Delving into the Dungeon

I'll start this article by saying that translating is not easy. It can be enjoyable, but, in general, there are several head-scratching moments to it and a fair dose of stress, though this always varies from project to project.

My original intention was to make a brief post celebrating, but I realized I could try to bite a bit more; though hopefully not more than I can chew. How did I get here? What's The Dungeon Beneath? What challenges did it pose? How does a person my age buy a house? I hope that by the end of this article I have provided a decent answer for at least a few of those questions.

The Origin Story

Going way, way back in time, I was a kid deeply fascinated by games ever since I saw my dad playing Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Later on, my fascination would be nurtured by Pokemon games, Warcraft and Age of Empires, and eventually grow into a fully fledged hobby.

More recently, but still some years ago, I decided to study translation at the Facultad de Lenguas - UNC , not entirely sure of what I wanted to translate. Halfway through my studies (which lasted for almost 5 years), I decided localizing video games (among other types of texts) would be a nice way to mix two things I enjoyed, translating and playing video games, and earn a living.

During those days of intense cramming, I did a pseudo-professional localization for a small game called Mana Spark. Looking back, I was heavily under-experienced, but I like to believe that my work was still better than a community translation. That first-hand experience with game localization made me think that "this was something that I could do again and enjoy it".

A few years after Mana Spark, I got my degree and soon began working as a translator, this time for the sweet nectar of money.

We've gotten to my current level/stage/floor.

First Steps Down the Dungeon

Now, my journey through the world of freelance translation is fairly recent. That is to say, I do not always have a project at hand to work on. However, most of the time I don't care since I use that time "unemployed" to read, play, exercise or look for something that could further nurture my career as a professional translator.

That's how I got to The Dungeon Beneath (Disclaimer: we did not translate the Steam store site nor the content of the latest update). I had free time at hand and a deep desire to carry out a localization along with some friends and colleagues. I contacted Will and, after a brief exchange of emails, he liked the idea of letting a few professional translator localize his game in exchange for credits, one of the most sought-after mythical creatures that translators hunt (besides decent rates).

Look, personally, I hate the idea of translating pro-bono, but hear me out: I only encourage it if it complies with a number of conditions:

• The dev you are helping is indie, has a small team, and much more passion for video games and their project than money.
• There is no deadline, or at least it is such that you have no hurry whatsoever.
• You and everybody involved will be credited.
• You will enjoy translating it.
• The game may never be localized if you don't take the matter into your own hands.
• The dev is either completely cooperative or does not care how you do your work. With this I mean that you have absolute freedom to do the localization as you wish.

All of it applied for this pet project that I carried out with my friends. Well, most of it. There was already a Spanish translation half-cooked and abandoned, but, after taking a glance at it, I discarded it and decided to work from scratch on a Latam Spanish localization entirely of our own.

And off we were to translate with Milagros Saulo and Abril Santillán . Later, towards the beginning of the revision process, a wild Gino Ariel Orsini appeared to help cooking and made invaluable comments and suggestions.

The Dungeon

The Dungeon Beneath is a tactical rogue-lite autobattler. I'll break this down:

• It's tactical because it's as if you were playing chess, but with dozens of possible pieces with different features, skills, and effects. You set every piece of your board after thinking your strategy, and each piece will then "fight" the enemy board automatically (=autobattler). If you win after a certain number of rounds, you keep going down the dungeon.
• Rogue-lite means, in this case, that every game will end with you dying or, in some cases, winning. There is no in-between.

So, how did this whole project work? Well, first, like in the game, you have to think your moves, plan and try to think a little bit ahead before you translate your first syllable. The project had 1650 strings and 7550 words, and it was originally set up on Localizor, a web-based pseudo CAT tool designed for community translations, i.e. translations done by an amateur community that likes the game.

However, I consider that this platform is useful only if you have an army working without any coordination, and the quality of the result is not your biggest concern. Working with a team following specific guidelines and using Localizor or other similar platforms is highly incompatible and inefficient, so I asked Will to hand me an excel file with all the strings. Then, I set up a google spreadsheet that looked something like this to be able to work along my colleagues at the same time:

I know, you don't handle private projects through the all-mighty and omnipresent Google, but hey, I'm not translating a AAA project from 育碧 or the next game of Supergiant Games (though I'm open to offers). I'm a simple freelance translator. Paying the professional license of a CAT tool to carry out a free translation does not seem like a good bargain.

After the translation and several revisions were finally done, I sent the file to Will, who later uploaded the localization together with new content. Normally, a team of LQA (language quality assurance) testers would see how the localization fits in the game before launching an update with new content or an entirely new localization, but here we aren't playing a world championship: we are playing a friendly local match. Bear that in mind. The LQA was me playing the game after the update for a few hours, reporting a few bugs back to Will, and concluding "this looks nice".

Fighting Demons and Finding God

The Dungeon Beneath is a pretty minimalist game; very well polished, but rather simple anyway. Its charm and addictiveness stems from that same simple but well curated design. It deals with fantasy creatures and has a small cryptic lore surrounding it. Nonetheless, its text is absolutely representative of the linguistic field of video game localization. If I were to teach video game localization, I'd extract hundreds of examples and exercises from the strings of this game (with Will's permission, of course).

I would like to say that I'm not the most seasoned translator out there: I've only been working professionally for two years, besides studying for another five. I've come a long way and grown exponentially during my first year as a translator, specially because I marveled at every word I translated, but the last several months have been rather dull, with projects being close repetitions of things I have done before.

However, taking on The Dungeon Beneath together with some close colleagues has made me learn something... rather, I've achieved some "enlightenment" regarding a certain aspect of video game localization, an aspect a bit more holistic. Usually, this thing I'm talking about is referred to as the "tone" or "style" of the translation, but I can't help but think that it does not do any justice to everything that it encompasses.

You can't just translate literally word by word, nor can you translate the "sense" of every string (the two options of an axis that people often use to describe translations). Well, actually, you can translate those ways, but I think that just doing that won't create a masterpiece, a translation with that je ne sais quoi that makes you remember it for a long time after you played it.

Instead, you kind of have to look at everything from above, and do allow me to be a bit megalomaniac here for the sake of drama: like some kind of god. The graphic style, the characters, the weapons, the environment, whatever bit of enigmatic lore written on cryptic text, etc., seeing how all those things relate to each other lets you devise your own ultimate translation.

It's kind of incredible how much introspection can come from a simple pixel-art game, right? This whole concept is something that I already knew, but that only now I have grasped better and assembled into the core of my translator soul.

Of course, this level of abstraction is hard to achieve in most projects if you are just one gear on a colossal machinery of translation, but achieving it once at least is helpful to become a better translator, I believe.

I did find one technical feature of this project particularly challenging: gender. In contrast with Spanish, English is a very gender-neutral language. This often comes as an issue when the game refers to the "player" of the game, who you cannot presuppose will always identify with "he" or "she". This time, this issue arose mainly from the monsters and units of the game, which had an specific gender most of the time.

Let's see a simple example and take the unit "Arcane Archer". English has no issue with it, it's "the arcane archer", but Spanish has to make a choice, is it "la arquera arcana" (fem.) or "el arquero arcano" (masc.)? Spanish has many resources and methods to tackle these kind of issues and achieve gender neutrality.

Normally, you have to find and choose one workaround that fits, but this time, with this particular issue, the solution was a bit more straightforward: I'd play the game or send a query to the dev, Will. Clear communication with the developers is always the most foolproof way to solve anything. This time, however, we could simply check the game's compendium:

We solved this kind of gender issues with the mighty power of context, an often lacking resource in video game localization, but gender is an extremely pervasive feature of Spanish and something that one always has to be looking out for. Asking the devs is not always an option available in the menu since not all issues are related to context; sometimes the challenge stems from strictly grammatical issues that would probably bore anyone but other translators.

Breathing Fresh Air

The job is done. I'm finally out of the dungeon.

Maybe future chroniclers will wonder: "Did he enjoy something in particular of this journey through an abyssal dungeon?" The answer would, perhaps, puzzle them. I enjoyed all of it. I localized it leisurely together with some friends, and only for a few minutes or hours every now and then. When you work out of interest and without hurry, enjoying a translation is easy (more so if you are paid for it). That said, I've always loved naming stuff, be them characters or items, and there was much of that. Specially those names that give you a bit of creative freedom to create something that sounds epic, like "Ayma, Lightning Caller".

Alternatively, chroniclers could try to figure if I regretted anything after carrying out such an endeavor with great courage and resolution along with my brethren in arms, and I do. I always do for a bit when I look back on past projects. "I could have translated this sentence this other way", "I made a silly mistake here", "this joke could have been better", "if only I had bought Nvidia stock twenty years ago": these are all thoughts that are hard to avoid if I revisit an old translation. Even now, to write this article, I took a look at the spreadsheet and my notes of TDB, and noticed a few things that could certainly be "better". Maybe I'm not entirely out of the dungeon yet. Perhaps I'll always take a bit of the dungeon with me, wherever I go.

Wow (read that word like Ryan Reynolds). I began writing this article doubting myself, but that last line was certainly something. Though it seemed like a clever and dramatic closure, it's not how I wish to conclude this.

In brief, the game is great, the localization process was fun and enriching, and I still haven't got a clue as to how does a person buy a house in this day and age. It could be that it's more affordable to live in a dungeon.