Hi, Runners! I hope you all enjoyed the “15 Minutes” interview posted on Wednesday, which is something we’ll hopefully see most weeks. Once we’re all up and running at full steam I’m aiming for a M-W-F update schedule, with articles on Mondays, short-form interviews on Wednesdays and NISEI updates from me (RC) on Fridays.
Importantly, the Q1-2019 GNK is still available for sale – if you want to get involved in the first wave of deliveries, you need to order before 11:59 GMT on Sunday, 11th of November!
This week, we’ll be talking about translation. Specifically, the why, who and how of it, along with some of the stumbling blocks we’re likely to face.
Why?
Well this is an easy one – not everyone speaks English. The game has been translated into various languages over the years, although not always completely, which means it has fans all over the world. We also have no way of knowing how many people never got into the game in the first place because it wasn’t available in their language at all! NISEI wants to support these players so they can get just as much enjoyment out of the game as the English-speaking runners out there.
Who?
We have the following people to thank for their work on this aspect of NISEI! It’s not going to be an easy or quick job, so please show them some love in the comments…
Lead Translator – MrBuggles:
I work as a translator/editor for the EU and have spent time living and working in several countries across Europe. When I moved to Germany, Netrunner is how I met lots of my friends, and even my wife!
While I’m consistently impressed by how many non-native English speakers can play out a long Netrunner tournament in a foreign language, I’m fully aware that there are hundreds of players out there who would prefer to play the game in their own language, and hundreds more who can only get into this wonderful game if we make it available in their mother tongue.
Netrunner is my first and only competitive card game, and I love it so much that I’ll be doing my very best to help keep it going. And while I’m an Anarch player through and through – every tournament I have logged on alwaysberunning.net has me playing Whizzard, Val or Maxx – I promise that’s no reflection on how I’m organising this translation process…
He’s leading our team of translators, who currently include (total number in brackets):
- Brazilian Portuguese (2): Bernardo, Igor
- Chinese (1): Chris Yang
- French (4): Metamatik, Nemo
- German (9): ab_1864, Charlotte K-L, DrFeelgood, Katyana, Layana, Nicita, Yann
- Hungarian (1): PsyZed
- Italian (2): Dieris, Valeria
- Japanese (1): Kay
- Malay (1)
- Polish (2): Luinloth
- Russian (1): Charles
- Spanish (5): Bahdom
This isn’t an exhaustive list, as there are people who haven’t got back to me to say that they’re happy to be mentioned in this article, including our solo Malay translator – but their efforts are also much appreciated!
How?
This is where it gets tricky. We have a rules document that’s larger than the rulebooks for most published board games, not to mention our soon to be thrice-weekly articles, Code of Conduct, new cards, new MWL, format guides… the list of material only in English at the moment is huge.
We have a priority ranking of documents to make sure that the texts that are most in need of being available in other languages are translated first.
The general approach involves one person being responsible for translating one document, to ensure consistency. Of course they are welcome to consult the other translators in their language team whenever they have a question or need some support.
Once a document is translated, another member of that language team will edit it, in the same way that, for example, our English rules document has a dedicated editor.
Potential Issues
- Ensuring the language used is inclusive
- Competing priorities and requests from within NISEI
- Size of the team – we’ve got a lot of people to recruit and organise
- Different size language groups means that some documents will be done in one language, while some other languages will have barely started them
- We can only translate into a given language if we get applicants who speak that language to the required standard
With that in mind, if your mother tongue isn’t English or you’ve worked professionally translating into a different language, and if you have some free time and would like to join our translation team, please complete this form and we’ll get in contact!
Other Business
Web Developer recruitment is now closed! We’re reviewing the applicants at the moment, and will let them know soon.
Playtester applications are still open – fill in this form and someone from the Development team will be in touch!
I’m now off for a weekend of Netrunner games at Charity Gift IV, and will be back next week with another doozy of an update – in which we’ll drop the full list for System Core 2019, MWLs for Standard and Eternal formats, and also announce a fun little surprise! Until then…
