
Translating the Cyberpunk Future - wormold
https://blog.neocabgame.com/post/188394177391/translating-the-cyberpunk-future
======
sdfjkl
I grew up in Germany and we suffered a lot from badly translated Games (and
worse so in dubbed movies). Almost everyone of my generation ended up just
learning English and played the original instead. Most of the time that was
all that was available anyways.

Except of course for the games translated by Boris Schneider. They arguably
were better in German because of his excellent (and hilarious) translations,
most notably the Monkey Islands.

Apparently his efforts earned him a Wikipedia page:
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Schneider-
Johne](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Schneider-Johne)

Much of my early English vocabulary was attained by playing Leisure Suit Larry
with a dictionary in my hand.

~~~
sammorrowdrums
Is it possible you remember some of those German Monkey Island quotes? Do any
of them work when translated back into English? I'm intrigued...

~~~
sdfjkl
Here you go:
[http://www.int33h.com/test/mi/index.html?lng=de](http://www.int33h.com/test/mi/index.html?lng=de)

------
toyg
Italian here and vouching for the correctness of this. They picked an
interesting way to "get out of jail", helped by flexibility in the scenario.

Another solution would have been to use the antiquated and formal "lei", which
is gender-neutral, replaces the second person with a third, and technically
defaults to feminine even when talking to a male (because it's short for "your
person", "la sua persona", which is feminine in Italian) - although in
practice this is not always the case and the verb can get gendered
arbitrarily. "Voi" can also be used in the same way, but then the following
verb is always gendered.

~~~
blotter_paper
I know it would be unfair to ask you to defend the author's writing simply
because you speak their language, but I would be grateful if you (or anybody
else who speaks Italian) could explain this part of the article for me:

> We also analyzed the solutions currently adopted by some activists, like the
> use of asterisks, “x,” and “u.”

> Siamo tutt* bellissim* .

> Siamo tuttx bellissimx.

> Siamo tuttu bellissimu.

> I’d seen examples of this on signs before, but it had always seemed to me
> that asterisks and such were not meant to be a solution, but rather a way to
> highlight the issue and start a discourse on something that’s deeply
> ingrained in our language. For our cyberpunk future, we wanted a solution
> that was more readable and pronounceable, so we thought we might use schwa
> (ə), the mid central vowel sound.

I get why the * and x are unpronounceable, but what's wrong with the u? As an
ignoramus on the subject of the Italian language, "tuttu" and "bellissimu"
would have been believable to me as Italian words. They _look_ pronounceable
to me. Anybody know what I'm missing?

~~~
tanbog
The "U" would be readable and pronounceable in Italian.

Stringing a few "U" ending words together does sound a bit wierd though...
like your making a hooting sound or something.

~~~
frostburg
It would read like a bad parody of someone from Sardinia speaking in Italian
with a thick accent.

------
contingencies
The body touches on common problems in internationalization (i18n) and
localization (l10n) which should be familiar to programmers who have done
properly internationalized software in the past. The canonical implementation
is _gettext_.

[https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html](https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html)
and
[https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural...](https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-
forms.html)

The final quote is a one-sided view of the _Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis_ , a
fundamental debate in 20th century linguistics.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity)

I must say I was excited at the URL because I thought it was a Quarantine
remake.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_\(video_game\))

------
harimau777
Something that I'm surprised they didn't mention:

They say that most Italian people would pronounce the schwas by just omitting
the last vowel altogether which, if I'm understanding correctly, is the vowel
that indicates gender. That itself seems like an appropriate way to
communicate "not one gender or the other". It also strikes me as a very
believable way for language to evolve.

------
haecceity
This reminds me of a funny story about Chinese writing. Chinese is not a
gendered language. A little while ago they decided to split the third person
pronoun into masculine and feminine forms because that's what Western cultures
do and they thought it'd be progressive. And now we're fighting back against
our thousands of years gendered language inheritance.

~~~
trianglem
Why exactly are we fighting gendered language? Don’t we want to know if the
subject is male or female?

~~~
vertex-four
Do you also want to encode race, country of origin, height, eye colour,
birthdate, into every sentence? Why is gender special enough that it’s worth
the problems it causes for many?

~~~
jddj
As someone who occasionally reads but usually does their very best to avoid
this topic due to its tendency to be a total minefield, I just wanted to let
you know that this particular argument doesn't work for me at all.

You'd be better acknowledging the fairly obvious benefits that come from
encoding so much more information into a single word, and then going on to
argue why _despite_ that it would be a good idea to move towards neutral
suffixes.

When speaking Spanish, for example, I definitely feel the lack of information
conveyed by _su_ when compared to his/her.

~~~
vertex-four
It's not obvious to me that knowing everyone's gender at all times is
important. In fact, as you say, there's a variety of languages where that
isn't the case.

When I'm talking about someone I bumped into on the bus, why is it relevant
what gender they are above pretty much anything else you could choose to
encode there? I'd much prefer to encode, for example, my relationship with
them - whether I'm close to them or not, whether I see them as equal, inferior
or superior.

Gender is mostly a thing that becomes relevant when talking about
relationships and sex or healthcare, and even then not always.

------
s21n
Recently there was a huge backlash in Poland over the translation of the anime
series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power on Netflix [1]. There's a non-binary
character named Double Trouble and the translators decided to change its
gender to male and named it Kłopotowski (Mr Trouble).

All this despite the fact that we do have neutral pronouns in Polish.
Unfortunately not everyone agrees on the use of neutral form because it was
sometimes used as an insult. There are other options though, for example you
can use the plural version (just like they/them in English) or Dukaj's pronoun
(introduced in the hard science fiction novel Perfect Imperfection [2] by
Jacek Dukaj, “a space opera to end all space operas”) which is similar to the
neutral pronoun but replaces the “o” suffix with “u”: it was / ono było / onu
byłu.

The discussion about the infelicitous translation started on social media
[3][4] and eventually was covered by mainstream media. One of the translators
gave an interview [5] and said that the reason for the unfortunate decision
was organizational chaos and lack of information flow.

1\.
[https://www.netflix.com/title/80179762](https://www.netflix.com/title/80179762)

2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Imperfection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Imperfection)

3\.
[https://www.facebook.com/MistycyzmPopkulturowy/photos/246543...](https://www.facebook.com/MistycyzmPopkulturowy/photos/2465431250191889/)

4\.
[https://www.facebook.com/catusgeekus/posts/2450286248592517](https://www.facebook.com/catusgeekus/posts/2450286248592517)

5\. [https://wyborcza.pl/7,75410,25383618,awantura-o-meskie-
konco...](https://wyborcza.pl/7,75410,25383618,awantura-o-meskie-koncowki-jak-
polski-netflix-zrobil-z-klopotow.html) (paywall)

~~~
taneq
We've just encountered Double Trouble and they're hilarious. Sorry to hear
they got a bit mangled in translation.

------
cyberpunk
The title had me excited for a second there... guess I’ll have to go back to
my diesel powered crystal ball..

------
sunebeck
The typeface they used and can be seen in the screenshot at the end of the
article makes the schwa look almost like a regular a.

------
rauchp
>We also analyzed the solutions currently adopted by some activists, like the
use of asterisks, “x,” and “u.”

If non-binary people in Italy are already using x's or u's for their pronouns,
why not just use that?

~~~
toyg
It's not pronounceable and it's not even a standard. Note how they say "some"
activists, it's not a settled matter even in activist circles.

~~~
tanbog
X isn't pronounceable. U is, though it sounds a bit funky.

