The short story “The Little Match Girl” was originally published in Danish 180 years ago (1845). The author, Hans Christian Andersen, was born 220 years ago (1805) and died 150 years ago (1875).
To celebrate these anniversaries, I have translated Ryan Veeder’s 2019 text adventure The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen into Danish.
Thank you so much for putting this together!
I consider this to be a very important and interesting project so I interviewed Tobias about it:
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RYAN VEEDER: Thank you for translating this game into its native language! First I should ask, are you Danish?
TOBIAS LANGHOFF: No.
RV: And instead, you are…
TL: Norwegian. But my mother is Danish.
RV: Before you could translate the game itself, you had to make Inform 7 itself work in Danish. What kind of work went into the Danish language extension?
TL: Inform is rigged to translate the “language of play” while still writing the source code in English (“language of syntax”). To do that you use special constructs, like "The Corner translates into Danish as Krogen.” That’s straightforward enough, but you also have to add stuff like “The grammatical gender of the little girl is common gender” so that Inform knows how to inflect nouns in weird languages like Danish, and “In Danish brænde is a verb meaning to burn” so Inform knows what to print when the game wants to translate text like “[You] [burn] [the noun]” into Danish. The Danish language extension tells Inform how to inflect those nouns and conjugate those verbs correctly, and that is written partly in something called Preform.
Preform is a bunch of grammar rules that turn a word (lemma) into another form of that word (lexeme). I wrote a script that parses the digital version of the Danish dictionary, which contains all lemmas and their lexemes, and spits them out as Preform rules. It’s not perfect but it helped a lot!
RV: When I wrote the game, I copied a bunch of the text from some 19th-century translation of the original story. Did you “translate” those parts by copying the Danish original?
TL: The original is written in very old-fashioned language (think “Thou” and “Thee”), and the translation you chose was more modern (“you”). To keep the tone old-fashioned but still make it approachable to people unaccustomed to reading old Danish, I had to make some modernization choices in the language. So the opening scene is a bit of a mix to keep that feel.
In the original story, all nouns were capitalized, as was the norm in Danish back then, but that would both be incongruent with the other areas of the game AND be harder to code, so I dropped that. But I kept some other old-fashioned spelling variants to keep that feeling.
You also told me once that the Atlantis area was not, in fact, inspired by H.C. Andersen’s story “The Little Mermaid” (which the famous Disney movie is based on), which is honestly baffling. But I copied some parts from the Danish original of that story and added them to that area. Not big chunks of text like the opening, but moreso small references.
RV: So your translation is more metatextually dense than my original.
TL: Just a little.
In your game, Poseidon is of course the king of Atlantis. In the H.C. Andersen “Little Mermaid,” the sea king is unnamed, but in the Disney movie you were probably inspired by, his name is Triton. In Greek mythology (and also in the Disney prequel series), Triton is Poseidon’s son. Therefore, my head canon is that the little match girl (who can travel through both space and time) travels to The Little Mermaid’s past, one generation before the story and film take place. Mermaids live for about 300 years, according to Andersen - I’m not sure if the timeline matches up, but you could consult your LMG Bible.
RV: The official lore explanation is roughly that complicated. Speaking of Poseidon, did you end up localizing any of the character names?
TL: No, the characters in this game live in their own cultures and have their own languages, even though the little girl can talk to them seamlessly. I did consider naming the girl “Ebenesabeth” at the end, since “Elisabeth” is the common Danish version of “Elizabeth”, but that felt wrong.
One “name” I will have to consider if I ever translate any further games in your series is the name “the little match girl” itself. That translates into “den lille pige med svovlstikkerne”, which means “the little girl with the sulphur matchsticks” - a mouthful. Likely she will have to be called just “the little girl” (“den lille pige”), like she is called by several characters in this game anyway.
RV: They do keep calling her that. That’s a Theme.
In the original, the response to >SING quotes Enya’s song “Christmas Secrets,” inaugurating a tradition in these games where >SING gets you some Enya lyrics. How did you handle this part?
TL: I wasn’t familiar with Enya or that tradition, so I chose to replace it with a traditional Danish hymn called “Dejlig er den Himmel blaa” from 1810. It’s about stars up in the sky, which seemed to fit the themes of the original story, at least.
RV: That works. It would have been a couple steps weirder for Enya to show up in the Danish version.
This is almost a spoiler, but at one point in the game there is a poem that I stole from Pablo Neruda. What did you do about that part?
TL: That poem (“The Stolen Branch”) has been translated into Danish already, and I spent quite some time trying to find a copy of that book (Kaptajnens vers), but I wasn’t able to. So I translated it myself from English, consulting two existing Norwegian translations that I did find online. Norwegian and Danish are fairly similar languages.
RV: Going back to stuff that I actually wrote myself, were there any jokes or weird turns of phrase that were challenging or interesting to translate?
TL: It was interesting to try to keep both your tone of voice and the tones of the characters. Nash, for example, speaks with a lot of slang. At one point he says “Well heck my dangs,” which I translated into “Hold da helt ferie”, which is a weird Danish phrase that literally means “take completely a vacation.”
I spent more time on the turns of phrases that reoccur throughout the game, like “you are like a ghost”, to both refine them and make sure they were consistent. I hope I managed to harmonize all of them. I chose to leave the graffito in the New Mexico restroom in English, as it felt more poetic that way.
RV: The Danophone IF community owes you two debts in translating this delightful game and putting together the Danish Inform 7 language extension. Have you published that extension anywhere yet?
TL: First, I should say that I also owe a debt to Thomas Bøvith, who made a Danish Inform 6 language extension back in the day, and Felix Larsson, who made a Swedish extension for an earlier version of Inform 7. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how language extensions work, since it’s not very well documented, and ended up using the unreleased Inform beta version 10.2. There’s some stuff I haven’t managed to get to work yet, like adjectives, some of which is probably my fault and some due to bugs in Inform. I’ll release it soon, though!