concern of video game localisation companies. Hard numbers are practically impossible to get since publishers usually do not make their sales public14, but I have taken the liberty to do a quick comparison nonetheless:

• A novel is typically several hundred pages long, sells for CZK ~300 and is considered well-selling if it sells 1500-2000 copies (though the best-selling authors like Haruki Murakami might sell tens of thousands (Lidovky.cz 2011)).

• A video game typically has a page count in lower hundreds (but occasionally much, much more), goes for CZK 500-1000 and it sells around 1000-3000 copies. The rare best-selling titles sell up to ten thousand copies but rarely more.

• Both are of course incomparable with film subtitles which are a relatively low- budget enterprise. A cinema ticket sells for CZK ~120 and one film is typically seen by tens to hundreds of thousands visitors (Unie filmových distributorů 2011).

The purpose of this comparison is to show the market reality of the Czech Republic. While video game translations tend to have more generous budgets than those of books,

13 ‘Shops’ that do not sell only digital copies rather than boxed ones. Thanks to the fact that no shipment is involved, a player can buy a game from anywhere in the world and download it to their computer in mere minutes or hours. 14 Which means the following data are based on hearsay.

- 20 - they are nowhere as lucrative as film translations, and publishers still have to judge carefully. This leads to a paradoxical situation where the games that rely on words and texts the most (and therefore ale lengthy) are the first ones to be dropped, while those that need translations the least (e.g. car races) do get them practically always, because they tend to have little text. The situation is not helped by the fact that the games with thousands pages of text, and the genres associated with them, tend to be of interest for ‘hardcore players’ only, while the mainstream best-sellers are the less talkative games and genres like action shooters or sports games15.

On the other hand, thousand-paged games and the genres associated with them tend to be of interest for hardcore players, i.e. a dedicated fanbase, and very often become targets of massive fan translation projects.

2.2 Source Languages

The two main source languages in translation of video games are English and Japanese, with a smaller fraction of games originating from European countries. In English- speaking countries, this means the majority of game translations occurs from Japanese. Europe, on the other hand, is quite a different story – here, English becomes the dominant source language and even may become the lingua franca of game translation, serving as an intermediary language for the translation of video games originating from non-English languages, provided no skilled translators of the original language are available. This is especially true in smaller markets like the Czech Republic. “The vast majority of translations we do is from English. I’d say 98 percent,” says Mondschein. Even if the game has originally been written in Japanese or another non-English language, the localisation manager has no other choice but to use English texts (which are always included) as the source, because there is not enough skilled game translators able to translate from other languages. The rest of my respondents agreed. “English. We translate mostly Ubisoft’s games and they are always in English,” says Poláček. Ironically, the game Poláček’s localisation team was working on when I interviewed him was IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover, a WWII flight simulator developed by Russian

15 Of the top selling games of 2010 (Mazel 2011b), the first one I would identify as ‘wordy’ is Red Dead Redemption (2010), ranked 9, then Final Fantasy XIII (2009) at rank 22 and Fallout New Vegas (2010) at rank 28. Of these, only the last one received an official Czech translation.

- 21 - team and published by Ubisoft.

Intrigued, I asked the respondents to provide examples of games they had translated that were originally created in a language other than English. It soon became clear that the use of English as an intermediary language is not without trouble, because some English translations were known to be lacking. An infamous example is S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, an Ukrainian post-apocalyptic game originally written in Russian, “which looked like if a random Ukrainian translated it from outstanding Russian to exceptionally bad English.” (Matyskeiwicz 2011). The foreign producer fortunately fixed the gravest errors just before release, but the original English texts which the translators were provided with16 included mistranslations like “storm weapon” instead of the correct “assault rifle”. Matyskeiwicz who understands a bit Russian said he was able to double check the suspect terms in the Russian original, but he still had no choice but to translate predominantly from the English version.

The Witcher, a Polish fantasy game inspired by the books of Andrzej Sapkowski, was known to have its English texts substantially shortened in comparison to the Polish original – the texts were trimmed by 30% in order to fit within the prearranged budget for English dubbing (Meer 2008). The localisation managers at CD Projekt Czech were aware of that and tried to find translators who could at least passively understand Polish. In the end, the game was still translated from English texts, but the translators had both the Polish and the English version opened on their monitors and were able to take inspiration from the Polish one whenever they felt necessary (Mondschein 2011, Czarnowski 2011). The publisher chose the same approach with Gothic, an originally German game, choosing a translator with at least partial knowledge of German so she could check the original when there was something strange or clumsy in English.

But try as they may, the localisation teams are limited by the translators they have at their disposal, and English retains its role as the (almost) sole source language, at least in the Czech Republic. This brings us back the the issue of insider knowledge that is demanded from game translators – even though the publishing companies might easily

16 Sometimes the texts change or get fixed after the translation has already started, which means the developer or producer sends the localisation team a list of changed texts which need to be re- translated. See Chapter 4.1.

- 22 - hire a freelancer who is not a gamer but who translates professionally from Russian, Polish, German etc., they instead opt to rely on the gamer’s experience of their standard English-language translators. But while professionals at least have the option to choose, fan translators do not have the luxury of choice. Noticing that Kopřiva was organising a fan translation of Drakensang: The Dark Eye, another German game, I asked him whether his team worked with English or German texts. His response was: “I’m sure the German version has fever mistakes and there isn’t so much confusion in names... [but we translate from English.] We can’t afford translating from German, we don’t have good German-speaking translators.”

The difficulty of finding translators working with other languages than English is not something unique for the Czech Republic. Rather, it has been linked to fan translations in general. Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez examining the fansubbing scene, have noticed that although the English fan scene does try to use native Japanese speakers whenever possible, other language communities have a harder time locating speakers of Japanese: “The knowledge of the Japanese language is generally not required in the case of translating into other languages because translators usually work from the fansubs translations that have been distributed in English” (Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez 2006)

Using English as the intermediary language in practically all video game translations in the Czech Republic ties closely to the question of translation quality, which is covered in more detail in Chapter 5.2.

2.3 A Note on Terminology

Why video games?

There are different terms used to denote different sorts of games, and their use does matter even for translation studies. Specifically, the most important distinction is the one between the terms computer game and console game that refer to the hardware used for playing17.

17 Along the same lines, there are also mobile games, handheld games etc. but these are of marginal importance.

- 23 - • A computer game is a game played on a personal computer (either a PC or a Mac) – these are what we mean when we say ‘computers’, with keyboards, mouses and monitors.

• A console game is a game played on a console (e.g. Playstation or Xbox), which is a piece of hardware (usually connected to a TV) dedicated for playing games. Consoles hold a dominant share of the game market18.

To maximise sales, a lot of modern games get released for each of these platforms and the players hardly feel any difference between the various versions. The platform does matter for translators, though. Gaming consoles have limited use past playing games (even their Internet access is very limited), while computers allow the user to browse the Internet, do their office work, edit videos, paint, create 3D graphics, etc. Most importantly, it is impossible to access and edit files on consoles, while any user of a personal computer can access and edit any file of any piece of software they have installed. This has lead to a situation where practically all fan translations and other modifications happen on PCs only19. Professional companies are able to translate console games easily, but they require the assistance of the game’s developer and the work must be done on computers anyway. (More on this in Chapter 4.4)

When speaking about games in general, we are speaking about all of these subcategories together. However, there is no consensual hypernym that would include all of them under one label – in some contexts, computer games and video games are used as a generalisation, but other times video games are used just as a synonym for console games. (Mäyrä 2008, p. 12) Due to this confusion, game scholars have been trying to establish a new umbrella term digital games, which is gradually becoming the norm in the emerging field of game studies. In spite of that, some sources still use different terms, as seen for example in “Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research”.

18 For example, let us look at the up-to-date worldwide game sales at the time of this writing (VGChartz 2011): there are only three PC titles in the Top 40, ranked 13th, 16th and 30th. Only one of these, the freshly released Crysis 2 had been published for other platforms as well: it sold 366,816 Xbox copies, 228,079 Playstation copies and only 103,373 PC copies. 19 Console games can be modified or translated, but the process is technically more difficult – the files must be ‘hacked’, carried over to a computer and edited there.

- 24 - The disadvantage of digital games is that the term is practically unknown outside of the circle of game studies scholars, and the general language still tends to speak about video games instead. It is for this reason that I have chosen to stay with the term video games, and I believe it is fully suitable for the purposes of translation studies. The reader should keep in mind, though, that this term is meant as a general label for all kinds of digital games.

Why translation?

Similarly uncertain is the question whether we should use the term translation or localisation when speaking about video games. The general usage here in the Czech Republic favours the former – all the fans I have spoken to, and also most Internet discussions or articles, use the term překlad [translation] or, perhaps more frequently, čeština (literally [Czech language], but using it the same way as one would say “Czech language pack”). The professionals, on the other hand, speak about localisations.

Bernal Merino (2006) argues that localisation is an industrial term that might denote more than just translation, for example marketing decisions to use a different soundtrack for the American market than for the Japanese one. When speaking strictly about the linguistic side of things, we should stick to translation (or its rough equivalent linguistic localisation that serves to exclude marketing decisions). Merino also disagreed with the proposal of Mangiron and O’Hagan (2006), who studied creativity in game translation, to coin a new term transcreation to reflect the “freedom granted to the translator”. It is questionable, argued Merino, whether this term actually brings any new perspectives in comparison to translation, seeing as book translations or films translations also tend to require a lot of creativity. I wouldn’t hesitate to apply the same logic even to localisation – the term sounds like a good marketing strategy to say “we are offering more than just word-to-word translation”, but does it really add new insights to translation studies, which have already condemned the notion of 1:1 equivalence a long time ago? We use translation all the time when speaking about novels, technical texts or films, and in all of these cases the term may denote other decisions than those regarding equivalency.

O’Hagan later (e.g. O’Hagan 2009) went back to using translation... or capitalised

- 25 - Translation as an umbrella term for both translation and localisation. Other scholars variably use either the former, or the latter when speaking about video games. In absence of any clear guidelines, I have chosen to use the more generic term translation.

- 26 - 3. The Development of Video Game Translation in the Czech Republic

Historically, the major target markets for software localisation – and video games are no exception – have been Japanese and then FIGS (French, Italian, German, Spanish) (Esselink 2000 p. 8), which correspond to the largest Western languages. The profitability of a translated product of course drops the smaller the target language is, and the Czech Republic with its ~10 million speakers is of a marginal interest to game industry corporations. It does, however, have a couple of peculiarities.

First, the Czech society has traditionally been relatively advanced and tech-savvy. By 2000, which was the time of a huge Internet boom, roughly 9.7 percent of Czechs were already using the Internet which was more than in any other formerly Eastern-bloc country save the small Estonia (28.6 percent) and Slovenia (15.1 percent): Poland had 7.3 percent, Hungary 7, while the larger language communities lagged far behind, with Russia at 2 percent and Ukraine at 0.7. Some of the FIGS countries were only moderately mode advanced by that time, with 14.4, 23.2, 30.2 and 13.6 respectively20.

Second, the Czech market can be extended by further ~5 million Slovaks21. Both languages are mutually intelligible, and the cultures are somewhat interconnected – it is especially visible on the Internet, where Czechs and Slovaks often intermingle in the same fan communities. Nábělková (2007) describes this as a relationship between a ‘large’ and a ‘small’ language, where the large language produces everything on its own, but the small one readily imports cultural products of the larger one. Applied to video games, this means that games translated to Czech can be sold to and enjoyed by Slovaks, although it doesn’t work the other way around. (Czechs, being the larger language, would ignore Slovak translations and produce their own instead.)22

20 Data taken from IBM’s Many Eyes database at: http://www- 958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/global-internet-users-per-country- 21 Slovakia was comparable in terms of IT development, with 9.4 percent Internet users by the year 2000. 22 Slovakia has not developed its own professional game translation scene, and although there are Slovak fan translations, there is considerably fewer of them than of the Czech fan translations. I have not studied Slovak translations in my research but due to the interconnectedness it can safely be assumed

- 27 - Figure 2: A screen shot from the Czech translation of UFO: Enemy Unknown, compared to the original. The font is missing Czech diacritical marks above certain characters. Also notice the glitch with the overlapping text, where the Czech text was too long to fit to the available space.

that most information about Czech translations apply to Slovak translations as well.

- 28 - Taken together, these facts place the Czech Republic in an interesting ‘sweet spot’ where on the one hand the video game market is relatively small, so that professional translations have developed rather late and even nowadays not all games get translated, but on the other hand the fan community has been large enough to produce translations on its own.

This Chapter maps the development of video game translation in the Czech Republic and describes the enthusiastic emergence of a fan translation community in late 1990s, then its gradual professionalisation during the first half of 2000s and finally the uneasy clinging to life of a fan community that has by 2011 been overshadowed and partially assimilated by professional translation companies.

3.1 From the Fan Scene to Professionalism

1990s – The Birth of a Community

While video games originated in the United States in 1970s and rapidly spread around the Western world, the former Czechoslovakia, tightly isolated from the West by Soviet occupation, had no opportunity to develop a hardware and software market before the Iron Curtain fell in 1989. In the impoverished post-communist society that lacked any tradition of copyright enforcement, a ‘shadow market’ of pirated video games formed long before games were published and sold legally on a regular basic. The do-it- yourself, pirate mindset of Czech and Slovak computer users and gamers lasted well into late 1990s when, finally, a legal game market started emerging (Švelch 2010).

The environment of early 1990s, in other words, was not a one where professional game translations could be produced and sold. Gamers, passing illicit game copies hand-to- hand on floppy disks and later on burned CDs, had no other choice but to play games in English. Not everyone could cope with a foreign language, though, and eventually someone decided to translate a game for their friends. What was the first Czech fan translation? “The earliest case I remember was a group that in 1991... I think... sold games for ZX Spectrum23 on their own mag tapes for 20 crowns, and they translated them to Czech,” recalls Matyskiewicz. “They continued for some time until 1993.” The

23 ZX spectrum was a personal computer developed in 1980s, a platform separate from PC.

- 29 - group, he says, took foreign games, translated them to Czech and modified loading screens so it appeared the games were their own creations. The tapes then circulated mostly in and around the city of Ostrava – when asked, other respondents who were from other parts of the country did not know about the case. It is quite possible that even other cities had their own hacker rings that shared fan translations, but the limitations of the pre-Internet era where no official distribution chains were in place did not allow for a wider distribution or fame. The first fan translation that enjoyed a wide circulation and which everyone does remember came later in mid-nineties, this time already for the PC platform. The game was Ufo: Enemy Unknown (1994), and the fact that it was an extraordinary good game24 most likely helped it to spread all around the Czech Republic. “A guy from Ostrava made it. (...) It was a fantastic translation. For me it was the realisation that a game can speak Czech,” says Pospíšil, stressing the point that the very notion of a translated game did not occur to him before he saw it done.

By this time, translations were not yet separated from the games themselves, and were distributed in the form of an illegal, modified copy of the original game – there were no official ways of obtaining video games and nobody to enforce copyrights (Rambousek 2011, Pospíšil 2011, Matyskiewicz 2011). The need to ‘legalise’ fan translations by separating them from pirated games came later with the advent of the Internet.

But before the Internet as we know it today, there was its precursor, the Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), a slightly less sophisticated computer network. Not many Czechs used it, and those that did were typically just the computer enthusiasts (Zelycz 2011) – for them, the virtual environment provided a great opportunity to share, amongst other things, pirated games and their fan translations. In reality, only a few games had been translated by the time of BBSes (Pospíšil 2011), but those that had now had an easier time spreading amongst gamers. The introduction of World Wide Web, which gradually replaced BBSes, was to change everything. People took up the opportunity and started creating their own web pages – hundreds of them appeared during late nineties, many of them small, with minimal content and value. For many, it was a hobby, a matter of passion. “Everybody wanted to have their own web page,” says Zelycz. “Even myself.”

24 This tactical game in which the player defends the Earth from hordes of mysterious aliens regularly gets listed as one of the best video games ever made. For example, the renowned PG Gamer magazine ranks it as 12th amongst the “best PC games of all time” (PC Gamer 2011).

- 30 - He describes how he realised there was no page offering translated software for download, so he gathered the few translated programmes and games he had previously downloaded from BBSes and put them up on a simple web page. “Translations didn’t really spread much before. Someone translated something, but gave it to their friends only because they had no way to pass it on. I wanted to help.” Eventually the news of his page spread, visitors came and downloaded, some even started sending him translations that were missing in his collection.

This is when the translations started to be separated from pirated games, for several reasons: first, there were legal concerns that the web page owner could get into trouble for piracy. Second, the server space provided by the hosting provider was limited and the downloads had to be kept to a minimal size. Third, dial-up connection was slow and expensive, which was another pressure to keep the file sizes as small as possible. Thus the tradition of translation patches25, which lasts to these days, was born – fans would download the modified files only and apply them to their existing copy of the original game, which they would have acquired ‘somehow else’. Translation patches were both small and ‘technically legal’.26

Others would create their own web pages collecting fan translations, too. In fact, for a couple of years there had been a running rivalry between Zelycz (who goes under the name of Čedič on the Internet) and Loner, another collector of fan translations. The two would befriend translators and persuade them to publish for their website only, and thus for some time one could find fan translations accompanied by texts such as: “This translation can be published on Čedič’s/Loner’s page only” (Pospíšil 2011). The ‘fight’ ended when Loner quit – Zelycz won, and his web page www.cestiny.cz became the de- facto community hub of game translation. Zelycz himself did not translate much, but he would eventually become an important community organiser, publicising fan translations, informing about news on the fan scene or helping isolated translators contact each other. Fans would use his page for announcing their projects, getting help, and of course distributing the finished product (Zelycz 2011). In time, there would

25 A patch is a small file that modifies an existing installation of a game. Typically the term patch is used for files distributed by the official publisher in order to fix recently discovered errors in a previously released game. 26 For a discussion on legal issues see Chapter 5.1.

- 31 - 140

120

100

80

60

40

20

0 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 Before 2000 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009

Figure 3: The number of video games translated by Czech fans per year31 appear separate discussions on other Internet forums, and private web pages of individual translators showcasing their works, but cestiny.cz remained the forefront of the fan community and the central database collecting all finished works (which, incidentally, proved to be a huge boon in my research).

Having a community hub was a prerequisite for more widespread translations, because it was difficult for a random fan to do everything on their own – not necessarily because of the length of the texts, but because of technical issues. A programmer was usually needed to ‘hack’ into the game and provide utilities that would allow editing encoded files or, for example, adding Czech characters to the in-game fonts27. Czarnowski explains that people would eventually group into teams that had their own programmers, but if there was an unaffiliated translator, they had to “go around” and ask for help. The programmers were a rare commodity – the respondents named three or four at a single point in time, and stressed that fan translations would be all but impossible without their help.

27 More on technical difficulties of fan translations in Chapter 4.2.

- 32 - Around 2000 – The Gold Rush of Fan Translation

By the turn of the century, the community was still relatively small – during the whole 1990s, ‘only’ 117 games were translated by fans. The number might seem impressive, but it pales in comparison to later years when almost the same amount of games were translated each year (see Figure 3 on page 32). The Internet was still uncommon (recall the 9.7 percent users mentioned earlier), and the gaming community revolved around gaming magazines instead. The magazines were to play a crucial role in the development of fan translation.

By the end of the 1990s it became a norm for gaming magazines to include CDs with various ‘bonus’ content, typically demo versions of freshly released games28 freeware and shareware programmes, game patches, and other content available freely and legally on the Internet. Amongst these extras were also fan translations. “I helped them [the magazines] prepare these packages... of the most interesting translations that have been released, both of games and of programmes” says Zelycz. He explains that it was all for free, and the translators did not get paid – it was just a collection of older releases, distributed on a CD for the ease of those readers who either did not have Internet access or could not afford downloading files on their dial-up connections. Some time later, the magazines started including a second CD with a full, legal version of an older video game – a practice known as covermounting (Codr 2001) which serves as a way of attracting customers to buy this specific magazine instead of a different one (which includes a different game).

In June 1999, something unthinkable happened. The LEVEL magazine covermounted Fallout, an older but very popular game that most Czechs had not the chance to enjoy because it was massively reliant on written dialogue and used lots of slang and colloquial English. This time, however, the game was fully in Czech. It was an extraordinary achievement, highlighted by the fact that the game had more than “2 megabytes” of text29. The magazine’s editorial proudly boasted:

28 A demo version, a short for a demonstration version, is a freely available ‘sample’ of the game, including only a small part of the full product, e.g. the first mission or two. It serves to lure players into buying the full game. 29 Megabytes was the standard in which fans usually measured the length of a translation. Assuming 1 character per byte, 2 megabytes are roughly equivalent to 1200 standard pages.

- 33 - “The work on the Czech translation of Fallout, more than 2MB of text plus editing pictures and fonts, seemed like a lot of work (sic) from the beginning, even though we braved it with the realisation it was the same like translating three novels, each of them printed in small letters and having 400 pages. But none of us expected it to be such a hell! (...) The biggest translation in the history of gaming magazines! Nobody else has spend three continuous weeks in the office just for you. And rest assured, we are now hated by our wives and girlfriends, whom we met sleeping at the most, when we came back home, and sleeping as we were leaving.”30 (Herodes 1999)

Gamers were in uproar. Fallout was the first major translation and the first translation to be ‘officially’ published alongside the game itself. The popularity of the original game helped the translation get widespread attention and circulation. As a result, fan translations gained instant fame and the Internet was flooded with enthusiastic volunteers who too wanted to translate something – the following year saw 90 new translations finished which was nearly as much as the whole previous decade (see Fig. 3 on the following page). This marked the start of the golden era – or the golden rush – of Czech fan translation, which would last the following couple of years before the gradual switch to professional translations.

This era saw the emergence of several translation teams. Undeniably the most famous of them was the team formed around “Mrazík” who under the label of “Mrazíkovy češtiny” [Mrazík’s Czech translations] produced translations with a staggering frequency. “Mrazík was a star. He recruited young boys who revered him and translated for him,” says Pospíšil. “With a bit of exaggeration you could say he announced 10 new

translations a week,” adds Matyskiewicz. Thanks to the sheer output, Mrazík 31 soon

30 It should be noted that Level in fact bought the translation in an already advanced phase of completion from an outside fan team, and ‘only’ finished the remaining work. (Pospíšil 2011, Rambousek 2011) 31 Data according to the database at www.cestiny.cz. The data should be taken with a grain of salt because exact numbers were hard to determine – not each entry in the database was a separate game, and some entries were duplicates. I have counted each game only once, the first time it was translated, ignoring future re-translations or alternate versions. The chart also doesn’t respect relative translation length, only the number of titles, most of which are in fact small and quick to translate. But all in all, it should be fairly representative of the general activity over years. I have counted all freely available translations, so if a translation was published semi-professionaly (see pp. 34-36) and later released on

- 34 - Figure 4: Translation advertisement on the cover of Level magazine, October 2001. The umber line under the magazine’s name reads: “3 CDs with demo versions and a full game: Might and Magic 7 in Czech.“ became a crucial part of the fan scene, known to everybody – I found it necessary to introduce him because we will encounter his name several times as the thesis progresses. His work has been praised by gamers, although not always by fellow translators. Mondschein says he found a lot of Mrazík’s translations lacking, but admits: “But I can’t dispute he has done much for the fan scene. I even started translating because I wanted to be like him! (...) For most gamers, he’s a god.”32 In other words, the fan community has even found its own celebrities. Browsing through old news, one finds headlines informing the reader about the newest escapades of their favourite

the Internet, it was still counted as a fan translation. 32 Mrazík continued releasing translation to this day, and so far there are 134 translations listed under his name – roughly 10 to 15 percent of all fan translation. (The total number of fan translations in unclear.)

- 35 - heroes, for example Come, Mrazík, in the yoke, when the protagonist got married (Zelycz 2001b), or a glum notice when Zelycz had to evacuate his house due to a massive flood (Polách 2002).

The enthusiasm of early 2000s can be demonstrated on the practice of ‘booking’, where individuals or teams would announce translations of prestigious games weeks beforehand, before the team was even fully assembled, just to make sure nobody else would book it first. Fan translations became “a fashion, a race” (Pospíšil 2011). In the bad cases, this might have lead to disappointments, if the result was sub-par or if the announced translation was abandoned and left unfinished in the end. In the worst cases, this lead to personal rivalries. Mondschein mentions the case of Gothic 2, a game he translated out of spite for Mrazík, who has ‘booked it’ beforehand. Seeing that his favourite game might be translated by Mrazík, whose translations he disliked, Mondschein decided to act: he ignored the booking, recruited two of his friends and for six weeks they did “nothing else but translate”. “But we did it. We released sooner, and he [Mrazík] never got to finish his own version.”

The ‘size’ of a video game translation may vary wildly. A typical 1990s game could have had a couple of dozens of standard pages, perhaps a hundred or two – a task easily accomplished by a determined translator or two in, at most, weeks. But very rarely there would be a ‘talkative’ game with the number of pages in high hundreds, sometimes even thousands. These games were not translated before the ‘gold rush’ of fan translation, but the sudden surge of interest after Level published Fallout made these massive undertakings possible. Several large projects were started and finished in close succession: Fallout 2, 2300 pages, in 1999-200033; Baldur’s Gate, 1400 pages, in 2000- 200134; Planescape: Torment, 3300 pages, in 2000-200235; Baldur’s Gate 2, 3200 pages (Wójcik 2008), in 2001-2002; etc. These projects would often involve as many as 30 to 60 translators, proofreaders, testers or programmers. They were the apex of community effort, even though their beginning were sometimes rather humble:

“We were in our summer house with my friends, in woods, playing Baldur’s

33 Unattributed data from the project’s web page at: http://move.to/FalloutIICZ 34 Unattributed data from the project’s web page at: http://adam.pohadkovychlum.cz/cestiny/bg1 35 Unattributed data from the project’s defunct web page, retrieved from the Web Archive at: http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20050208213610/http://dungeony.cz/tormentcz/default.html

- 36 - Gate. But they didn’t understand it so I decided to translate it for them and started editing the game files. (...) We spent about two weeks in the woods, I translated the first chapter of the game so they could play it. When we returned back to civilisation, I sent the finished part to Čedič. Then Raptor [one of the fan programmers] contacted me and [helped me with some technical issues36]. Thanks to him I saw how many text there was in the game and realised I had no chance doing it on my own. So I looked for help at Čedič’s page. I tested them if they knew Czech and English, and we started translating.” (Rambousek 2011)

During my research, I have focused mostly on these large projects because I believe they are the most representative of the strength of a fan community – they reveal both what the community is capable of, but also how it works and organises itself when a collective effort is needed. It is also no surprise that the respondents were most keen to recall these projects and speak about them, rather than speaking about their minor projects.

Early 2000s – Gradual Professionalisation

At the same time these mega-projects were being realised, the fan community embarked on on a journey of slow professionalisation. In 2001, the publishing company Bohemia Interactive contacted certain fans and offered to release their translations alongside ‘budget versions’37 of older games. Fans agreed, with the provision that their translations would still be freely available on the Internet, and that is how translations of Heroes of Might and Magic III by Czarnowski and of Baldur’s Gate by Rambousek’s team were released, starting the fan community’s cooperation with publishing companies. (Zelycz 2001a, Zelycz 2002a)

The cooperation was further eased in 2001-2003 when Zelycz and Pospíšil organised several get-togethers of the fan community. Their intention was just to meet each other in a pub and “have a chat”, however the meetings were attended also by representatives from gaming magazines or game publishing companies (Zelycz 2002a), who thus 36 A description of typical technical issues was omitted. These will be explained later in Chapter 4.2. 37 Budget versions were essentially the same concept as covermounted CDs attached to gaming magazines, sans the magazines – cheap re-releases of older games that could not be sold for full price any more.

- 37 - gained easy contacts and a personal acquaintance with the fans.

Gaming magazines were keen to repeat the success of Level’s Fallout and hired fans to provide translations for their covermounted games. Translations, previously included just as a pack of free ‘extras’, became something that could be advertised (fig. 4) – on the other hand, this also meant that the fan translators were no longer willing to provide them for free. For a time, the standard practice was to ‘pay’ the translators either in game CDs – recalling my personal experience, I took part in the large translation of Fallout 2 that was published by Level magazine, where each of the translators received a game of his choice – or in magazine subscriptions. Poláček elaborates: “I once did something for them... I don’t even remember what it was... (...) but they gave me a life- long subscription of Level. I think. It keeps coming.” This practice was a short-lived one, though, and ultimately the magazines started hiring translators for money. Mondschein, who was at the time an editor in Gamestar magazine, explains how it worked: the magazine had an agreement with Mrazík, who was one of the few fans able to provide translations on a regular basis. Mrazík would take care of everything from recruiting translators and programmers to the translation itself, handing over the translation as a finished product on prearranged deadline and getting paid.

This was the defining feature of these early, semi-professional translations – I am using the prefix semi- to denote that these translations were done by groups of fans in the same fashion in which they used to work earlier, for free. The ways how these were organised and how the community worked had not changed at tall – and any payment was just a pleasant extra on top of what the fans would do nonetheless. It should also be noted that aside of being published along an official game release, these translations were usually also released as free patches on the Internet – albeit typically a couple of weeks later to ensure the official release would sell – thus retaining their fan character.

Later, when online shopping became more prevalent, even Internet video games sellers decided they want their stakes in the translation market. Fan translators, now aware that their products might actually have some monetary value, would sometimes postpone the release of a finished translation and try to sell it to Internet shops first. The shop would ‘buy’ the translation patch (sometimes for money, sometimes just for a game or two) for a limited time – receiving exclusive rights to distribute it for a month or so to their

- 38 - paying customers – after which time the translation could be released for free, as usual (Zelycz 2011). The patch, even the free one, typically included an advertisement for the shop which would show during the installation process.

All of these semi-professional translations – the budget editions, the magazines, the online shops – proved the public was “hungry” (using Czarnowski’s words) for Czech translations, and opened the door for professional companies. In late 2001, Czarnowski found out that the local branch of the Polish publishing company CD Projekt would be publishing and translating Heroes of Might and Magic IV, a new installment of game series he had been translating so far. To make sure the company “does it right”, Czarnowski contacted CD Projekt and offered them to personally oversee the translation – the company not only agreed but also hired Czarnowski and made him a localisation manager responsible for all their Czech translations. Czarnowski promptly proceeded to contact his friends and acquaintances from the fan community and hire them as freelance translators. The first professional translation team was born.

“It was a very good foundation. These translators had a good knowledge of gaming terminology and they were enthusiastic. On the other hand, it soon turned out some of them were unable to work for hire. Some had little time (I wasn’t quite happy with 5 pages per week), some couldn’t keep deadlines, others had trouble with quality – what was sufficient for an amateur Czech language patch, wasn’t enough for the level required of a commercial product. After a couple of months we were left with a skilled core, which I’ve gradually expanded by new translators whom I actively sought and whose quality I tested.” (Czarnowski 2011)

When Heroes of Might and Magic IV quickly sold 5000 copies (Zelycz 2002b), a number that remains uncommon even today, the marketing power of translations became indisputable and other companies soon followed suit. Cenega, a competitor of CD Projekt in Poland, became the major competitor of CD Projekt in terms of translations in the Czech Republic. Several more, minor publishers like Playman, Hypermax or TopCD joined in with their own translations. Oftentimes the publishers did not have their in-house teams or localisation managers – they ‘outsourced’ all the work and bought translations as finished products, letting the fan teams that had established previously do all the work. The interesting development here is that in the

- 39 - majority of cases, these ‘official’ translations were done by former amateurs who lacked any formal training, rather than by established localisation agencies38.

The transition of fans under the wings of publishing companies might seem like a detail, but it had far-reaching consequences. While previously only older, budget games were released with translations, the game publishers had access to licenses of brand new games and, equipped by freshly professionalised teams, could release new titles translated into Czech straight from the beginning. True, the Czech versions often came out several weeks later than the international versions – a problem caused by foreign game developers who at this point of time often did not provide texts beforehand, which meant the local publishers could only start translating once the international version had been finished39. But even a month’s delay was a huge improvement in comparison to translated budget or covermounted games, which typically came out years after the original release.

Professionalisation lead to increased budgets. To ensure the investments would return, the publishers did not release translations as free patches on the Internet any more – one had to buy the Czech release, for money, a fact not all gamers initially liked. Commenting on the release of the Czech version of Heroes of Might and Magic IV, Czarnowski wrote:

“A large group of gamers, instead of buying the Czech version of the game, started asking around the Internet for a translation patch which they could apply to their pirated versions. The minority who owns the English original legally looks for the patch too. (...) One gamer even called it a ‘jerk move’ that translations of the previous versions were available for download, while the new one isn’t. (...) I know it is unusual that we finally get normal releases of Czech versions, but I hope gamers will eventually come to terms with it.” (Czarnowski 2002)

The gamers did indeed come to terms with the new professional translations. In the first years of the new century, the number of professional translations was still small, 38 The cases when a translation was done by non-gamers are sparse and rather anecdotal, and will be covered in Chapter 4.6. 39 See for example Morkes’ interview with Czech game distributors in which he asked, among others, about the problem of late releases. (Morkes 2002)

- 40 - because the publishers were still establishing themselves, so the semi-professional and fan ones remained strong for a couple more years. But this was to change.

Late 2000s – The Decline of Fan Translation

Ultimately, the professional localisations became commonplace enough so that the number of fan translations dropped considerably. Looking at Figure 3 (p. 32), we can see that fan translations reached their peak between 2002-2004, after which their numbers dropped rapidly. This was the expected outcome of gradual professionalisation. Not only did the professional companies ‘book’ games for themselves, leaving less and less untranslated games for the fans, but also there was a considerable ‘brain drain’ of the fan community. There were never that many fan translators in the first place – sure, there were hundreds of small-time contributors, but the core of the most active community members was actually quite small. Zelycz’s estimate is about three dozens people who knew each other personally and were used to working together. After their departure either to professional companies or due to personal life, the formerly lively pace of the fan community slowed down. “Mrazík is the last one of the old guard,” says Zelycz. “But there’s simply not so many [fan translations] any more. (...)”

But as one can clearly see from figure 3, the fan scene, although weakened, has been continuing steadily over the past years, producing about 40 new translations each year. And if the ability to produce large-scale translations is to be taken as a measure of the health of a community, then the Czech fan scene is still far from dying – The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, spanning 3200 pages40, have been translated in 2006-2007, and only last year (i.e. 2010) the same team has started working on Drakensang: the Dark Eye, a similarly large game. Both of these games were left untranslated by official publishers, but fans took up the slack41.

Gaming magazines, once proud vanguards of the translation community, have withdrawn to the background. They still release covermounted games and they still include translations whenever possible, but instead of hiring translators on their own, they simply just the translations that have been produced by publishing companies 40 According to the readme file included with the Czech patch. 41 Interestingly, the team leader of both of these projects is Aleš Kopřiva, the localisation manager at TopCD who organises the fan projects as a hobby in his free time.

- 41 - earlier.

In the latter part of 2000s the professional teams settled down to their present-day form, which I was introduced to as I interviewed the respondents. CD Projekt, now renamed and transformed into Comgad, retains the largest in-house localisation team which means a couple of managers, programmers and proofreaders; they employ translators externally. Other teams are typically smaller, often as little as just one or two jack-of- all-trades managers who do what they can themselves and hire freelancers for the rest. Chapter 4 will deal more closely with the typical work-flow of a translation.

Up until this time, all games were published by local companies who licensed them from foreign producers (a practice similar to how the book industry works). But in this time of relative prosperity, producers could finally try to bypass Czech publishers and produce their games directly via their established localisation headquarters in Western Europe and their subsidiaries here in the Czech Republic. This is how EA Games produced several translations (including large-scale ones like Dragon Age: Origins in 2009), translated by a generic agency and tested in Madrid (Tvrdý 2011b). This system was, however, a rarity, and did not last long.

By 2011, there has been a slight step back. The financial crisis hit the entertainment industry a bit late, and its implications are not clearly visible because companies would not speak about exact numbers. But at a glance, one can see the number of translated titles is smaller. “When we began, there was a huge hunger for games translated to Czech. Even games like Europa Universalis II42 paid for themselves no problem,” admits Czarnowski and explains that after the recession, things are “no longer so sunny” and translation now need to be considered more carefully. The aforementioned publisher, EA Games, has withdrawn from doing Czech versions of their games, a move which has been connected to lower-than-desirable game sales in the Czech Republic (Tvrdý 2011b).

It is questionable whether the recent hesitation of professional companies to produce translation will result in a resurrection of the fan scene or nor. But some indications have already appeared. As I have mentioned in the opening of Chapter 2, a fan team 42 Europa Universalis (2001), a hard-core strategy game that was both visually unimpressive, hard to get into and quite wordy, serves here as an example of niche game for a marginal audience.

- 42 - lead by Tvrdý has already taken over the franchises abandoned by EA Games – while EA’s lengthy games Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins were translated by professionals, the expansion packs43 for these games were already translated by Tvrdý’s fan team and now the group has started a translation of Dragon Age II, a project of a far bigger scope. (Tvrdý 2011a)

When I interviewed Zelycz, he predicted that fan translations would in the long run cease to exist: PC games are fighting an uphill battle against consoles44, he said, and moreover the younger generation is getting better in English and might not need translations in the end. Future will show if he was right, but so far it seems that as long as there are popular games left untranslated, the fans will take care of them.

3.1 Comparison to Other Countries

As has been explained earlier, the Czech Republic happens to be in a ‘sweet spot’ where the market is not large enough for all games to be translated, which leaves some games – either those lengthier or those with a narrower target audience – untranslated, but at the same time the market has been large enough for a fan community to emerge and thrive. To show that this is an unique arrangement, I would like to compare the situation in the Czech Republic to other countries... but here we hit the problem that the situation in other countries has not been thoroughly documented yet. I have tried nonetheless, and here I would like to apologize that the following text is based more on hearsay than on reliable sources. I have used the few sources that were available, and finished the rest of the puzzle by using personal knowledge, sending e-mails to my friends abroad and asking around on Internet forums45.

In English speaking countries, there is little room for fan translations. Most games are created in English in the first place, and the European developers take care to have their

43 An expansion pack is, as the name suggests, a paid expansion for an existing game that usually adds some new missions and other content to the original game. Expansions are smaller and shorter than full-fledged games which sets them apart from sequels. 44 As I will explain in Chapter 4.4, console games are notoriously hard to modify and there are only few fan translations for console games. 45 See for example the following discussions: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=79813 and http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?526831

- 43 - games translated professionally so they can access the North American market. But there is still a large game development hub in Japan – in fact, Japanese is the other dominant language of video games, and there is a big trend of translation from Japanese to English (Pym 2009, p. 139) – despite of that, not all games see an international release. Coupled with other popular Japanese cultural products like anime films or manga comics, this has lead to the creation of a lively fan translation scene, documented for example by Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez (2006) who have written about fansubbing or Minako O’Hagan (2009) who writes about fan translation of video games. There is, as it turns out, an English-speaking fan community translating older Japanese games46 that have been omitted by American distributors. However, the English-speaking fan scene is so strongly connected with translation from Japanese that the term fan translation might be misunderstood as anime translation or manga translation – indeed, the studies that are available describe translations of Japanese films or Japanese games only. While undeniably valuable, due to the specificity of Japanese culture, we should be wary of applying their conclusions to fan translation in general.

Moving over to Europe, French- and German speaking countries have, to my knowledge, no substantial fan scene, and if they do, one could assume it to be concerned again with Japanese games only. The reason is that the French and German markets are so large and important that all games get translated professionally, leaving no room for fans. Poland is a similar case, and I have been informed that most games do indeed get a professional Polish translation, even the large-scale ones. When Wójcik (2008) did a study on Polish translations of Baldur’s Gate II and Fallout 2, games iconic for the Czech fan community, he studied games that have been translated – even dubbed, a practice extremely rare in the Czech Republic – by Polish CD Projekt, a professional publisher.

Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries and Finland do not use translations at all because it is generally assumed the gamers’ generation speaks English well-enough. The exception are children games or family games which do receive professional translations.

46 The practice is called rom-hacking. It is briefly introduced it in chapter 4.4.

- 44 - Figure 5: Encyclopedic texts shown on the example of Civilization IV. The “Effects” frame list the actual in-game impact of the game element, whereas the text in the lower frame is just an ‘unnecessary extra’ with no relation to the game itself. There are hundreds of such texts in Civilization IV.

But then there is Spain and Spanish speaking countries. With up to 400 million speakers world-wide, Spanish is unsurprisingly included in FIGS and in the cross-hairs of game producers. It does receive professional translations, but for some reason there has been enough impetus for a lively fan community to emerge. The community, centred around the web page clanland.net, has translated such massive games like Baldur’s Gate II or Planescape: Torment and their database lists 752 fan translations as of the day of this writing. Unfortunately I am unable to provide any closer information as I do not speak Spanish, however I believe the Spanish fan scene may be a topic well suited for a different study.

As for Italy or Greece, I have unfortunately been unable to get any information on these countries. Skipping minor countries in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, this leaves us

- 45 - Russia, which has seen some interesting developments over time. Throughout the 1990s and continuing to early 2000s there was a busy shadow market of pirated games which had oftentimes been translated to Russian. The shadow market has nowadays been replaced by fully legal publishing companies who, as put by one of my informants, “translate everything, even totally crappy games, but usually the localization comes 1-2 years later than the game release, although for AAA games they are usually late by a month or two.”

Once again let me apologise for the unclear state of information in this section. Fan translation of video games is an exciting, albeit rarely examined phenomenon that still needs closer study, as evidenced by the sparse data I had to rely on. There is in the very least the question of Asian languages, which I have ignored here for the lack of any information, even though one could expect Chinese, the biggest language on the globe, to have an energetic fan scene – in fact I am fairly certain I have seen Chinese translations on occasion. Given the uniqueness of the Chinese culture, a study of its fan translations could bring insights widely different from what he have seen in the West. Let us hope we might learn more one day.

- 46 - Figure 6: An example of a well-prepared lockit (Alpha Protocol). The texts are sorted by scenes into separate tabs, and notes explain who is talking to whom. Translators had additional documents at their disposal which introduced the various characters and provided an overview of the game’s mechanics.

Figure 7: An example of an insufficient lockit (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Clear Sky). Only minimal context is given. Notice the lines do now flow logically as a dialogue – this is because they are listed alphabetically by the “Dialog ID” in the right hand column. The translator can assume a “leader” is talking to the player, but knows nothing about the character (like their gender) and has no way to tell in which order the lines appear in the game.

- 47 - 4. The Process of Game Translation

This chapter describes how a typical game translation project develops over time, from its first inception, through translation itself to the release of the finished version. We will focus on technical details and specific challenges faced by both professional teams and fan translators. But first, let me provide some background of the game development process.

A game will usually pass through the hands of several companies before it gets translated and released on a local market. The game industry is dominated by the developer/producer model, a concept known for example from the film industry. Developer is the team – sometimes a separate company, oftentimes a subsidiary of the producer – who does all the hard work of actually creating a video game, but who needs financing. The producer provides funding for the whole project, takes care of marketing, manufacturing of the game disks, distribution to retail shops, and reaping the spoils – the producer is the de facto owner of the game, bought from the development team via funding (Costikyan 2005). In North America and Western Europe is it usual for the producers to publish the game themselves, directly via their local subsidiaries. This model is however uncommon in less important markets like the Czech Republic, instead giving ground to local publishers who buy licenses to distribute the game on the local market. It is the local publishers who create translations out of their own initiative47.

The chain developer > producer > local publisher enters the play in cases where the translated version is intended for a simultaneous shipment (sim-ship) along with English-language versions, which is nowadays the preferred mode of release. Sim-ship requires the coordination of all parties involved which results in a long chain of communications that is – as will be shown – prone to failures in communication, misunderstandings and various other complications that hinder the translation effort.

47 In reality, the terminology is not strictly defined – the producer might be called publisher too because they do publish games directly on the Western markets, while the local publisher will often be called a distributor to differentiate from the international publisher/producer. I have simplified the terminology for our purposes in order to prevent confusion.

- 48 - 4.1 The Process of Professional Translation

Before the translation is even considered, it is necessary for the local publisher to obtain a license from the producer. While this is mainly a marketing process, the potential translation already figures in the equations. Licenses tend to be cheaper if they allow the distribution of translated versions only (meaning the English texts will be left out from the game), since English-language versions could be exported back abroad to compete with the producer’s own versions (Mondschein 2011). On the other hand, some Czech players might prefer games in English and by agreeing to the limited license, the local publisher would sacrifice these customers to the foreign producer. It is therefore desirable to strike the perfect balance in the license... but the arrangements must not take long. As Kopřiva complained to me: each day of the licensing process bites off valuable time before the sim-ship date is due. “It is a big difference between agreeing on the license six months in advance and buying it only 2 months before the game gets released abroad.” (Kopřiva 2011)

Once the license is obtained, the publisher weights the pros and cons of a translation. Some games, like children games, must always be translated, while with others, the length of the texts is carefully considered. An interesting problem is that some games include a lot of extra background texts that have no direct relation to the game itself (and the game can be fully understood and played without them), but lengthen the translation considerably – a famous example are the games from the Civilization series, in which the player takes the lead of a country and sees it from the stone age to space races in the 21st century. The games include a “civilopedia”, an encyclopedia describing, with a bit of exaggeration, each major invention in the history of mankind (fig. 5). So far the Civilization games have been translated only by fans who bypassed the text bloat caused by the civilopedia by leaving it untranslated or, as in the case of the recent Civilization V fan translation, by creating a quick translation of the game itself and then spending additional months chipping away from the in-game encyclopedia (Špindler 2011).

Czarnowski provides an example he has encountered in his professional career: his team was about to translate Trainz, a train simulator one might expect not to contain much of a written word, only to find out the game had in fact 2500 pages of text – not only

- 49 - meticulous descriptions of every single engine, rolling stock, building, railroad track and signal, but also a hefty manual for an in-game scripting engine which players could use to create their own model railways. In this lucky case the team was able to translate just the core of the game (800 pages), leaving the rest untranslated because most of the engines, rolling stock, etc. were technically not part of the game, but only included on the disk as ‘extras’ created by fans. But this was an exceptional case, I was assured. Professional publishers have fewer options than fans – they cannot simply leave out a part of the game untranslated and then sell it as a ‘Czech version’. Either they do a full and costly translation, or release the game in English (sometimes providing a free partial translation as a download on their web page). However, the lengthiness still makes some games virtually untranslatable by Czech professionals48.

If the game is intended for a sim-ship, as is the norm today, the translation needs to be done while the game is still being developed. The translators receive all game texts from the developer, but have no access to the game itself and no way to play it. They translate ‘blindly’ without first-hand knowledge of the game, guessing the meaning of texts and hoping for the best. The little information they have comes from limited articles on the internet, such as developer interviews, and the translator’s personal knowledge of similar games or, in case of a game series, the prequels. This challenge is what makes the largest difference between professional and fan translations – while professionals have to translate ‘blindly’, fans translate games after they have already played and gotten to know them.

To help the translators overcome their ‘blindness’, developers usually provide them with supporting documentation on top of the texts that are to be translated, for example explaining notes, an overview of the game’s story and characters etc. The whole package of documents is called a localisation kit, a lockit. The quality of the information contained within the lockit varies wildly depending on the developer and their previous experience with internationalisation, but – speaking from my own experience – it rarely is enough to appease all the translator’s uncertainties. Normally, translators work with Excel files where one column is intended for translation, whereas other columns contain supporting notes – perhaps a name of the character who is speaking (when translating subtitles), perhaps a shortish note explaining the role of the text in the game, like

48 Which might be the reason why the lengthy Civilization has never seen a professional translation.

- 50 - “interface”, “tutorial” or “mission 01” (see fig. 6). Anything more than that, like explanations of the game’s mechanics, buildings, units or characters, tend to be an exception rather than the rule. It all depends. “The big companies try to have their lockits in a standardised form. But if you are in contact with developers who are making their first game... it’s not a lockit, it’s a massacre,” says Mondschein, referring to the translator’s nightmare of texts scattered randomly around many files and sorted in alphabetical order or by the date they had been added to the game, rather than by any in-game logic (see fig. 7).

After receiving the lockit from the developer, the texts need to be reviewed and prepared for translation – this might involve converting them from a uncommon file format to something easily editable. After that the texts get cut in smaller pieces and divided between separate freelance translators. This work is all done by the localisation manager. It is the manager who communicates with the developers, organises other team members, prepares glossaries, watches for deadlines or sorts out any technical problems. “Once, we received [a game] where all texts were divided in 1800 directories and thousands of small files, containing sometimes just a sentence or two each. (...) Easier than translating it in this form was to spend two days coding a programme that could convert it all into one big Excel file, and then back again,” said Czarnowski. A similar work must be done when translators start sending translated texts – the manager must manually check each file to see if is properly formatted, then collect all translations back together or convert them back to the original format so they can be put back into the game.

Simultaneously, the game is still being developed and it is quite possible for some of the texts to be changed in the last minute, or for new texts to be included. The developer might send an updated version of the texts every couple of days, in which case the localisation manager must compare both versions, look up the changes and have someone re-translate the affected parts. Mondschein mentions one example where the developer first sent 100 pages of text, later 150 pages, even later 300 pages. But it was still the same file and the new lines were not marked. The manager had to find and extract them manually, and make sure that the developer had not replaced the already translated lines. A curious situation arose when the team was translating Metro 2033, a game made by Russian developers who decided to add five or six new sentences at the

- 51 - very last moment. Pressed by time, not wanting to bother the translation team with such a small change, and presumably thinking Czech was a fellow Slavic language which should not be so different from Russian, the developers decided to translate the texts by themselves, thereby producing a ridiculously botched Czech translation. “We noticed it only later when the game was already being tested, and we immediately though: Who translated that? Which proofreader let it pass?” says Mondschein and adds: „The localisation manager can’t trust the developer.”

Aside of these considerations, the translation itself is a fairly straightforward process. The only striking fact I have noticed was the use of software for computer assisted translation (CAT tools) – or, more precisely, the lack of their use because none of the Czech companies I have interviewed used CAT tools, as one might expect on the field of video game translation that on occasion tends to be quite technical and repetitive. The reason lies in file formats, explains Mondschein – the fact that the manager needs to convert various formats there and back and, moreover, coordinate with the developer would complicate the use of CAT tools to a point where they would not be worth the time investment. “If we received the texts in a Trados-friendly form, that would be something worth considering. But if the developer sends you an update twice a day, which you need to export [from a different file format] and then import again, it’s difficult.” Poláček and Kopřiva, the other two professionals I have interviewed, say they don’t use CAT tools ‘officially’ but leave it up to the freelancers’ judgement. “And I know none of my translators want to use them,” added Poláček.

Later in the process, while translators are working on the text, the developer will send a testing copy of the game. The manager then checks with the help of programmers to see whether there are any technical issues, for example whether the game fonts support Czech characters or if the game can be run on a Czech version of Windows. There is a wide array of things that might have gone wrong because of bad internationalisation practices – for example a game might rely on certain data to be placed in the “Documents” folder. However, the folder is called “Dokumenty” in Czech Windows and if the game has been coded without due care, it might not recognise the folder and therefore not work properly (Mondschein 2011). These are all small issues, but need to be checked for and then fixed in cooperation with the developer.

- 52 - Due to all of these obstacles, it is understandable that the resulting translations tend to be full of mistakes, misunderstandings and inconsistencies both in style and terminology. When Wójcik (2008) did a case study on the Polish professional translations of Baldur’s Gate II and Fallout 2, he did indeed found that, despite the presumably large budgets49, many problematic solutions slipped into the final version. The same names would be translated differently in two different places; a character would address another one informally, only to switch to formal voice in the very next sentence; other times there would be a mistake caused by translator not knowing the context (e.g. a translator thought a “power fist” to be simply a poetic label for a human appendage, translating it as a “mocarną pięść” [powerful fist], while in fact it was a weaponised gauntlet powered by batteries). These mistakes are unavoidable but most of them can be fixed in the testing phase.

Once the texts have been translated, proofreaders go through all of them and fix all errors and inconsistencies they can spot – this is no different from, say, book proofreading. After this, the localisation manager collects all the texts, converts them back to the original format and sends them to the developer. The developer incorporates the texts into the game and sends back a so-called Beta-testing copy of the game – an internal pre-release version intended for testing purposes. At this point, the project might either be handed over to a specialised “testing manager” (in the larger companies) or still remain in the hands of the overall “localisation manager” (in the smaller companies), and the testing phase may begin.

The manager assembles a team of testers who will play the Beta-testing copy of game, try to read as many texts as possible and report any errors they find. Testers are usually game fans who work as external freelancers, must have a computer powerful enough to run the game, and of course need to be skilled in language use. They may be the same people as translators, but usually are not (translators get assigned to new projects in the meantime). There is a lot of possible problems that cannot be noticed by simply reading the texts outside of the game, for example the aforementioned inconsistencies, but also technical problems like wrongly displayed fonts or mangled code tags50. However,

49 The games were even dubbed into Polish by professional actors. 50 Game texts often incorporate pieces of code that must not be translated, otherwise texts might not show properly or there will be other problems (see fig. 10 on p. 62). If translators modify or delete the

- 53 - Figure 8: A game’s data file containing texts opened in a hex-editor. (Ufo: Enemy Unknown). The file is written in code displayed on the left; the hex- editor displays the code as readable characters. Notice how one cell of code corresponds to one character of text (see the highlight).

testers will hopefully spot them while playing and then report the error to the localisation manager.

The manager collects all error reports but they cannot directly fix them in the game, because they lack access to the game’s code. Instead they forward these reports to the developer who has to implement them to the game and send back an updated Beta version. A new round of communication pitfalls and setbacks begins. Kopřiva says that practically during each project he has done, something went wrong. Once, after he had received and ran the testing copy, he found out the texts had been inserted in a wrong order, so that random texts showed in illogical places in the game. Mondschein shares a similar experience: once, after waiting for several days, his team received an ‘updated’ testing copy which in fact had not changed at all and still retained all the original mistakes. Fumbles like these are to be expected – the foreign developers are, after all,

tags by mistake, the error is very hard to detects during proofreading and will show only in the game.

- 54 - fixing errors in Czech language which they do not understand, and might not notice if they do something wrong. In such cases, the developer must be urged to provide a correctly updated Beta version, while testers are still playing the uncorrected game and reporting the same errors others have already reported several times.

But even graver problems happen. Mondschein describes a situation when the ‘master’, i.e. the final version of the game, was to be finished in a week – but the developer still had not fixed any of the 500 errors in the translation that had been reported. Upon being urged, the developer responded: “Sorry, we fix each error individually and we won’t manage more than 150 in the remaining week. Pick the ones that are the most important to you and we will fix those [and leave the rest uncorrected].”51 A similar example has been provided by Poláček: a game had been translated and even released, but in the first days after it hit market, the Czech publisher found several more mistakes and wanted them fixed. But because the developer in question had a policy of not releasing after- release patches52, the mistakes had to remain in the translation forever.

A relatively recent development that further complicates the testing phase is the reluctance of certain developers or producers to provide Beta versions at all. They are vary of providing testing copies because these might leak to the public – someone from the translation team might take the game and release it illegally on the Internet53 weeks before the official release, thus hurting the sales. Similar leaks have already happened when, for example, Assassin’s Creed escaped two month before release from the company that has been manufacturing the game DVDs (Sinclair, 2008), and it’s sequel Assassin’s Creed 2 leaked from the localisation company that has been translating it to Russian (Poláček 2011). Because of this, Czech publishers might sometimes either be required to send their testers to the developer’s premises if it is logistically feasible (e.g.

51 It should be noted that it is extremely unusual for the developer to fix texts individually, one by one. The normal practice is simply to replace all game texts at once by the newest version provided by the translation team. This specific example was a rare sight and invoked the respondent’s ironic smile. 52 It is, sadly, normal that video games get released with numerous errors of a technical character, despite having been tested before the release. Game developers tend to release fix patches, freely downloadable from the Internet, for months after the initial release. The policy of not releasing patches means the company tries to test the games so thoroughly beforehand that no patches should be needed. A mistake in a translation was not enough to break this policy. 53 Unreleased games are very sought after amongst impatient gamers.

- 55 - Figure 9: A game’s font file. The original is on the left, the redrawn Czech version on the right. Some characters had to be redrawn, and some new characters have been placed in previously empty spaces.

to Warsaw) or the producer will try to hire Czech testers in the city where the company has its seat (e.g. Madrid or Montreal). Neither is an ideal solution, but fortunately this practice has so far been limited to the most premium game titles only.

If there is any ‘moral lesson’ to be taken from all of these examples, it is that the practice of sim-ship in which the local publishers needs to coordinate with foreign developers, creates a complicated environment that hinders the translation efforts in many ways. No such problems arise if the game gets translated after the English- language version has already been published – in these cases the local publisher is usually provided with the game’s code and may change it on the fly, without needing the developer’s help. But as has been explained earlier, releasing translated versions after the international release is economically undesirable, and sim-ship remains the preferred method.

With blind translations, texts that are in a constant state of flux and several translators working on the game simultaneously to meet the pressing deadlines, it is almost impossible to produce a flawless translation. Seen in this light, the testing phase gains a great importance, perhaps as big as the translation itself. Unfortunately, it tends to be the

- 56 - first phase that gets cut to a bare minimum if budgets are tight. The above-mentioned process should be understood at the ideal, in reality things do not always work like that. Proofreaders are the first to go if budgets do not allow for them, instead leaving all language corrections on the backs of the testers. In smaller companies, the localisation manager might be required to perform the role of a proofreader as well. The testing process itself might, in turn, be stripped to bare bones only – to make sure the game runs and there are no blatant mistakes in the opening menu, then label the translation done. Nobody would, of course, admit to such a malpractice in their company, but examples of untested games can still be found.

In late 2010, the Czech version of Fallout: New Vegas was published, an extraordinary achievement because this last instalment of the popular post-apocalyptic series is again quite ‘talkative’ and lengthy. However, it soon turned out the Czech translation was underwhelming and contained a lot of errors and grammatical mistakes. “Because the first version of Cenega’s translation contained a great deal of mistakes, you will find the sentences and names to be full of nonsense,” wrote user “Justy” (2010) on a fan forum, mere days after the game’s release, and proceeded to announce a fan project to collect and fix as many errors as they can find. Having the support of Cenega, the official publisher, the fans are reporting errors back to the publisher who fixes them and releases an official patch. It shows the devotion of the fan community again, but there are also other interpretations: “People take it positively, because the Fallout community is strong and wants to help,” shakes his head Kopřiva. “But in reality, the company should [test games] on their own, not abuse enthusiastic fans. This is in the better case a shoddy work, in the worse case a fraud to save money.” Cenega offered a different explanation, claiming the producer sent the texts very late and they have had little time for the translation. (“Smejki” 2010). Whatever the real reason of the lacking translation, this example shows that the market reality does not always favour quality work.

Even when the game has finally been published and is being sold, the translators’ work is not over. Over the span of the next several months, the developer might release updates or patches that fix various technical errors in the game. Sometimes these patches edit texts too in which case, the translators must go through all the changes and re-translate what is needed – had they not done that, players might find parts of the newly patched game in English or the game not working at all. This form of ‘customer

- 57 - care’ is just another obligation the translation team needs to keep in their minds. When all is said and done, all of these minutiae and processes make professional game translation an unique type of translation unlike any other.

4.2 The Process of Fan Translation

The main difference between fan translation and professional translation of video game is that the fans work with a game that has already been released and which they had the opportunity to play. Fans typically decide to translate a game only after having played it and liked it, which means they tend to have much better insight into the game than a professional translator could ever hope for.

On the other hand, fans do not enjoy the technical support of the game’s developer and must handle the technical side of translation themselves. Historically, a major challenge of fan translators has been obtaining the texts from the game in a format that would be easy to work with, and then importing them back in such a way that the game still worked afterwards. Video games, it should be understood, do not store texts in handy Word- or Excel documents – instead, the texts are often hidden and encrypted in data files which are hard to read, yet harder to edit. Sometimes the texts are even scattered amongst the game’s internal code which must of course not be edited, making all tampering with them difficult.

Very rarely do fans have a direct access to software tools provided by the developers – this happens for example when the developer releases an editor, a software tool which allows the fans to alter the contents of the game, add new missions and items or, most importantly, rewrite texts. Even better, says Czarnowski, recalling his years as a fan translator, is when fans manage to obtain a shady copy of the official software tools used by foreign companies to produce for example German or French translations. Such tools can of course be used to easily edit the texts for a Czech translation too; they are however very rare since most developers nowadays do not create them and instead prefer to insert the translated texts to the game themselves (as was explained in Chapter 4.1).

Most of the time the fan translators have no such luck and have to obtain the texts

- 58 - somehow else. Therefore the first thing they do is browsing through the game’s directories and files and trying to find where the texts are located. Sometimes the texts might be available in easily editable text files, “but that’s a lucky chance” (Matyskewicz 2011). Most of the time the texts will be located in some of the many data files. In such a case, the translator needs a hex editor, a computer programme able to open data files and present them in a readable manner. The translator then looks through the seemingly nonsensical signs (the game’s code) until they locate a readable text that can be translated (fig. 8).

Now, one option is to translate the texts directly via the hex editor. This is very problematic, though, because the translated text needs to be of exactly the same length as the original – even a single character less or more would shift the rest of the game’s code and the game would not work. Fan translators used to dread this infamous obstacle. “Once I was translating a football game and needed to translate ’red card’,” says Poláček. The Czech equivalent of “red card” is “červená karta”, which is 5 characters longer, but there is no widely accepted abbreviation. In the end, Poláček had to write “čer. kar”, a mangled approximation. “I was so ashamed I didn’t even want to sign the translation with my own name,” he says.

This limitation had been solved still in the early days of fan translation by programmers who noticed that each block of text was usually preceded by a marker, a single encoded value which informed the programme about the length of the following text. By altering these markers, fans were suddenly able to write texts of any length, and the game would still work correctly. (Matyskiewicz 2011). Because manually counting each sentence and entering its length would be extremely time-consuming, the programmers then started creating special software tools which would ease the process. Such a tool finds the in-game texts, exports them to a text file for easy translation, then imports translated texts back to the data file and changes the markers accordingly. Proficient programmers can create even more sophisticated tools which are able to, for example, take non-linear game dialogues and show them in tree structures so that the translator can easily see which question leads to which answer. There is a catch, though – each game requires individual approach and its own tailor-made tools, which is the reason why skilled programmers have always been such a crucial part of the fan community.

- 59 - When games display texts on screen, they need to use fonts that are embedded in the game’s code. If the game was made by a foreign developer, it is very likely that these fonts will not be able to display Czech characters correctly – say, instead of “Ř”, the game might display “Ø” or just an empty space. A programmer is again needed to extract the font file from the game, at which point it just a simple matter of opening the file in an image editing software and redrawing the “Ø” to “Ř” and so on for each letter that shows wrong. Some experimenting might be needed to find out which characters or spaces in the original correspond to which in the Czech translation (see fig 9). In the worst cases, the original font does not allow redrawing of old characters, neither does it have enough free spaces for new characters, and the translation must be written without using Czech diacritical marks. While fans can opt for this solution easily, “you can’t afford this with a professional translation – people would stone you to death,” says Czarnowski. “If you encounter this problem (...) the best you can do is publish the game in English, and then release a free unofficial translation patch without diacritics.” But he is quick to add that fonts used to be an issue with older games, whereas new games often include international fonts by default, or at least use easily editable TTF files 54 instead of images.55

For a more detailed description of technical issues and their solutions in fan translation, see Muñoz Sánchez’s text on rom-hacking (Muñoz Sánchez 2009).

Once texts have been exported from the game’s files and fonts have been prepared, the translation itself may begin. This phase is a simple matter assuming that the whole game gets translated by a single translator, but it becomes increasingly complex with lengthier translations – volunteer translators must be found, texts must be divided, sent out and gathered back, the whole team needs to coordinate. Intrigued by the fans’ ability to tackle projects with dozens of volunteers, I asked how the whole process is usually organised.

54 TTF is the standard file format for computer fonts. Unlike image files (seen on fig 9), TTF files are easily editable and have virtually unlimited ‘space’ so one can always add new characters as needed. 55 The inclusion of Czarnowski’s professional perspective in this section hints that some of the aforementioned technical issues can be experienced even by professional teams. Indeed, professional companies face the exact same problems as fans, if they are translating a game without the support of the original developer. But because these problems have traditionally been a bigger obstacle for fans, I have chosen to explain them in this section.

- 60 - This first order of business is, of course, assembling a team. The team leader puts up a notice on various web pages and Internet forums, announcing the project and asking for volunteers. As e-mails with ‘applications’ start coming in, the leader sends out texts for test translation. “When I translated S.W.A.T., I needed help with the in-game encyclopedia. Back in those days, translating was a fashionable thing to do. Everyone volunteered,” says Pospíšil and describes the omnipresent inconvenience of each team leader, which is the insufficient skills of many volunteers: “But the overall quality was horrible. 50 percent of people translated it via PC translator. I had to fire those.” After translators had finally been selected, the team leader divides the texts between them and the translation begins. As the works progress, team members will meet on a chat, discussion board or an Internet forum to advise each other and discuss over terminology, names of places or characters etc.

Undeniably the most emotional part of fan translation – at least as described by my respondents – comes when the team leader tries to collect the supposedly translated texts from individual translators. “It’s an exhausting, ungrateful work,” says Matyskiewicz. Delays and excuses are to be expected. Some people will stop responding to e-mails, others will come up with explanations for not being able to provide the translation they have promised. “People are enthusiastic to start translating,” continues Matyskiewicz, “but some find out it’s too much for them. What’s worse – they will be ashamed to admit it and will pretend they are still working on it.” But some excuse will need to be provided sooner a later, and experienced translators pass there as anecdotes, debating which one is the best. The team leader of the Planescape: Torment fan translation, which at one point employed 46 volunteer translations, wrote in his post-release report:

“...many volunteers overestimated their linguistic abilities or the amount of free time they had. (...) They didn’t even know how to tell me that they quit. So I was receiving emails with variations of ‘I almost had it done but then my hard disk broke, I lost all my data, and I have no strength to begin anew’. There was one exception: ‘My five years old sister played on the computer and accidentally deleted the file’.” (Kordík 2002)

The broken hard disk excuse, I have been informed, is by far the most common one.

- 61 - Lose §R$VALUE$§W energy§W.\n Gain §G$VALUE$§W rare materials§W.\n Research of $TYPE$ finished. Expense: $PARAM$

Figure 10: Code tags in a game’s text (Victoria II). The red parts serve as instructions for the game’s code, which will interpret them and replace them by dynamic values or symbols in the game. They must not be changed.

“The worst was when it actually had happened to me,” smiles Pospíšil. “I was working on a translation with Yavie, and my laptop died. I had everything in there – my accounting... But when I wrote her about it, you know what she said? She said: ‘Classic’.”

Let us imagine, though, that the team in fact manages to translate all texts and collect them back together. Will there be any proofreading or testing? Rambousek explains the most common solution is to release the translation for public as it is, label it a ‘Beta version’ and ask other fans to report any mistakes they encounter while playing – fans will send text reports or images of the game screen, and the team leader will fix the mistakes, releasing gradually improved versions and ultimately the ‘final’ one. But the procedure varies, depending on a specific case or translator. Matyskiewicz, for example, would test his translations internally with a small group of friends before releasing them. Pospíšil translated a football game once, and asked visitors of an Internet page dedicated to football to correct his translation. And some of the larger projects even managed to find a dedicated proofreader – in the translation of Planescape: Torment, two persons had read and corrected all 3300 pages, fixing mistakes, fine-tuning style, making sure each character maintained a consistent tone (if their texts had been translated by several translators) and even sending texts for re-translation when needed. Only after this did the team release the polished translation. (Kordík 2002)

When the testing is done and all texts are ready to be released, the programmer takes all files that have been modified (which is a minor fraction of all the game’s files) and compresses them into a patch, a small file which players download from the Internet and apply to their installations of the game. The fan translation has been finished.

- 62 - To have a more specific idea of how the process of fan translation looks as a whole, I would like to illustrate it on the example of the newest large-scale project, the translation of Dragon Age II. I will be paraphrasing Tvrdý, the project leader whom I have interviewed.

When Tvrdý heard that Dragon Age II would not be released in Czech language, he took it as bad news. But having previous experience with the translation of smaller downloadable content for the prequel, Dragon Age: Origins, it occurred to him he might use his experience and contacts to kick-start the project, build the team and then hand the responsibilities over to someone else. It was not to be, he soon found himself leading a team of 50 people, and decided to see the project through to the end.

But first, he published an article on several gaming servers and fan portals (e.g. Tvrdý 2011b), in which he asked fans to volunteer for the massive translation. He tested their skills on a sample text, assembled the team and five days after the translation started, a half of the texts had already been done. This is where the first problems arose, since many texts were of a bad quality and needed to be reworked from scratch – it seemed some translators had asked their friends for help with the sample translation in order to slip in the team but could not produce good translations on their own, or they had simply put much effort into the initial sample but were unable to keep with it for long. There was a translator who claimed 10 years of experience in fansubbing but had to be fired anyway. After some rearrangements, ‘only’ 30 translators remained.

In the meantime, a programmer has tried to break in the game’s code to see what can be done. The team had already extracted the texts before, but the programmer was hoping to prepare an utility that would display dialogue trees. In the end, he did not manage to overcome the game’s encoding so the team would have to translate texts in the order in which they appear in the lockit and test for inconsistencies later in the game.

All the texts needed to be proofread, and Tvrdý tried to come up with an effective system of quality control. A first experiment to divide all translators to five large groups, in which they were supposed to read and correct each other’s translations, resulted in mass chaos. The progress was hampered

- 63 - by team members arguing about minor details. Tvrdý eventually scrapped the system and reformed all team members to pairs, taking care to match them to complement each other. The pairs get assigned a text and the deadline and it is up to them to divide it, translate it, and proofread each other’s text. Tvrdý checks their outputs to make sure they are acceptable. So far the system has been working well. The progress is about 4 times slower but the resulting texts are better.

There still is the issue of proofreading the initial batch of texts that have been translated on the project’s beginning and that are of dubious quality. When I interviewed him, Tvrdý was still looking for competent proofreaders willing to work for free, complaining they were hard to find. The project was slowly nearing completion, but team members were already losing their enthusiasm and some had quit. While the first half had been translated in days, the second one, and the proofreading and testing might take several more weeks before the fan translation is released.

All in all, translating games as a fan is very different than translating them as a professional. For all their specific complications and challenges, the fan translations do have their advantages. The lack of blind translation, hard deadlines and outside parties seems to have some allure even for professionals. Kopřiva organises fan projects in his spare time, experimenting with style and creative translation. Mondschein shares with me his idea of a dream holiday, when he would take a laptop somewhere with no connection to the outside word and translate a shortish game just by himself. Only Poláček said he wouldn’t go back to fan translations: “It is better this way... except when I must translate children’s games. I hate those. Like Two Horses. That was a nightmare.”

4.3 General Challenges for Video Game Translators

If there is a feature of video game translation that has already been well documented by translation scholars, it is the description of specific challenges a translator might encounter in the text of a video game. I will therefore limit this section to a simplified summary and provide links to the works of others where appropriate. Some of the following challenges have already been covered earlier and are listed for the sake of

- 64 - completeness.

The texts a translator will be required to work with may take many forms: there may be subtitles for cinematic sequences (akin to film translation), lengthy written dialogues (akin to direct speech in literary translation), encyclopedic passages or historical backgrounds (non-literary translation), game instructions directed to the player (instructional texts), labels of buttons, menus and other interface functions (akin to software localisation), technical settings of computer graphics, servers, etc. (technical translation), ambient noises and battle chatter56, sometimes even songs or poetry – a single game will combine several of these, and each game is of course a bit different. Outside the game itself, there are supplementary materials that also need to be translated – printed manuals, game boxes, advertisements, etc. A video game translator like no other must be able to accommodate to various styles and registries. See Bernal Merino (2007) for a detailed description of various text types in video games.

Translator work with lockits (see fig 6 and 7 on p. 47), in which the texts are formatted as document tiles (typical Excel spreadsheets) and ordered in a linear fashion. However, games themselves are hardly linear – they resemble hypertext57; the texts in games do not appear in the same linear order as in the lockits, and each player will experience the game’s events (and read the texts) differently, depending on where they click, what they do, where they go.

For example, let us imagine there is an in-game item called “code card”. It gets mentioned at various places in the game’s text – in a dialogue when

56 In strategic games where players take the roles of army commanders, their units will reply to their commands – these short sentences like “Consider it done!” or “Defending!” are called battle chatter. Their translation closely resembles film subtitling, although a film subtitler will rarely face the arduous task of coming up with 30 distinct variations of “Moving, sir!” 57 Hypertext is a concept used in media studies to refer to a series of texts in which there is no predetermined order of reading, and above that the texts are interconnected via a series of links. A typical example of hypertext is the Internet – while separate pages definitely have both a beginning and an end, we cannot tell in which way will the reader read the Internet as a whole; there is no start of the text, no end, no preferred order of reading. Comparing games to hypertext is a way of saying that the player is the one who determines the exact ‘reading order’ of the game’s events or written texts – the amount of ‘reading freedom’ of course depends on the specific game, but it is always present.

- 65 - someone talks about it; as a notice the player will find on the door while exploring the surroundings (“Code card required to open”); in the game’s menus as an instruction (“To finish this mission, find the code card and open the door”), etc. However, there may be no way to tell which of these occurrences will the player read first – will they first hear the dialogue, will they first explore the map and find the locked door, or will they first open the menu and read about their goals for this mission?

Trying to take these texts out of the game and present them to translators in a linear fashion leads to text fragmentation, as Bernal Merino (2007) terms it. One occurrence of the “code card” from our example might be placed on the very beginning of the linear text, along with all dialogues. The other occurrence might find it way to the middle. The last might be located on the very end of the file where all other menu texts dwell. Each will probably be assigned to a different translator, but they all have to be translated in a consistent fashion.

Another problem with text fragmentation arises in the testing phase – since there is no clear order of reading, the testers cannot simply read all in-games texts from beginning to the end. They can play the game from beginning to the end, but they will inevitably miss some of the texts. This problem is partly mitigated by having several testers, or by encouraging testers to play the game repeatedly to make sure they haven’t missed anything. With larger games, testers might coordinate to make sure each in-game text will be read by someone (“Play as this character.” “Visit this location”).

Software, and video games are no exception, sometime generate text on the fly with the help of variables, or tags (fig. 10). For example, the text “Research of $TYPE$ finished” will render in the game sometimes as “Research of spinning mule finished”, other times as “Research of flintlock rifles finished”. Developers writing in English might nor realise other languages use different rules of grammar, like inflection, and as a result, translators might have some trouble accommodating their language to the game’s structure. Translators can sometimes bypass these limitations by clever workarounds, but other times there will be no other choice but to use incorrect grammar: (for a detailed explanation and more examples, see Díaz Montón 2007)

Victoria II is a strategy game where the player can play any country on the

- 66 - world. The translator will find that for each country, the texts mention its name (e.g. Germany) and an adjective (e.g. German). The adjective is then used to generate texts like “German culture” (and, along the same lines, “French culture”, “British culture”, etc.), “German colonies” or “German- French War”. These would be correctly translated to Czech as “Německá kultura”, “Německé kolonie”, “Německo-francouzská válka”, respectively. The Czech translator needs several different adjectives, but the game forces him to choose one and accept incorrect grammar in the remaining occurrences.

Texts will sometimes be limited to a certain maximal length, to fit in the allocated space on the screen. Thanks to advances in technology or better skills of fan programmers, this limitation is nowadays less prevalent than in the past, and usually concerns only parts of the interface where there is not enough space on the screen. This is also more frequent in console games, since consoles use TVs for display which have smaller resolutions (and therefore smaller ‘screen space’) than PC monitors. A specific problem are Japanese games: Japanese alphabets take up considerably less place than text in Latin, and translators will find it difficult to fit their texts on the screen, unless the game has been prepared with Western languages in mind (Matyskiewicz 2011).

Last but not least, there is the issue of expert knowledge – game translators are regularly required to translate genres varying from football, through locomotive simulators to fantasy epics which refer to decades of fantasy literature. “It is obvious that translating a game based on ‘Sponge Bob’ has little to do with translating one based on the UEFA Champions League, World War II or ‘Spider-Man’”. (Bernal Merino 2007) However, this is hardly something that differentiates game translators from, say, film translators. What makes game translation unique in this sense is that atop of expert knowledge, there is something like ‘gaming culture’ that dictates the use of terminology, registry or specific idiosyncrasies. A phrase like “gain enough experience to go up a level” has a very specific meaning and only one acceptable translation. The translator, though, cannot find the solution in a dictionary (until such time when a ‘gaming dictionary’ gets written). The problem of gaming terminology can be mitigated if the translator gets the chance to play the game beforehand and get acquainted with it, but this is rarely an option for professional translators.

- 67 - For more on challenges faced by game translators, see e.g. Bernal Merino (2007), Díaz Montón (2007) or Dietz (2007).

4.4 Translating PC games vs. Console Games

The issue of gaming platforms has so far only been hinted at, but never explained. This section explains the implications of gaming platforms for translation.

The important thing to understand is that gaming consoles are nowhere near as flexible in their use as the PCs one usually uses in their office or at home. Consoles are dedicated gaming hardware connected to a TV or a monitor but have little use aside of playing games. Most importantly for translators, consoles do not allow to directly access, work with or edit files that are the building pieces of all software – a feature that is such a matter-of-course for personal computers that a PC user might not even realise it is there. What this means in practical terms is that it is impossible to modify or translate console games on consoles, and all work must be done on a PC. Professional companies translate console games like any other game – they edit texts, formatted typically Excel documents, and when the translation is done, the texts get sent to the game developer who uses their development tools to ‘put them’ in the game. Fan translators cannot rely on the help of developers and as a result, console translations are a rarity (at least in the Czech Republic) – I was able to find 11 Xbox translations58 and 2 translations for Playstation59, the rest of the 929 games listed in the fan translations dabatase at www.cestiny.cz were games for PC.

The translation of a console game requires a bit of programming knowledge and an illegal modification of the gaming hardware. The process was explained to me by a console translator who wished to remain unnamed. Translating the game is actually the easy part – the game’s data must be transferred to a PC, but then the process is the same as with any other fan translation. The hard part is getting the texts back to the game. Due to the fact that both the Internet access and working with files on gaming consoles is limited, it is impossible just to download a translation patch from the Internet and apply it to the game. Instead, after the game files have been transferred to a PC and

58 Centred around the web page at: http://www.czechxbox.info/ 59 Made by the small team called RK-Translations at: http://www.rk-translations.wz.cz/

- 68 - translated there, there are basically two ways of getting them back into the console – either a new disk is burned, containing the whole, but modified game; or just the modified data are copied onto the console’s hard disk (if it has one). However, neither of these are without trouble. Consoles are blocked from reading unofficial, burned disks, unless the hardware has been hacked with an illicit chip. And files contained on the console’s hard disk cannot be displayed and worked with, unless the hardware has been hacked with an illicit chip. Either way, the gaming console itself must be physically tinkered with, a practice forbidden by the console manufacturers. The shady character of the practice, and fact that it requires considerable technical proficiency, seems to be enough to prevent fans from translating console games on a regular basis.

A related practice that has gained wide acknowledgment in the English-speaking fan scene, even attracting the attention of translation scholars (e.g. Muñoz Sánchez 2009 or O’Hagan 2009), is ROM-hacking or translation hacking. It is a form of console translation that avoids the aforementioned issues by using emulators. Emulators are pieces of PC software that imitate or ‘emulate’ the inner working of a gaming console, thus enabling console games to be played directly on a PC. Thus, the game can be both modified and played on a PC, avoiding the illegal practice of equipping consoles with modification chips. Still, ROM-hacking and the use of emulators are legally dubious and the console manufacturers, seeing their products are being bypassed, proclaim them to be the “greatest threat to date to the intellectual property rights of video game developers” (Newman 2008, p. 160). So far, the fans have managed to avoid trouble by focusing their attention on older games that have not been officially published on the English-speaking market, and by adopting a moral code of sorts according to which they will cease the distribution of any translation if the game in question gets an official release (O’Hagan 2009). (More on legal issues in Chapter 5.1.) ROM-hacking is still practically nonexistent in the Czech Republic60.

4.5 Dubbing and Subtitles

Up until now, this thesis has avoided the topic of audio dubbing – this is because dubbing, another cost for the already tight budgets, it is a rare practice in video game

60 I have counted 2 translations done in this fashion – the very same 2 which I have listed above as Playstation translations.

- 69 - translation in the Czech Republic, done only on special occasions. One of these occasions are translations of children games, which need to be dubbed practically without exception (Czarnowski 2011). As for games for grown-ups, “it’s not bad to have dubbing, but it has little effect. The gamers are used to English,” elaborates Mondschein. Another ‘special occasion’ is when the game does not allow to show subtitles, for example in certain video sequences, which again forces the translation team to invest in dubbing. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is an example of game that did not allow subtitles in certain parts, so the Czech publisher had no other choice but to produce dubbed alternatives – but because the game was too wordy, only the parts where no subtitles were visible had been dubbed, and the team used the original Russian audio where subtitles could be used (Czarnowski 2011). But whatever the reason, the use of dubbing in Czech translation seems to be connected to, of all possible motivations, necessity.

Of the professionals I have interviewed, Mondschein and Czarnowski were the only ones with some experience with dubbing, although limited, therefore I am afraid I am unable to provide much meaningful insights on the topic. Dubbing is an interesting aspect of video game translation, but if there is to be a study focused on it, it will have to be done in countries where games dubbing is a more widespread practice. A more comprehensive look on dubbing in game translation has already been provided by Mangiron and O’Hagan (2006).

But if there is no Czech dubbing, there need to be at least Czech subtitles. A well-known rule amongst professional film subtitlers is that subtitles never mirror the original speech perfectly, instead they get condensed and shortened for easier reading. That is why I was surprised to find out that this rule is not observed amongst Czech game translators, both fan and professional, who simply translate them the same way as if they were translating any other text. “A game isn’t a film. The gamer can usually pause and play the subtitles as needed. A film won’t wait till you are finished. A game will,” sais Mondschein. Even in places where subtitles cannot be paused, translators do not shorten them. If there is not enough time to read a subtitle, it will be reported and fixed later – during the testing phase. This reasoning coincides to what I have heard from others. “It’s up to the testers,” said, for example, Tvrdý.

- 70 - But there might be another, perhaps subconscious reason to keep the subtitles as detailed as the source speech: to keep character. Video games cannot rely on an actor’s performance to transfer emotion or provide colour to what is being said – while life actors in films handle this more-or-less well, digital actors in computer games tend to be underperforming in comparison, and much of the time they are not even shown in a close-up. When we, above that, deprive the gamer of voice nuances by keeping the audio in a language they do not understand, another opportunity to convey detail is lost. In the end, the text remains the only way to imbue the message with character and emotion – but if we start cutting all of those “ahems”, “you-know-whats”, rhetorical flourishes and other ‘unnecessary’ words, much of the original character is lost.

4.6 When Things Get Done by People Outside the Industry

This chapter has shown the difficulties that await a translator who dares to trot into the field of video game translation. It is apparent that those who work on the translation should ideally be gamers themselves – this concerns not only translators and testers, even proofreaders. Mondschein was keen to inform me that their main proofreaders are passionate gamers. “They have the gaming terminology mastered, they know the games, they can edit texts and decide, for example, that ‘this character should not speak in this tone.’ (...) They are extremely important to us.” In a stark contrast, it has already been mentioned several times that some games get translated and proofread by generic agencies that have little knowledge of video games. It raises the question: how much does it show?

After CD Projekt became the first Czech publisher to produce their own translations, but before they hired Czarnowski as a localisation manager, the company had commissioned translators from Barrandov, the leading film studios in the Czech Republic, for a couple of translations. “It was tough. Barrandov had no experience with game translation and it showed,” says Czarnowski. The translations were reasonable for the most part, and obviously done by skilled translators, but the translators’ choices were often off and did not correspond well to a computer game. “I received the translated text and read it. There was a [creature called] ‘brownie’61... but then there was

61 The word Czarnowski used was ‘skřítek’, a Czech equivalent for a ‘brownie’ or ‘pixie’, a small creature measuring two feet tops.

- 71 - a mention that the ‘brownie’ measured more than two metres, which was weird.” The translator evidently noticed the height disparity himself, and tried to come up with clever workarounds to mask it, but it was still confusing. Bewildered, Czarnowski looked in the English original only to found out the creature was in fact a ‘troll’, a being well known amongst gamers to be huge, strong and brutish. “I think he knew only of those hairy trolls one hangs on their car’s rear-view mirror,” smiled Mondschein. The translations were full of similar hiccups – small, but enough to perplex a gamer.

Nowadays this is not an issue because all the Czech publishers have evolved from the fan community and are well-versed in game norms and standards. However, there is one exception – that of the game industry’s giant, EA Games. In late 2000s, this company decided to try their hands at Czech translations of video games, while bypassing the established translation teams. To my best understanding, their translations had been organised from their localisation centre in Germany, translated by Czech generic agencies, and tested in Madrid62. This created an altogether unique and peculiar translation environment. The most famous EA’s translation is that of the game Mass Effect 2, an action space opera taking place many years in the future. The word ‘credits’ has been translated as ‘autoři’ [authors], which is perfectly suitable if it occurs in the game’s main menu. But in Mass Effect 2, credits were also the universe’s standard currency and thanks to that, Czech space adventurers paid their groceries in authors. “This is, by the way, an excellent proof that nobody bothered to test the translation,”63 comments Poláček. „There was a mistake in every other sentence,” says Tvrdý who started a fan project to fix the official translation soon after its release.

Luckily, these examples are more an anecdotal evidence than a general trend. Practically all video games that receive a professional Czech translation pass through the hands of the local publishers who in turn employ gamers and former fans. Still, I find this section to be a nice illustration of what happens if you take a video game, a generic translation agency and combine them both with the practice of ‘blind translation’. 62 Allow me to cast away academic objectivity for a while and express my doubts about the availability of skilled Czech proofreaders and game testers in Madrid. 63 On the other hand, is is also a proof that generic agencies, unlike most Czech game translators, do use CAT tools. The “credits = autoři” instruction was most probably a part of the glossary provided by the producer. It was intended to be used for menus only, but propagated through the rest of the translation via generous use of translation memories.

- 72 - 5. Special Topics in Game Translation

5.1 Game Translation, Legality, Piracy

Are fan translations legal?

One question raises itself – with all that unsolicited hacking and modifying internal structures of video games, are fan translations legal? The answer is not a simple one, and could be best expressed as: “Yes, probably.”

There has been only one discussion amongst Czech fan translators about the legality of their endeavour, and that was back in 2001. It started with the chief of the Czech software police claiming that all tampering with the game’s original form, without the consent of the original author, is considered copyright infringement (Rožánek 2001), only to be dismissed by a lawyer who explained that as long as one modifies the copy present on their hard-disk, rather than the data contained on the original CD, it is “tricky, but legal” (Polách 2001). With this being the last point of the argument, and with no court case ever taking place, Czech fan translators abandoned the question of legality and carried on without any change. However, the discussion took place a decade ago and since that time there have been two major developments: the amendment of the Czech copyright law in 2006, and the massive expansion of the participatory culture phenomenon of modding, user modifications of games.

It must be understood that fan translations are separate from software piracy – translations get distributed in the form of patches that must be applied to an existing copy of the game. In this regard, they are virtually the same as mods, user modifications which add new missions, levels, items etc. to an existing game. Modding is a popular phenomenon world-wide, and dozens of Internet communities produce modifications for their favourite games, seemingly without any trouble. In fact, it has become a norm for game publishers to address modding in the EULAs64 of their games. Many producers

64 When one buys a video game, they technically buy just a license to use a piece of software. Each video game is therefore accompanied by an EULA, an end-user license agreement, which the user must agree with in order to be allowed to install and play the game. EULAs address different issues such as how the game may be used, what the user is allowed to do with their copy, what

- 73 - not only allow fan modifications (typically on the provision that they must be distributed free of charge), but also actively encourage them, knowing well that fan modifications can only prolong the popularity of their game and help build the brand name (O’Hagan 2009).

The problem with EULAs is that they are usually tailored for the US law and might not work well within other legal systems. In the case of the Czech Republic, if a license agreement clashes with rights guaranteed by law, the law takes precedence – and some parts of EULAs do clash with the law. The Czech copyright law from 2000, amended in 2005 and 2006, is sorely lacking when addressing software, and remains very vague. The key phrase seems to be article 66:65

“Copyright is not infringed by a lawful user of a computer program reproduction, if he: (...) b) otherwise reproduces, translates, adapts, arranges or alters in any other way a computer program if necessary for the utilisation of a lawfully acquired computer program in accordance with its purpose, unless otherwise agreed.” (emphasis mine)

Does translation constitute a modification necessary for the utilistation of the game? And is one allowed to distribute such a translation to others so they can utilise their copy of the game? If yes, this would mean that fans can translate a video game at their will, even if the EULA forbids any modifications. But there is no certainty, and without any court precedent, it is hard to be sure. One could at least hazard an educated guess: a publisher suing fan translators would find it very difficult to prove that a fan translation somehow harmed their product or revenues.

To be on the safe side, fan translators sometimes try to obtain an official permission of the game’s creator. “I, being the sort of a good guy I am, insisted on having a permission,” says Rambousek, speaking about his Baldur’s Gate project. “I eventually reached the very CEO of Black Isle [the game’s developer] who gave us a green light.” Examples like these are quite common, although Pospíšil shares a story about how he

responsibilities and liabilities does the game developer or producer have etc. 65 Act No. 121/2000, amended by Act No. 81/2005, Act No. 61/2006 and Act No. 216/2006. I am quoting the authorised English translation commissioned by the Ministry of Culture. See bibliography for link.

- 74 - asked for a permission to translate “a game” by EA, but was explicitly told not to. “I argued with them that it would serve as a good advertisement, but they said no. (...) No, I didn’t translate it in the end.” Pospíšil’s case was a rare one, though – generally the worst what can happen to fan translators asking for permission is being ignored. Of course, many fans do not bother to ask at all, hoping nobody would notice. And nobody does. “An English or American publisher couldn’t care less about about what happens somewhere in the Czech Republic,” says Zelycz.

When professional Czech versions started getting published, the situation got more complicated – if a fan translation were available aside of the professional one, it might motivate Czech gamers to buy the (cheaper) English version of the game and apply a free translation patch, instead of buying the professionally translated version. For this reason, fan translators and web portals entered an unwritten agreement with local publishers (with whom they often were personal friends), promising they would not translate a game if there was a professional translation available or being produced. Even if someone did produce their own ‘counter-translation’ to a professional one, the major community web pages would not publish it, explained Zelycz, which was generally enough to discourage such translations or prevent their wider circulation. Similar ethics have been described on the English-speaking fansubbing scene by Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez (2006): “One of the self-imposed rules adopted by fansub groups has always been to stop the free distribution on Internet of a particular anime once the programme or series has been licensed for commercial distribution.” By assuming ethical codes like these, fan translators have so far avoided any persecution.

Indeed, the symbiosis between game publishers and fans who produce free ‘content’ for their games is a widespread one. I this thesis, I have mentioned the cases of Fallout New Vegas or Mass Effect 2 where fans decided to fix a deficient professional translation – both of these projects enjoyed the official blessing of the game’s publisher and have eventually been released by the publisher as official patches. The support goes even further than just translations: large companies like EA have dedicated fan support programmes through which they e.g. sponsor fan web pages, give away some merchandise, provide prizes for Internet competitions etc. (Tvrdý 2011a). Fan translations are just a further drop in the sea of brand building.

- 75 - ‘Stolen’ translations

While translations themselves are no piracy, they can and regularly do become a target of piracy. The underlying cause is that professional translations, unlike fan ones, do not get freely released on the Internet, so if a Czech player wants to play the game in question in their native language, they have no other legal choice but to buy the local, translated version. Of course, there still is a considerable amount of gamers who download a pirated version, typically in English, and then try to obtain the translation in an illicit way. Pirates commonly extract translations from Czech versions and distribute them amongst themselves in the form of ‘translation patches’; or they can, of course, simply pirate the Czech version as a whole. Aside of outright pirates, there are players who have bought the game legally, albeit in English because it was cheaper (given that English publishers do not have to pay for translations), and who now try to obtain ‘stolen’ translations for their English-speaking games (Mondschein 2011). Be it as it may, this behaviour causes financial loss to the local publisher who invested in the translation but now sees it being distributed via pirate channels.

I have asked my respondents what do they do against translation piracy, or whether anything can in fact be done. Localisation managers report piracy to the company’s lawyers (Mondschein 2011, Poláček 2011) who do what they can – which is not much, generally just a cease-and-desist letter or two. “Our goal isn’t necessarily to bring [the pirates] to court. It’s usually enough if they stop uploading our games or translations,” said Mondschein. There have been court cases with game pirates who distributed complete games, but no court case with anyone who distributed ‘stolen’ translation patches only.

In the early days of professional translation, there used to be a curious piracy anti- measure in the form of dubbing. CD Projekt deliberately dubbed most of their early translations, because Czech gamers back then were still unused to buying legal software and would try to download pirated translations and apply them to their English versions. Dubbing added hundreds of megabytes to the otherwise small translation, which was a considerable hurdle in the time of slow dial-up connection that had to be paid per minute (Czarnowski 2011). Nowadays this practice has been obsoleted by broadband Internet.

- 76 - It might be surprising that piracy doesn’t limit itself to professional translations only. Strange as it sounds, even freely available fan translations get ‘stolen’. In other words, an enterprising individual will download a fan translation, delete all mentions of the original translator, replace them by their own name and then redistribute the translation as their own work (Tvrdý 2011a). It is a strange behaviour, and stories of it get passed around like anecdotes, but at times it can be enough to dishearten a fan translator who has put much effort into their work, only to see it ‘stolen’ by someone else. “!!! Majkee and Eagle – you are but common thieves !!!” wrote user “Raptor” (2002) on the community’s hub web page cestiny.cz upon noticing one of his translations was being passes around under someone else’s name.

5.2 Quality of the Translation

This thesis has so far avoided the question of translation quality. It is a question that wants to be asked – which are better, fan translations or the professional ones? What effect on the resulting quality do the various challenges, such as ‘blind translations’, have? How much better or worse are game translators to comparison to, say, literary translators? Etc. I am sorry to admit I cannot answer any of these questions – doing so would require an analytical research beyond the scope of this study, a research that would have to obtain and work with a representative corpus of translated game texts. It would be an interesting research, no doubt, but it remains for someone else to do.

What I have been able to do in my study is to speak with translators about various topics they perceive as important for quality, ask about their opinions, and present the findings here. The reader should keep in mind, though, that this chapter is based on interviews, theories and personal perception rather than measured data.

Terminology

The most noticeable part of a game translation is, arguably, the terminology the translators decide to use for in-game items, places, rule mechanics etc. It is possible to divide the usage of terminology in games into three types. The first type, which has been addresses earlier along with general challenges of video game translation (Chapter 4.3) are the uncodified, vernacular expressions used by the gaming community, which

- 77 - the translator should ideally have mastered themselves. If a translator gets these wrong, it might elicit a sneer or two, but this generally is not a problem since all the Czech translators tend to be gamers themselves.

Then there is technical terminology related to computers, consoles and things like display settings, server set-up and similar. These terms usually have their codified equivalents, either defined by industry standards (e.g. terms like “texture mapping” or “IP proxy” which are used in the field of IT), or provided in official manufacturer’s glossaries. Similarly, translators will encounter technical terms from other expert fields, like car engineering or military. What connects all of these is that they tend to have ‘official’ equivalents and can be learned.

The third terminological group is the one that cannot be learned. These are the terms where translators have full freedom to translate them as they want – fictional names of people and places, magical spells and items, fantastical fauna and flora, and many more. These are the terms that will evoke the greatest passions, as different players will have conflicting, but adamant ideas of that the ‘correct’ translation is. If there are any discussions about translation quality amongst fans, they are usually terminology related. Let me quote a sample from an Internet discussion about the translation of Fallout New Vegas:66

User Kein: “Who could possibly translate Khans as Chánové? I feel like throwing up...”

User Smejki: “You mean that Khans are not Chánové? Go back to the elementary.”

User Soth: “Khans, according to pictures and in-game descriptions are indeed the descendants of a Khan67. But I agree that names sound better in the original form...”

User Rajba: “I don’t know, but translating Khans as Chánové? Such a brutal Czechisation was not necessary, I think...”

66 The discussion is to be found under the article written by “Smejki” (2010), see bibliography. 67 Khan, the old Mongol title for a ruler, is indeed translated to Czech as “Chán”.

- 78 - Users “Soth” and “Rajba” are indications of a great rift amongst Czech gamers that has never been solved – often one camp of fans would argue that English terminology sounds “better”, whereas the other camp would hold that it’s stupid calling things by English names in a Czech translation. It might be just a matter of personal taste, but Kopřiva in an earlier interview (“Raggamuffin” 2009) came up with a different interpretation: according to him, some gamers dislike Czech terminology because it tends to be, simply put, uncreative and blunt: “The worst case is when people translate slavishly [meaning direct 1:1 transfer], the results are a mess.” He then gives an example from one of his fan projects, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: there was a creature called “clannfear”, which has traditionally been translated as “postrach klanů” [terror of clans]. After explaining that, apart from being a complete nonsense, it also sounds horribly, Kopřiva goes on to propose his solution, a “drtihlav” [headcrusher]. “If fits perfectly and it’s not crap (...) even if the translation is a bit loose.”

Arguments like these are to be expected in every fan translation that is being done by a larger team, and they often consume much time and energy. Professionals, who pursue the policy that “nothing must be left in English” (Mondschein 2011), must make these decisions too, knowing well that fans will judge their terminology with a critical eye. To make matters worse, games often tend to refer to other games, books etc., and the terminology should be consistent amongst all of these products.

Matters are relatively simple when the game does not refer to any other title. This means the translation team can choose any Czech equivalents they like, simply taking care that they sound ‘well’. Things get a bit more complex when translating a game that is a part of a longer series. As long as the previous title has been done by the same team or company, all is well, but issues start arising when the prequel has been translated by someone else. The problem does not lie in obtaining the previous team’s glossary – the Czech translation scene is relatively small, people tend to know each other personally, and even if not, it’s easy to obtain contacts. For example, the publishing company Playman has recently translated Might and Magic: Heroes VI, while all the five previous titles in the series have been translated by Czarnowski or hit mother company CD Projekt. But Czarnowski has simply sent his glossary to Playman, disregarding it was a competing publisher (Poláček 2011). The real problem arises when a team receives the predecessor’s glossary and finds out it is ‘bad’. What do the translators do

- 79 - when they dislike the previous glossary, but should keep to it anyway? “We stick to it,” says Czarnowski. “...unless it’s really a nonsense. But we always consider if the terminology is worth changing, because the players are already used to it.” Czarnowski’s answer seemed to be the generally accepted one, but it should be noted that there are also translators who deliberately violate the glossaries that have been used previously – as evidenced by the fan practice of ‘fixing’ translations they dislike.

Things get even more complicated when the game’s translation needs to be synchronised with films, books, comics, tabletop games etc. Mondschein explains that they regularly translate children games which accompany films – in such a case, the publisher needs to establish a contact with the film’s translator and ask them for cooperation. Sometimes it works, sometimes not and the game uses different terms than the film (Mondschein 2011). But perhaps the most complicated constellation of products and terminology one can conceive has occurred with Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II – Chaos Rising, which has already been mentioned in the introduction to chapter 2. Warhammer 40,000 is a popular franchise of computer games, books and tabletop games that has a wide following even in the Czech Republic. Czarnowski describes the difficulties his team was facing when coming up with a glossary for this title: there is no Czech translation of the tabletop game (which is the source of the franchise), the books conflict each other, and there are two opposed groups of Czech players who each use different terminology. Czarnowski tried to contact both, ask them for help, and come up with a compromise solution. “In the end, our terminology is often being used as the official one,” he smiles. It sounds like a happy end, but the claim is disputable – I have spoken to fans from both groups, and they both hated Czarnowski’s ‘official’ version. “From the point of view of a player of the board game... let’s say it’s full of nonsense,” says Tvrdý, from the first group. “The compromise in the PC game is crap,” says Matyskiewicz, from the second group. “Imagine, they have translated ‘Thunderhawk’ [an aircraft] as ‘Hromový jestřáb’ [thunder hawk]. Names shouldn’t be translated!”

Amongst game fans, terminology is a matter of passion.

It is, however, a matter of passion only if the game in question has, for some reason, achieved a cult status and a dedicated fan community has emerged around it,

- 80 - congregating on Internet portals and forums. This is not a status enjoyed by every game – in fact, far from it – and terminology of the less popular titles goes usually uncommented.

Domestication and Fidelity to the Original

Studies of the English-speaking fansubbing scene have found that fan translators may sometimes deliberately break the norms established by professional translators, because they have differing preferences. This has been shown on examples where fansubbers refuse to domesticate and instead deliberately keep their text close to the original, preserving cultural references, puns or some idiosyncrasies (Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez 2006). For example, fansubbers may keep the Japanese name suffixes, using forms like Momonari-kun even in English. Other times, fan will translate idioms literally and explain their meaning in a ‘footnote’, a separate subtitle on top of the screen68. O’Hagan (2009) has found similar practices on the game translation fan scene. While professionals usually argue that translations must not be obstructive and should feel as natural as possible, fans may disagree and even claim subtitles that do not keep the original idiosyncrasies are not a faithful translation. What we see here is a clash of the perspective of fans with the perspective of the publisher. “The latter puts priority on adapting the game to the target market requirements so that the product is received as if it is a locally produced game, not a translation.” (O’Hagan 2009)

Wondering if I might find similar clashes between the fan perspective and the professional perspective, I have asked local publishers how do they work with cultural references, jokes, idioms, etc. The answer was in all cases the same: convert them to Czech, try to achieve a naturally sounding text. “I hate American cultural references in a Czech translation. It draws attention to the fact that this is a translation,” said Mondschein. This confirmed O’Hagan’s observations about professionals. However, I have received the exact same answer from the fans too: they all thought domesticating is the way to go, and couldn’t think of an example where someone would deliberately keep original idiosyncrasies for reasons other than the lack of skill. Rambousek, who

68 The logic being that those who are interested can pause the film to read the footnote – since fansubs are typically viewed on a computer where this is possible – and those who are not can simply ignore the subtitle at the top of the screen.

- 81 - organises a local anime festival, confirmed the very same aesthetics even amongst fansubber: “an experienced translator [fansubber] will avoid the suffixes -san etc., and will instead express the level of formality somehow else (...) But beginners love suffixes and must use them at any cost.” In other words, if a Czech translator preserves visibly un-Czech formulations, they are seen as a beginner, even amongst fans. Special practices like footnotes in subtitles are missing as well. In terms of aesthetic feelings, Czech fan translators are virtually the same as professional translators.

Why do the perspectives of Czech fans differ from those of English fans? An explanation is hard to find. If anything, the widespread practice of using English as the intermediary language for some source languages, which may cause severe deviations from the original, should provide more reasons for fan dissatisfaction. As O’Hagan (2009) notes: “The situation can be frustrated by the fact that some official European language versions of Japanese games are derived from the games’ English versions, leaving more room for loss of the original intent.” (O’Hagan 2009) Devoted Czech fans should find it quite easy to discover shocking unfaithfulness of available translations to their favourite games or films, and could demand more fidelity. So why don’t they? The answer is, I think, fairly prosaic: ‘nobody’ speaks Japanese here, fans cannot compare the translation to the original, and fan translators cannot possibly keep original idiosyncrasies if they don’t use the original source. Any foreignisations like the Japanese suffixes mentioned by Rambousek have, in all likelihood, filtered to Czech translations through intermediary English fansubs.

Moreover, the very idea of fidelity can be seen as a very fleeting notion when speaking about video games which, unlike film or literature, tend to have no well-defined writers. Translators work with texts that have already been through many hands. Different parts of a single game get written by different designers, only to then be rewritten by other writers or editors. The resulting texts are anonymous and it is unclear whom should the translation be faithful to. Mangiron and O’Hagan (2006) think the idea of fidelity to the original text may even be replaced by a different sort of fidelity: “With games, fidelity takes a different meaning whereby the translator does not have to be loyal to the original text, but rather to the overall game experience.” According to this perspective, a translation is not faithful if it replicates the original words and meanings, rather if it offers the player the same enjoyment and experience as the original game – a

- 82 - perspective that favours not only domestication, but also creative and loose translations.

Style and Creative Translation

It is perhaps no surprise that video games are sometimes quite playful. While there are certainly many bland titles, it is not uncommon for the designers of a game to strive for good dialogues and memorable characters. Due to the nature of the medium, most characterisation in video games must still happen through voice or text – while game ‘actors’ have undeniably been getting more and more convincing, their acting performances are typically far from those of live actors. Being aware of this, game designers often invent characters who use colourful manners of speech, dialects, favourite phrases, but also puns or idioms. Translators are expected not only to transfer the meaning of this, but also keep the original ‘feeling’ of the text. “For this reason, translators are often given carte blanche to modify, adapt, and remove any cultural references, puns, as well as jokes that would not work in the target language. Localisers are given the liberty of including new cultural references, jokes, or any other element they deem necessary to preserve the game experience.” (Mangiron and O’Hagan 2006)

The computer game series Sam & Max Save the World, based on a popular comic about two animal private investigators, is well known for being riddled by puns and American cultural references. When Polish CD Projekt translated the game, “it was essential to replace all the references by Polish-cultured ones. They didn’t use their usual translators but hired an ‘artistic’ translator instead. He created a de facto new Polish world from the original game,” says Czarnowski. The Polish translation was allegedly very popular, but when the company faced the decision whether to translate another games of the Sam & Max fame, they decided not to: it was way too costly.

One may find similar examples of translator’s freedom even in Czech translation, especially in the fan ones. Fan translators will sometimes take considerable liberties, often changing the tone of the original version or even adding stylisation where there has not been any. Matyskiewicz says that when he was translating Arcanum, he encountered the problem of transferring ‘pirate speech’. While the English gamer would immediately associate phrases like “Avast, me mates!” with pirates, there is – of course

- 83 - – no comparable pirate speech in the land-bound Czech Republic69. Matyskiewicz wanted the pirates to sound distinct and decided to render their speech in chodština, a more-or-less dead dialect from south-western Bohemia which he had to reconstruct from dictionaries. It did not sound pirate-like, but it sounded old and strange enough. “About third of the gamers liked it, a third shrugged, a third felt like murdering me.” (Matyskiewicz 2011)

A yet more famous example is the way how fans tend to translate dwarves in fantasy games. Disregarding the English original, Czech dwarves will be usually made to speak in a heavy Moravian or Silesian accent70. This practice originates from Wiedźmin (The Witcher in English), a popular series of fantasy books and stories by Andrzej Sapkowski, which have been translated to Czech by Stanislav Komárek (Matyskiewicz 2011). Fantasy fans have been so entertained by Komárek’s translations that they accept them as the ‘canon’ for dwarves and attempt to recreate them even in unrelated games – Matyskiewicz, for example told me how he would read the books first, then mark down rules and guidelines of dwarven speech, and only then started translating. The practice is so popular that it will be observed with no regards to the original text – when I asked Kopřiva, who created the ‘Moravian’ dwarves in the fan translation of Drakensang: the Dark Eye, whether that was any corresponding dialect in the source texts, the response was: “No, [the original writers] have done a lazy job (...) It’s not in there, which is, from the point of view of a hardcore gamer, an idiocy. (...) Dwarves should speak a bit authentically, for me as a fan it is a must.” (Kopřiva 2011)

By stylising dwarves who in the original used no comparable dialect and ‘improving’ over their original mode of speech, the fans are inadvertently using a technique called linguistic variation as described by Molina and Hurtado (2002)71. Of all instances of ‘creative translation’ this is definitely the most the most acclaimed amongst game fans. This is because, in reality, the translators who are able to produce good linguistic variations are rare – all of the examples one might hear of will be attributed to a limited

69 And Internet pirates have not developed a distinct dialect so far. 70 The exact variant depends on a translator, though the canonical rendering is based on prajština, a unique Czecho-Polish dialect with distinct traces of German that originates from the time when there was still a strong population of Germans in Silesia. 71 Quoted in Mangiron and O’Hagan (2006)

- 84 - circle of translators. Kopřiva, for example, is well known for his tendency to ‘improve’ original texts in his translations, while Matyskiewicz became a sort of a fan celebrity for producing various memorable characters in his fan translations.

It should be understood that Kopřiva, Matyskiewicz and similar translators are by no way the norm. Less skilled fan translators may, and will, mistranslate idioms, miss cultural references and lose linguistic variation. The large-scale fan translation of Fallout 2 was the project that made Matyskiewicz’s characters famous, but it also contained severe errors by other translators like “we are running out of beer” translated as “utíkáme od piva” [we are running away from the beer]. The translation of Deus Ex mystified Czech gamers with phrases as “suit yourself” > “obleč se” [get dressed] or “that is cool” > “to je zima” [that is coldness] (“Divoška Jája”, undated). While I have not done an empiric study to judge the occurrence of linguistic variation or other sort of ‘creative translation’ between various fan translators, one cannot possibly expect fans who do not understand English well to produce good stylisation. Indeed, the popularity of the aforementioned ‘translator celebrities’ most probably stems from the fact that their translations overshadow the rest of the fan scene. They are so unique and remarkable that they can make a bad translation good – the translation of Fallout 2 is often mentioned as one of the best translation the Czech fan scene has produced, no doubt thanks to several characters brilliantly translated by Matyskiewicz. But when a different group of fans decided to compare Czech Fallout 2 to the original, they found that the translation – aside of Matyskiewicz’s parts – is in reality quite poor and full of blatant mistakes72.

The fan scene is usually very good at identifying talented translators and assigning specific in-game characters to them. To make sure a stylised character will speak consistently, fans need to extract all texts attributed to this character and send them to one translator only, in order to prevent text fragmentation. Rambousek describes how during the translation of the Baldur’s Gate series he encountered an unique character whom he wanted to speak distinctly – to make sure the character would be consistent across all games in the series, Rambousek took care to find all of the character’s text, which have been fragmented and spread throughout the text, and assign them to a

72 According to a Internet discussion at: http://forum.madbrahmin.cz/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=878 (various authors)

- 85 - ‘translator-writer’ who translated extremely slowly, but also very “nicely” (Rambousek 2011). But such care, I have been assured, is reserved for selected characters only. “The character must deserve it somehow,” sais Kopřiva. Fans, who have played the game before starting a translation, select the few ‘special’ characters who will receive extraordinary attention, and translate the rest of the game without such considerations. Sometimes, like in the case of Planescape: Torment (Kordík 2002), this work may be substituted by dedicated proofreaders who make sure that each character maintains a consistent tone even though they have been translated by several translators.

All of the aforementioned examples originate from the fan scene – playing with distinctive tones, slang or dialects is something most often associated with fan translators who are neither pressed by deadlines, nor limited by blind translation. That being said, I was surprised to find similar practices even amongst professionals. Mondschein explains that their company tries to avoid text fragmentation wherever possible, and strives to assign all texts of a single character to one translator only, in order to give the translators the freedom to stylise or ‘translate creatively’. “But we can only do this if the lockit is prepared well,” he says.. Kopřiva, the localisation manager who organises fan projects in his free time, even tries to transfer his fan experiences with ‘text improvement’ to his professional practice. “After so many years I’ve grown allergic to the crap the game developers usually produce. (...) Such things I refuse to translate exactly, because it would look like a fault of my translation – writing in games tends to be poor,” he says and gives an example: “Our translation of Sins of a Solar Empire has better texts in Czech than in English. (...) I have looked for information about future technologies and integrated them to the translation. (...) So whereas in English there is, say, a description of a laser, but poor and nonsensical, the Czech version has a description which actually reflects the real laser technology.”

Kopřiva is undeniably the extreme end of a scale, and there are others who deliberately do not follow the same ideas, both amongst fans and professionals. When I confronted Tvrdý, the leader of a recent fan project, with the example of Kopřiva’s Drakensang, he said: “My goal isn’t such quality like in Drakensang. That must have cost a huge amount of time and I see no point in doing it in such [a great] quality.” Coincidentally, the sequel to the game, Drakensang 2: The River of Time will be translated professionally by a competing company, the team lead by Poláček. When I asked him

- 86 - whether one can expect, for example, heavily accented Moravian dwarves, he responded: “No. There is no time for things like these, and what’s more, we don’t get to see the game before the translation is done. (...) The game has 1200 pages of text. Try to find a dwarf in it.” It is hard to condemn pragmatic stances like this one – ‘creative translations’ require a great deal of enthusiasm and some love for the game or character in question. Both are hard to come by for a professional who translates a game blindly without having much knowledge about it.

To summarise this section, there exists a tendency amongst some translators to play with the text and translate ‘creatively’, which – aside of terminology mentioned in the previous section – demonstrates in the use of dialects, distinct manners of speech or simply rich style. On the extreme end of the scale there are translators who deliberately ‘improve’ the texts by adding stylisation where there previously was none (but “should have been”) or even rewriting factual information to be ‘more correct’. On the other end of the scale there are those who see this as an optional ‘extra’, a nice thing to do but nothing that can be expected from translators working under constraints (mainly not enough time). But there is no general consensus as to what exactly is expected from a professional translator, or what should the minimal standard of their work be.

Quality

The question that remains unanswered is how do all of these phenomena contribute to the resulting quality of a translation, and whether there are any observable trends when comparing fan translations to the professional ones.

If I am to state my subjective perceptions then I would say that one may encounter specks of brilliancy amongst fan translations that are hard to find in the works of professionals – precisely because fans work with high personal enthusiasm and without time constraints. Mrazík’s infamous quote: “A messed up game deserves a messed up translation,”73 attracted a lot of fan ire back in its days because it contradicted the very reason why fans translate games – out of passion for a game they like and want to make as good as possible. But however hated the quote may be, it gets one thing right: the attention a game translation receives amongst fans is usually directly related to the

73 Introduced to me by Pospíšil.

- 87 - game’s perceived quality. All of the examples given of extraordinary effort during translation happen to be examples of popular games as well. One could expect relatively less effort in fan translations of mediocre games. Let us not have naïve ideas about the overall quality of fan translation aside of these unique examples – the translators generally are, after all, unskilled amateurs. My respondents were able to name many examples of fan translations full of mistakes and bad style.

In comparison, professional translations tend to have systems of quality assurance that fans could usually only dream of. Obligatory proofreading and testing74 ensure that translations will not be degraded by grammatical mistakes and obvious errors in meaning or style. Professional translations might lack examples that gamers would quote as strokes of translator’s geniality, but aside of these quality spikes their overall level should be better than that of fan translations.

Could, should – there is a lot of uncertainty in my statements, and definite conclusions cannot be drawn until an empiric study has been made. For example, one thing I have completely omitted (barring the occasional example) is the issue of mistranslations and errors in the transfer of meaning. It is one of the topics than can hardly be judged without a comprehensive corpus of texts and methodology fine-tailored for quality assessment. Even when the rare articles that are available on fan translation speak about translation quality, the conclusions are shrouded by mystery. For example, Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez (2006), when speaking about quality of fansubs, limit their argumentation to saying that “quality of the translations circulating on Internet is very often below par”. How did they come to this conclusion? By subjective perception, in all likelihood. A dedicated study on the quality of fan translation could bring some interesting findings.

5.3 User Feedback, Translators’ Motivations

Seeing that video game translators sometimes put considerable effort into their work to make the game sound as good as possible, one could ask the question: can the gamers appreciate it? Or the other way around: can the gaming community recognise bland translations and be critical to their downfalls?

74 Unless these get slacked or skipped altogether – see Chapter 4.1.

- 88 - My respondents admitted that user feedback is practically nonexistent, and if there is some, it is usually limited to a line saying that “it was good” or “you have ruined the game”. For example, Poláček told me their recent translation of Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood was judged positively by reviewers and pointed me to a couple of reviews. Reading them, though, the only criticisms of the translation were that it “deserves a praise. Throughout the game I’ve found only a couple of places where the subtitles were an eyesore,” (Smutný 2011) or “the subtitles have been localised to Czech and are something the Czech player can be grateful for.” (Stach 2011) It is ambiguous, nondescript and hardly valuable for the translators who have no way to tell what they did well and what wrong. And even these reviews were an exception, most reviewers do not reflect translations at all, says Poláček, and a short browsing through Czech game reviews confirms he is right. For Czech game journalists, translations might as well not be there – and they probably are not because reviewers could play the games in English75.

Mondschein explains that some user reactions can be found on Internet forums, but even these tend to be vague. “There is a rule: everyone loves to complain, hardly anyone praises, and nobody gives a specific example. The very best what gamers are capable of is crying: ‘The Check translation is horible’, spelling it wrong76” he says. Having browsed Internet forums for discussions on translations, I can ascertain that – if there are any – they indeed are vague, with the only specific criticism happening when someone complains about a term they dislike. The typical Internet rebuttal for lamentations like these? “Be grateful it’s Czech.”

There seems to be a widespread disdain amongst game translators for the appreciative ability of the gaming public. Fans and professionals alike feel like gamers cannot appreciate their efforts. Both Zelycz and Mondschein spoke about the supposedly bad translations by Mrazík, who has notwithstanding been loved by Czech gamers because a bad translation is still better than none. “Moreover, kids don’t care about bad grammar. They themselves write even worse,” added Zelycz. As I was speaking to Poláček about

75 I have sent e-mails to various Czech gaming magazines asking about whether, and how, they reflect translations in they reviews, or whether the reviewers play English versions. None responded. 76 I took a liberty to replace grammatical errors provided my Mondschein in Czech by some English ones.

- 89 - the botched translation of Mass Effect 2 – the one that used “authors” as a currency – he told me: “I have read Internet discussions. People said: ‘Sure, there’s authors. Who cares?’ I have the feeling they don’t mind. They are happy they can understand at all.” Seen in this light, the pragmatic decision to deliberately limit proofreading and testing to a bare minimum suddenly makes sense – the gamers will not notice (it is said).

Czarnowski explained to me how in the early days of CD Projekt, his supervisors had noticed that there were Czech translations that were considerably worse (and cheaper) than those done by Czarnowski’s team, without anyone visibly complaining. Czarnowski was hard pressed to cut his team’s costs, and needed to argue with his supervisors that it was not possible – or at least that he would not produce deliberately bad translations, because for him it was matter of pride. In the end, his vision to provide “the best translations on the Czech market” won thanks to the support he received from the Polish mother company: “They [the Polish] are gamers themselves. Games aren’t just goods for them, games are games. It’s something they are interested in.”

This brings us tidily back to where we began with this thesis – to participatory culture. Czech professional translators who have been recruited from the fan scene decided to pursue a career in translation simply because they wanted to somehow participate. What began as a fan enthusiasm carried over to their professional careers. For many of them, the job isn’t a matter of simply calculating the costs and benefits but also a matter of interest, and some put considerable effort to produce good translations, despite being convinced that the public will not appreciate, or even notice, it.

“Of course, many people don’t care. I don’t do it for them. I do it for the connoisseurs,” said Kopřiva.

- 90 - 6. Conclusion

For the past two decades, new media have been redefining the contexts and practices of our everyday lives and jobs. The onslaught of personal computers and the Internet has left no endeavour unaffected, and even translators have been accommodating to the new realities and changing the way they work. Software localisation has become a newly recognised type of translation, but even other translators are increasingly using the aid of new technologies, like tools for computer assisted translation. Internet has quickly become a tool without which translation would be almost unimaginable.

Going mostly unnoticed by translation scholars, a new phenomenon of amateur translation has been emerging. The Internet has enabled people not only to meet in an unprecedented scale and form communities of fans centred around common interests, but also to share their enthusiastic writings, songs, videos or even computer programmes that would otherwise remain unpublished. This newly emerged field of participatory culture has soon seen untrained fans producing translations of their favourite works that have slipped through the established distribution channels. Communities of the self-termed fansubbers now create subtitles for foreign films, but fan translation is not limited to films only. This thesis has focused on video game translation in the Czech Republic, which started as a purely amateur hobby but evolved into professional companies that have incorporated themselves into international video industry chains. We have examined in detail what video game translation means in terms of practical challenges and everyday tasks carried out by translators or localisation managers, and looked at the differences between fan translation and professional translation of games. The last chapter has described the prevailing concerns and ideas regarding translation quality and user appreciation, although much work remains to be done if we are to obtain any conclusive findings.

However, the world of translation is not a static one, especially not in the technologised and ever-changing context of video games. It is quite possible that a couple of years after this thesis will have been finished, video game translation will have quite a different form. One of the future possibilities lurks in the practice of translation crowdsourcing, where hosts of fan translators can be employed for quick and cheap

- 91 - translations of specific texts. Perhaps the most well-known example of translation crowdsourcing is the one of the social network Facebook, as described by O'Hagan (2009): in 2007, Facebook has allowed any of its users to translate short strings of texts from the English version of the network to their native language. Each text string was independently translated by several volunteers, and the community then voted for the best translation. The results of the voting have been made visible, thus motivating the ‘winners’ to translate even more. Using this simple method and thousands of unpaid volunteers, Facebook has already been translated to dozens of world languages.

Could crowdsourcing eventually conquer even video game translations? So far this development seems highly improbable. As we have seen in this thesis, video game translation is characterised by several features that would make crowdsourcing very unsuitable – first amongst them is the pressing need to have the game translated ‘blindly’ and quickly before its actual release date – in other words, before the hundreds of enthusiastic fans could even get their hands on it. Due to these limitations, game translations seem to be destined for small teams of experienced professionals or the occasional fan who picks up a game left out by the industry.

Still, there is one type of video game that could use translation crowdsourcing in a unprecedented scale – the massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). Games like these, which can only be played via the Internet with hundreds and thousands of likely minded players occupying the same game world, break the usual marketing conventions of standard games. For one, they are not sold in the traditional pay-for-a-copy manner, but instead sell subscriptions that allow users to connect to the game world for a limited time (typically a month), after which the subscription must be renewed. These games also cannot be ‘finished’ and, being based mostly on social interaction with other players, they offer months or years of entertainment – for all intents and purposes, MMO games resemble social networks like Facebook much more than they resemble standard games. Thanks to these facts they are free of the novelty-based sale cycle of standard games which urgently need to be sold in the first weeks after release (as explained in Chapter 2.1). MMO games normally get played – and paid for – even years after their official release. For example, World of Warcraft, released in 2004, had 12 paying subscribers by October 2010 (Blizzard Entertainment Inc 2010).

- 92 - The implication for video game translation is that MMO games do not need to be translated before their actual release – even if the translation took months, the long life cycle of a typical MMO would not mind the delay. MMO translations could therefore be easily crowdsourced to their users, which is an ideal knowledge base of people who know the game intimately and are able to understand the exact meaning of every single line of text. The game theoretician “Danc” (2008) has already noticed the huge potential of MMO games for crowdsourced translation, noting that fan translators could be further motivated by providing them with in-game rewards. Although so far there has been no MMO game using crowdsourcing for translation to foreign languages, this is something that has a great potential of happening, and something translation scholars should closely watch for. The future of video game translation remains uncertain and full of thrilling possibilities.

When all is said and done, both video game translation and fan translation in general are exciting, quickly developing phenomena worth of academic interest. It is my hope that this thesis has provided a comprehensive basic overview of video game translation for the interested scholar, and perhaps a new insight or two. The land still remains largely uncharted, and hopefully we will soon start seeing more studies dedicated to these new happenings on the translation scene.

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Zelycz, R. (2002b): 5.000 prodaných kusů Heroes of Might and Magic IV CZ, [Heroes of Might and Magic IV CZ sold 5.000 copies], retrieved April 18, 2011: http://cestiny.idnes.cz/zurnal/5-000-prodanych-kusu-heroes-of-might-and-magic- iv-cz-fuu-/clanek.A020902_78339_bw-cestiny-zurnal_bw.idn

Zelycz, R. (2011): Personal interview

Video Games Mentioned in the Text

The publisher information listed holds for the English-language version or, where there were several publishers, for the North American version.

Alpha Protocol (2010), developed by Obsidian Entertainment, published by Sega

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (2001), developed by Troika Games, published by Sierra Entertainment

Assassin’s Creed (2007), developed by Ubisoft Montreal, published by Ubisoft

Assassin’s Creed 2 (2009), developed by Ubisoft Montreal, published by Ubisoft

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (2010), developed by Ubisoft Montreal, published by

- 100 - Ubisoft

Baldur’s Gate I (1998), developed by BioWare, published by Interplay Entertainment

Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000), developed by BioWare, published by Interplay Entertainment

Civilization IV (2005): developed by Firaxis Games, published by 2K Games

Civilization V (2010): developed by Firaxis Games, published by 2K Games

Deus Ex (2000): developed by Ion Storm Inc., published by Eidos Interactive

Dragon Age: Origins (2009): developed by BioWare, published by EA

Dragon Age II (2011): developed by BioWare, published by EA

Drakensang: The Dark Eye (2008), developed by Radon Labs, published by Dtp Entertainment

Fallout (1997), developed by Black Isle Studios, published by Interplay Entertainment

Fallout 2 (1999), developed by Black Isle Studios, published by Interplay Entertainment

Fallout New Vegas (2010), developed by Obsidian Entertainment, published by Bethesda Softworks

Final Fantasy XIII (2009), developed by Square Enix, published by Square Enix

Gothic 2 (2009), developed by Piranha Bytes, published by JoWood Productions

Heroes of Might and Magic III (1999), developed by New World Computing, published by The 3DO Company

Heroes of Might and Magic IV (2002), developed by New World Computing, published by The 3DO Company

IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover (2011), developed by 1C: Maddox Games, published by Ubisoft

Mass Effect 2 (2010), developed by BioWare, published by Electronic Arts

Metro 2033 (2010), developed by 4A Games, published by THQ

Might and Magic: Heroes VI (2011), developed by Black Hole Entertainment, published

- 101 - by Ubisoft

Planescape: Torment (1999), developed by Black Isle Studios, published by Interplay Entertainment

Red Dead Redemption (2010), developed by Rockstar San Diego & Rockstar North, published by Rockstar Games

Sam & Max Save the World (2006), developed by Telltale Games, published by The Adventure Company

Sins of a Solar Empire (2008), developed by Ironclad Games, published by Stardock

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky (2008), developed by GSC Game World, published by Deep Silver

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (2007), developed by GSC Game World, published by THQ

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006), developed by Bethesda Game Studios, published by Bethesda Softworks

The Witcher (2007), developed by CD Projekt Red Studio, published by Atari, Inc

Trainz (2002), developed by Auran, published by Auran

Ufo: Enemy Unknown (1994), developed by Mythos Games, published by MicroProse

Victoria II (2010), developed by Paradox Interactive, published by Paradox Interactive

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II (2009), developed by Relic Entertainment, published by THQ

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II – Chaos Rising (2010), developed by Relic Entertainment, published by THQ

World of Warcraft (2004): developed by Blizzard Entertainment, published by Blizzard Entertainment

- 102 - Summary

Video game translation is a distinct style of translation that has so far been largely overlooked by scholars in translation studies, perhaps being seen just as a subset of software localisation. This thesis presents a summary of arguments and examples which show video game translation as a specific field with its own peculiar set of challenges and characteristics.

But aside of simply characterising video game translation, the goal of the thesis is to ‘zoom out’ of game texts, and instead focus closely on the communities and practices that accompany game translation. Video games have been translated not only by professionals, but also by untrained fans who have organised themselves to tackle huge translation projects, often numbering in thousands of pages of plain text. Drawing comparison to the concept of participatory culture, as introduced by the media theorist Henry Jenkins, the thesis describes the history of the Czech fan translation scene, where teams of fans have begun translating video games ‘just for fun’ during the 1990s, only to evolve into professional companies during the 2000s. Nowadays, the Czech Republic is a unique environment where both professional and fan translations of video games thrive. This has allowed the author to look for similarities and differences between fan and professional translation. A comprehensive description of the typical work-flow and organisational processes of both of these modes of translation are presented, as well as an overview of the motivations and aesthetics expressed by video game translators.

The thesis is based on personal interviews with the major figures of the Czech game translation scene, both fans and professionals. Thanks to this fact, it can afford to deal with detailed examples and differing personal perceptions. Although it focuses strictly on game translation as it is practiced in the Czech Republic, it is the author’s belief that the thesis provides worthwhile insights both into the study of video game translation and that of fan translation in general.

- 103 - Resumé

Videoherní překlad je specifický styl překladu, který dosud zůstával v očích translatologie převážně opomíjen, případně byl chápán jen jako podkategorie softwarové lokalizace. Tato práce předkládá souhrn argumentů a příkladů, jež vykreslují překlad videoher coby jedinečný obor mající svá osobitá úskalí a charakteristické rysy.

Nicméně cílem práce není poskytnout prostou charakteristiku videoherního překladu. Místo toho práce oddaluje pohled od samotného textu, jenž je překládán, a zaměřuje se na společenství, myšlenky a činnosti, které překlad doprovázejí. Videohry bývají překládány nejen profesionály, ale rovněž fanoušky bez formálního překladatelského vzdělání, kteří se sdružují do skupin a z osobního nadšení překládají hry, jež mají v přepočtu někdy i tisíce stran textu. Práce přirovnává fanouškovský překlad k fenoménu participativní kultury, jak jej popsal teoretik médií Henry Jenkins, a popisuje vývoj české fanouškovské scény od devadesátých let dvacátého století, kdy týmy nadšenců začaly „pro zábavu“ překládat první videohry, přes první desetiletí jednadvacátého století, během něhož se mnohé amatérské týmy profesionalizovaly, až po dnešní dobu. Nyní je Česká republika jedinečným prostředím, kde vzkvétá jak profesionální, tak fanouškovský překlad videoher, díky čemuž měl autor možnost srovnat oba tyto typy překladu a hledat mezi nimi podobnosti i rozdíly. Práce poskytuje detailní popis toho, jak jsou překládány počítačové hry jak amatéry, tak profesionály. Věnuje se organizačním stránkám překladu, řešení technických problémů i samotnému překladu textu. Mimoto jsou představeny motivace a estetické názory, které stojí za samotnými překlady.

Práce vychází z osobních rozhovorů s předními osobnostmi českého videoherního překladu, jak amatéry, tak i s profesionály. Díky tomu může zacházet do podrobných příkladů a věnovat se i rozdílným osobním názorům či myšlenkám. Přestože se práce zabývá výhradně prostředím České republiky, autor je přesvědčen, že může poskytnout cenné poznatky pro studium videoherního překladu obecně i amatérského překladu jako takového.

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