Songs of Sennaara 2023 language puzzle game from Rundisc, uses fictional languages but is developed in French and English. “From the very beginning, we chose vocabulary, riddles and puzzles to fit both languages,” original director Julien Moya told Polygon, referring to how players who speak these languages can approach the game’s translation puzzles. However, many other languages have a different structure, which means localization Songs of Sennaar it required a careful process.
“I know that later things were much more difficult for some languages, such as Chinese, which have very different structures and rules and required a lot of adaptation,” Moya said.
Naturally, this became a challenge for translators involved in translating a game about translating different languages. Although Rundisc handled English and French internally, it turned to narrative localization studio Riotloc for lend a hand in expanding the game’s reach. The translators of the Russian, Portuguese, Japanese and Spanish versions of the game spoke to Polygon via email about the translation process of “the translator’s mindset,” as Russian translator Anna Kiseleva put it. Songs of Sennaar.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Polygon: What’s it like localizing a game in a made-up language? I’m sure it’s both intriguing and challenging.
Anna Kiseleva, translator from Russian: Strictly speaking, v Songs of Sennaarthe source language is still English. There are four artificial hieroglyphic languages, but the goal of the game is to translate these dictionaries into their own language. This game is more about the translator’s way of thinking than about invented languages. The authors spoke English, so they created an English translation process, and if your player speaks another language, you’ll need to carefully adapt the process with this recent language in mind. In my case it is Russian.
Fortunately, we are translators ourselves, so we understand this process well and that’s what we do. First you decode the words. Then you put the words together. And then you try to make sense of that combination. These three stages are implemented in the game itself: first you see a sequence of hieroglyphs, then you start to understand some of them and they are shown as words. And finally, when you decode all the words in a sentence, things get even more fascinating.
ME ME SEEK / WANT GO / PASS UP / GREAT means “We want to go up”.
About the ME ME part: To give the player something to think about, the developers incorporated some oddities into the invented languages. For example, the Follower language pluralizes words by repeating a single symbol (WE = ME, ME), while Warriors etc. have a separate symbol that means “plural”.
Bards apply “you” as a synonym for “I” and have the word order reversed:
BRAT PLURAL YOU PLURAL BE means “Brothers, we are.”
To draw a little more attention to this step and the fact that the translator has to create a sentence from the words and not just mix them together like salad ingredients, I went a step further and did two translations for the strings using singularities, showing them to the player after full decoding . It looks like this (in Russian, of course):
Camila Fernandes, Portuguese translator: Certainly yes! While working on the translation, we did not have access to all the characters used in each language for which it was created Songs of Sennaarbut we dealt with concepts transcribed into English. So for the Brazilian-Portuguese localization team, it was the EN-PT translation. The main challenge was to understand the context and choose the right words in Portuguese so that no message would lose its meaning. Fortunately, the client team was available and provided all the information we requested. During this process, the story unfolded through words, sentences, and half-sentences, which made me look forward to the game being released in my language so I could experience it as if I hadn’t helped translate it (LOL).
Iori Honda, Japanese translator: Early on in this project, I felt that this game might be challenging for casual players. For Japanese gamers, learning English can be particularly challenging due to significant differences in language structures. This concern applied to all languages found in Lettucewhich makes me concerned that the game may not be suitable for Japanese players.
Since not every gamer is adept at learning foreign languages, my approach to translation focused on making it “beginner-friendly” and “player-friendly.”
One of the most challenging aspects was the task in which players acted as translators between groups, creating sentences based on individual pictures. The tone of the translation was intentionally neutral and included uncomplicated words that players could apply to deduce the appropriate terms, while taking into account the word order in each language. Anticipating that some players may forget grammar rules by the end of the story, I’ve added translation tips, offering grammar and word tips whenever possible.
To my surprise, many players were elated Lettuce after its release. They had fun guessing words and creating sentences, and some players and reviews even mentioned that the translations were well done. I didn’t expect such a positive response from players and was pleasantly surprised by how much they enjoyed the language learning aspect of the game.
Fernando Moreiras, Spanish translator: Newly invented languages are really common in cultural products. As a fan, I had some knowledge of languages like Quenya and Klingon and had read about the process the authors went through to create them. My first solemn contact with invented languages as a translator was as a literary translator, when I was commissioned to translate a novel by George Orwell 1984with the participation of newspeak. The apply of Newspeak in English was well documented by Orwell, so I first had to adapt the rationale for change in English to the needs of my target language, Galician. After figuring out the grammar and neology of Galician Newspeak, everything went pretty smoothly.
Are there different ways to “translate” these invented languages for different countries/markets?
Kiseleva: In this particular case, the whole problem was to show how to translate these hieroglyphs into Russian, using Russian words and grammatical structures. For example, there are no modal verbs in Russian, so constructions such as “You are looking for, you are” are even less understandable to a Russian player, because we never say “you are looking for”, we say “you are looking for”. Here I used the same method as above, because to a Russian player Bardic and English are equally foreign, so it made sense to treat them the same way.
Mulberry trees: Personally, I think the real difference is not in countries or languages, but in genres. Artificial theater languages, such as those I have already mentioned, usually have some strict rules that must be followed or at least mirrored or adapted in the target language. On the other hand, phony comedy languages (think Smurf or Minion languages, or even some uses of phony Latin) don’t really have any mandatory rules, you just tell jokes that work for your target audience and get some laughs.
What type of expertise and research do you apply in your work? Songs of Sennaar?
Kiseleva: In this particular case, we were going to make our work process public, so I guess being a professional translator is enough.
Fernandes: In addition to knowing the source and target languages, you should always pay attention to ambiguous words out of context. But this applies to most game localization projects.
Mulberry trees: In fact, he knows several grammatical systems quite well and reads or watches works that feature artificial languages. I already had this base as a teenager, not only for full languages like Quenya and Newspeak, but also for involutions or evolutions of languages, such as those appearing in movies like Quest for Fire Or A Clockwork Orange. Being a nerd prepares you for this kind of work.
