Character/Location names in other languages.

[LNH2304]

As you can see, Reborn is reaching the end, and personally, I feel the need to bring it to a wider audience by translating it into a multitude of languages.

 

However, there are so many characters as well as locations that needs to have their name changed, and we have to make sure that they're not so cringy in certain languages... So I would like to listen to your opinions about this.

 

Any constructive criticism is welcomed.

[IntSys]

Well, as you already know, translation is a very broad area covering multiple languages, some of which you might not have learned before. Every language would have its own case of translation issues, and so I feel like discussing translation "in general" here doesn't really accomplish anything.

 

Like, for example, I could help out with translating the game into Chinese, but if I were to discuss the details of the Chinese translation here, I doubt if anyone would even be able to reply to me here, seeing that most people here are from the western world.

Though if you happen to know Chinese as well, I'd be more than glad to discuss the details with name translations. Personally I find this to be the easiest part.

[Swampellow]

Forgive me if I’m wrong but, names themselves wouldn’t be the issue with translation correct? While literally every other part of the game would need to be translated, the names of locations (as in the name part, not the City/Town part) and characters would not need to be translated technically. 

[IntSys]

For Chinese, I'd lean toward following official translation trends and paraphrase location names' meaning into Chinese instead of just transliterating. It'll also help with translating ingame dialogues too since a few of them make reference to the meaning of these names.

 

Though this is probably not an issue for Germanic and Romance languages.

[LNH2304]

1 hour ago, IntSys said:

Well, as you already know, translation is a very broad area covering multiple languages, some of which you might not have learned before. Every language would have its own case of translation issues, and so I feel like discussing translation "in general" here doesn't really accomplish anything.

 

Like, for example, I could help out with translating the game into Chinese, but if I were to discuss the details of the Chinese translation here, I doubt if anyone would even be able to reply to me here, seeing that most people here are from the western world.

Though if you happen to know Chinese as well, I'd be more than glad to discuss the details with name translations. Personally I find this to be the easiest part.

 

Maybe when working on translations, we could create several translation subgroups that represent languages, in where members are native speakers of those languages? 

 

And sorry, I don't speak Chinese at all, althrough I speak Vietnamese natively, in addition to English (secondary) and Japanese (tertiary).

 

I had quite an amount of experience working with the latter two due to my career as a content translator for mobile games, and I'm confident that I can propose some names in Japanese for Reborn people and locations. Although discussions with Japanese Reborn fans (if we even have any) are required to ensure the best quality possible.

 

Sadly, my mother tongue, Vietnamese is a no-no here as Pokémon had always remained unpopular in Vietnam. And never will the franchise become widely known here due to the constant extreme popularity of PC gaming and poor exposure to Pokémon media (including the anime and mangas), which in turn were reinforced by the recent rising of the mobile gaming market. Consequently, very few fellow Vietnamese Pokémon fans even know about, play, or make Pokémon fangames.

[BlueberryRum]

If there is a need for a Spanish translation I could help with both Spain Spanish and South-American Spanish (Pokémon is quite popular in South-America)

[Samtale]

11 hours ago, LNH2304 said:

 

Maybe when working on translations, we could create several translation subgroups that represent languages, in where members are native speakers of those languages? 

Perhaps the club feature on these forums would be good for such a thing, its a place people could collaborate on certain languages with each language having its own topic. The topics would make it easy to keep each language organized, though that being said don't know if anyone still uses the clubs I haven't seen them be very active.

[TheTGU]

So, since I'm working on a German translation, I guess I'll also say something on that topic.

I personally don't think names and places should be "translated".

 

I see one major problem when it comes to translating Reborn in a team: How?

The vast majority of translating is editing a single .txt file. The only way I can see that being possible in a team is by using something like Word Online.

Though that would mean play-testing can't be done quite as often.

Anyways, there's also the .png files that contain text, which would require someone who can work with spriting programs (which wouldn't require knowledge of the language, since someone could just tell that person what the translation should be) and there are some issues with the way essentials' translation feature works or... Well, doesn't.

There are some lines which in order to be translated properly, would require changing the script.

But changing the script comes with a lot of problems, so the better approach would be making a mod.

That would require somebody with knowledge about the ruby programming language and the game's code. Though that person also wouldn't need to speak the language it would be translated into.

And then there's what I call "Pokémon Termonology"...

This contains everything with a canon translation like Pokédex entries, menu lines, Items, Item descriptions, Pokémon names and much more.

Translating that manually would require someone to look everything up, which would require unrealistic amounts of time.

Another solution would be writing a program to do the work, which would require... Well, I'm not doing that a 3rd time.

 

 

So, now I wrote way more than I originally planned to...

 

[Egzample]

On 3/24/2019 at 4:56 PM, LNH2304 said:

Sadly, my mother tongue, Vietnamese is a no-no here as Pokémon had always remained unpopular in Vietnam.

I'm planning to make Polish version of Reborn, when Pokemon had its popularity peak at the turn of 90s/00s, and then it dropped to be (at best) moderately popular until now. Tough I heard rumours Nintendo plans to make a bigger come back on a local market, I don't care if there is maybe ten other Polish speaking Reborn players here or hundreds. And who knows, maybe your translation will help to make it more popular.

 

To be honest, I'd stick to official translation trends and lines where it applies, and go freestyle where it feels like enhancing the atmosphere - in my native I observe trends are changing, publishers tend to fully localize games, including names, but I don't think it's a good idea (it looks awful imo, when I compare 2003 Warcraft 3 localization to more recent Hearthstone's), and thus I'd stay with Shelly, Noel, Charlotte, but I see some interesting possibilities with Shade, Florinia or Titania. Also, I rather wouldn't touch mons' names, due to amount of work and research that would be needed to come up with something that sounds cool, has a reference to original name and mon's backstory, etc. etc.

[LNH2304]

4 hours ago, Egzample said:

I'm planning to make Polish version of Reborn, when Pokemon had its popularity peak at the turn of 90s/00s, and then it dropped to be (at best) moderately popular until now. Tough I heard rumours Nintendo plans to make a bigger come back on a local market, I don't care if there is maybe ten other Polish speaking Reborn players here or hundreds. And who knows, maybe your translation will help to make it more popular.

 

To be honest, I'd stick to official translation trends and lines where it applies, and go freestyle where it feels like enhancing the atmosphere - in my native I observe trends are changing, publishers tend to fully localize games, including names, but I don't think it's a good idea (it looks awful imo, when I compare 2003 Warcraft 3 localization to more recent Hearthstone's), and thus I'd stay with Shelly, Noel, Charlotte, but I see some interesting possibilities with Shade, Florinia or Titania. Also, I rather wouldn't touch mons' names, due to amount of work and research that would be needed to come up with something that sounds cool, has a reference to original name and mon's backstory, etc. etc.

 

Thanks for your opinions. Unpopular Pokémon may be in my home country, one should work, and not only dream and hope for a better future. (Through gathering a group of fans who are determined and have a good grasp of English in here might be quite a herculean task...)

 

In Vietnam, the official, locally published Pokémon Adventures manga use the trademarked romaji names from the original Japanese for Pokémon, people, and locations (except for moves and Abilities, which were translated instead) - but most Pokéfans much prefer English names instead due to familiarity and ease to remember compared to Japanese, therefore causing some discontent upon announcement. We also had dubs for the anime, and their naming conventions are similar to that of the manga. Noticeably, character and place names from those aforementioned media are not translated to Vietnamese as the results would turn out to be highly cringy. Therefore I guess we have to be faithful to the names in Reborn should one day, we begin working on the (almost) impossible...

 

As a side note, aside from MMOs, there were no official localizations of offline games of any kind in Vietnam due to us being a highly niche and underdeveloped market, scaring away potential investors in the process. Localizations (or more accurately, direct translations of in-game text) for some more well-known titles such as Grand Theft Auto V are mainly done by fans, for fans only. For many generations, Pokémon games (in English of course) are sold in specialty shops around the nation along with consoles for the average dedicated gamer - and they are all imported through the gray market as Nintendo has zero presence in Vietnam.

[Waynolt]

On 3/25/2019 at 1:25 PM, TheTGU said:

I see one major problem when it comes to translating Reborn in a team: How?

The vast majority of translating is editing a single .txt file. The only way I can see that being possible in a team is by using something like Word Online.

Though that would mean play-testing can't be done quite as often.

There is another possibility, now that you mention it... the Translation Manager could be given the option to import partial translations into existing ones, thus merging them.

 

This way a team could divide the workload by lines (you translate lines 0 to 1000, another one lines 1000 to 2000, etc), and then all the results could be merged into a single final translation file.

(I've added this possibility to the Translation Manager v1.05; selecting Import->Merge will let you copy over some translated lines from another translation file)
(The "start" and "end" lines it asks for are the numbers in the third column of the translation tab - it will copy those 2 + any inbetween)