For translation of hairstyles and beards for Witcher's DLC one could use formal hairdressing education. Can Geralt have his hair bind in a way to create "divoký ohon" ? (untranslateable joke referencing the game's name, Divoký Hon (Wild Hunt) Click to expand...

Someone here translated "Damn" as "Do prkénka dubového!". I did not know this game has preschool edition. Click to expand...

Translation of a game you are looking forward to has great disadvantage of brutal and unavoidable spoilers. Mere testing such game is better. A bit. Click to expand...

I translated the epilogue to Witcher 3. The world has no secrets before me anymore. Click to expand...

In the Witcher 3 there are so many songs, poems, Sayings, sonnets, balads and rhymes that one might get a poetic appendicitis from it. (untranslateable joke) Click to expand...

After translating all these herbs and alchemical ingredients for TW3 I feel like "bába kořenářka". Better not cook anything for a few days.



Dwarfen language is nice, but for trolls we invented their own pseudogrammar. English translator is saying he will learn from us for next time. Click to expand...

Would have been useful for TW3 translation to study old sailor shanties of the last few centuries..



I am sad that some old czech words have been forgotten, despite being so beautiful sounding. They will live again in Witcher 3. Click to expand...

Niagara Falls have frozen and I read that as "Nilfgaardian Falls". I could really use a break from all this Witcher stuff.



Three in the morning and I am asking myself, is this supposedly last batch of few thousand words really the last one, or is it going be as always. Click to expand...

There are even such plot twists in Witcher 3 that were written, translated, voice acted, finished...and cut. Will serve as a great drunken stories though. Click to expand...

Challenge accepted.This is extremely rough translation, I am not good at english and I hope Mr. eníek who wrote it (and is head translator of TW 2/3) never sees it. All credit goes to him and eurogamer.cz who published it.I included the tweets that eníek wrote during his work on TW3, they were part of the article. They are in quotes.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The foundation for Witcher 3's localization was laid down in january 2014, when we started putting together an extensive terminology lexicon for the game and when we received a first batch of quests for translation.These batches then arrived throughout the year and the amount of texts in the base game reached to around 2100 pages, which is twice as much than was the case with Witcher 2.The localization of videogames entails certain specifics compared to other media and is one of the most difficult types of translation work available. Often times we are envious of book translators, who get fully finished original, can get to know it intimately, prepare their notes for language characterization of various characters and then proceed translating nicely chapter after chapter.In videogames, we are fully at the mercy of developers and their will to prepare good materials with enough context. And sometimes we are out of luck.Not only do we not have the game available to check how the texts will look, but often these texts are not logically sorted, arrive for translation out of order and often do not contain any additional information that could help us "hit" the proper meaning right away. Imagine it as a translation of a movie you haven't seen yet: you do not get any sound nor picture, only dialogues that are out of order and without context, so you do not even have any idea who says what how and to whom. This is how the first messy basics of every localization begin.In the Witcher's case though, developers attempted to give us enough context to make our work easier. Plenty of companies could learn a lot from CD Projekt in this regard. (translator's note: and many other regards)If you as a translator work on a game you are looking forward to, it is a double-edged sword. You may get to it as a first person in the country, but you have to come to terms with the fact that it will be completely, brutally and irreversibly spoiled, so you may not even want to play it anymore.So the translators and correctors not only know the whole storyline of the Witcher 3 for more than a year, but they also know about every game mechanism, about all the monsters and characters, but also about all the branches of even the smallest quests. Even if the complete image of the game gets put together as a puzzle during the work, spoilers are daily bread for every translator.Because the Witcher games are part of such enormous world with rich history and backstory, there are plenty of terms from the whole book saga and previous games that we need to adhere to and keep during translation. For this purpose, we created at the start of the localization a terminological table, which already contained around 1200 objects and during the translation we added several hundreds more. This then served as a "witcher dictionary" of the sort, with up to date terminology. Translators debated in it how to translate every new term.For example, whenever we encountered some plant (which are plentiful in TW3), the process of translation was: Is this plant real, or fictious ? If real, we will use real existing czech name (nice czech names get preference ahead of latin ones). If it is fictious, we ask ourselves: Is this plant present in the books or previous games ? If it is, we use the already existing translation to stay consistent.If we find out that this is completely fictious plant that is also new for the game, we can create our own name for it. In this case we look at most understandable part of the full meaning basis of the original (polish/english) name and combine it with appropriate czech suffix, which is how plants and herbs are traditionally named in czech language. Sometimes my graduation from Biology was useful during this process. We played nicely with names of villages around Novigrad's and Velen's countrysides. Only the Skellige Isles have their terminology left alone, since their inspiration are nordics/vikings and czech language is not appropriate for these.The Witcher is very specific in one respect compared to other AAA games - unlike them, which are usually built on germanic language base, it is set in a slavic environment/world. And because czech falls into the same language family, it would be a shame to waste the opportunity. Czechifying given names is sometimes flaky (although Skyrim, for example, handled it pretty well some years back), but Witcher was very inviting in that respect.I don't think there has ever been a game where czech names for villages, characters, monsters and herbs and other terms sounded as natural as they do in Witcher 3.Same attention was given to stylistic and lexicologic aspects. We strived for the cleanest use of czech possible, since modern expressions and "czenglish" words do not fit the pseudomiddle ages of the game. Experts such as mages and sorceresses of course speak scholarly as in books, but you will not hear complicated / expert expressions from simple villagers - and if you do, they will be in a funnily garbled form.Similar stylistic playground was presented by various books, diaries, boards, letters and journals that you can find while adventuring. Some are written in elder language, others are written by a villager or a bandit not used to written word, and the translation has to reflects it all. We cannot expect uneducated peasant to have similarly refined writing style (and grammar knowledge) as a nobleman from Novigrad.Sometimes we digged deep into the bowels of czech language and brought back expressions that are not used anymore, but fit the world of the Witcher perfectly. We did this to such an extent that sometimes it feels like we played with the texts even more than the original. Huge thanks goes to a corrector, who was very careful about correct song verses and appropriate text rhytms for all the songs, poems, sonnets, etc.It's own chapter is a well-liked dwarven dialect, which was handled by the same expert who did the first two games.Eventhough it may not seem that way, translating all the texts in the game is just the beginning of localization works. To be continued in the next article.