ESL Creation/Translation/Review

Authoring
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I think once you know expectations it can help, too. Ruber Eaglenest and Victor Ojuel both are native Spanish speakers who entered IFComp with games that had really cool ideas but suffered in translation.

Both of them worked hard and went on to enter games in English that are highly regarded for their story and writing ( Ariadne in Aeaea and Tuuli, respectively). Victor has a job writing narrative for the game Temtem now. Marco Innocenti had some flak for his first IFComp game because of some word choices (I think some people criticized ‘cyanotic’?), but ended up winning IFComp.

I’m not sure what they did between the starting games and the later games to get so polished, but whatever it was worked!

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I am very impressed with the most successful ESL authors as I know from myself that even if I manage to avoid technical mistakes when writing English, my writing is a lot less varied than when I write in my own language Danish, which is why I focus on puzzly parser games rather than focusing on writing an exciting story.

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The thing is, I don’t recall spotting anything wrong with Aesthetics over Plot while playing, and then after seeing the reviews I thought “oof, there’s no way I can pull this off myself”.

For my own game-writing I try to keep the text minimal and to provide certain game mechanics that players can engage with even if they dislike the writing. At this point I would not attempt to do comedy in my own language (need to build more confidence in my writing chops)

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On one hand, I definitely sympathize with people struggling to write in English, being ESL myself, but on the other hand… yeah, when text is the main medium through which your game is conveyed, too many mistakes or awkward phrases do get in the way of player experience. There’s not much anyone can do about that. I think we should definitely encourage people to get beta readers for things like this.

I’m starting to play RTE right now. I must admit that the initial walls of text are a bit intimidating, but it does look interesting.

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As long as your writing conveys the correct information (something which plenty of English authors certainly struggle with), then I feel like you’re good.

If someone decided to go full-tilt to sound as British as possible, and eliminated all of the original “awkward phrasings” (as it’s being called), then I would feel absolutely gutted, if I knew what the previous draft looked like.

The way that an ESL author approaches the English language can have unique and wondrous qualities, and there is value in that.

So if any ESL authors out there are hesitant to release their game because they’re not a native English speaker, and the revision notes seem conflicting and endless: Your game is welcome. Don’t feel like the barrier to entry requires you to sound like a flawless Brit.

Language is flexible, and our brains are pattern-matching machines. Your take on the English language will have flourishes and aesthetics that are all your own.

Writing is subjective.

Own your unique approach.

I’ve been a tester for ESL games before, and they’re gorgeous.

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Gonna add my grain of salt as an ESL writer who’s also gotten this kind of comment (grammar mistakes and the like). I’ve honestly felt disparaged with the harshness of quite a few of them. I understand how important it is to have a good base, especially as the medium is very text-heavy, and it can break immersion. And I am really grateful for everyone trying to help us ESL writers to fix issues we might have with our text.

But there is something so intrinsically beautiful to see writers brining their mother language roots in their projects. It really is something unique that non ESL authors might not be able to see or appreciate, because it takes codes that might not be in the English language or are contradictory to the rules and still is incorporated in those works. It makes the genre so much more diverse.

IF can be very personal, and it takes a lot of courage to share it with other people. It really makes it extra special to have someone trying to convey a story in a language that they might not be fluent with to share with people who probably wouldn’t be able to read that writer’s language. [EDIT: And it takes a lot more effort to be able to do this than non ESL writer can realise (unless they write in more than one language).]

And I haven’t really felt like we’ve appreciated this aspect enough.

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It’s always interesting to read these sorts of threads, as an ESL writer.

Joey’s nailed it here, I think. I often find the unique phrasing in ESL works to be charming, and God knows that colloquialisms are slippery beasts to wrangle.

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I think this is 100% true. I will say one thing I’ve grappled with as a reviewer is that it’s often hard to figure out how to talk about this; there’s very rarely ABOUT text saying that an author is not a native speaker or that a work has been translated, for one thing, and it’s deeply uncomfortable and potentially offensive to try to like look at someone’s name and grammar choices and make an assumption based on that. So I typically try to soft-pedal spelling and grammar critiques where I have a suspicion a game is from an ESL author without explicitly saying anything about it, but that also means it’s hard to intentionally lift up the positive aspects you mention, too.

Anyway this is something for me to keep thinking about. But I’ll just emphasize I feel super lucky to be a native English speaker, since folks go through a lot of effort to write in a language they didn’t always grow up speaking, and I get to have all the cool, creative benefits without lifting a finger. So y’all are deeply appreciated!

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There is often something about phrases that are not quite idiomatic; they can be quite poetic. Poetry, I find, is often idiom-adjacent. Perhaps this occurs because they originate in an idiomatic phrase that does not fully come across. I don’t know!

I value that in translated work, since I value the poetic.

Those cases seem different from run of the mill grammar stuff. Being honest: without the help of testers and readers, my game would have been unacceptable to many players and reviewers. I say this as someone with a terminal degree in writing and who has taught composition at the university level. So if I need this assistance, I think many ESL authors would as well. Proofreading support for writing projects is probably required for all but a lucky few.

Whenever there are concerns with grammar, punctuation, and the like, I always wonder if the author received the testing support that they needed. That’s true for any game I play, even with native English speakers. I don’t usually see it as a failure on the writer’s part.

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Good (canonical?) examples of ESL writers who turned it into a strength are Nabokov and Joseph Conrad. I’ve even read this about Raymond Chandler. He was raised in England and attended a boarding school there, and so he found the American wisecracking vernacular alien.

A good example of an ESL IF is Ghosts Within from the 2021 IF Comp. An ambitious game!

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I did not know this about Chandler! Now I’m imagining the translations required:

“I say, my dear fellow, perhaps you could parcel out the dosh, lest something untoward regrettably occur?” → “Gimme the cash and nobody gets hurt!”

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I wrote about this on Mastodon recently:

Here’s an article I discovered at the time which expounds further on the subject:

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Not validating anyone being harsh, but this might actually be taken as an unintended compliment: you didn’t trip the “English isn’t this writer’s first language” switch enough to make them realize you’re writing in a non-native language - which for most reviewers will cue them to temper their commentary. You’re being judged as an English writer rather than an ESL writer!

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That’s a good point and I am among the many authors who didn’t do that. I will definitely try to mention that in my next games as it otherwise may put the reviewer in a dilemma. On the other hand I doubt ESL authors are looking for “compassion points” which would not be very satisfactory.

More generally though, I have sometimes liked a very flawed game (language or bugs etc) despite the flaws and as a reviewer I sometimes feel an obligation to rate the game a bit lower than my initial feeling, which doesn’t really make sense as reviews are always subjective anyway :slight_smile:

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These might be good banner-text/library card additions for parser systems:

Prose Language(s): English; Occasional Spanish; Vulcan
Author Primary Language: English

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I must admit to feeling puzzled and a little stressed out whenever the question of an author’s English proficiency comes up in reviews and discussions–I think mostly because the notion of native-speaker-level proficiency remains a bit opaque to me. What is the standard against which authors are being evaluated? E.g., Raymond Carver/Gordon Lish, Virginia Woolf, Strunk and White, Associated Press Style Guide, perfect score on the TOEFL exam? There’s variation even among those examples (and they also mostly reflect my own context as a person in the U.S. who’s most familiar with American English :sweat_smile:). I definitely agree that a ton of grammatical errors in a language-based medium would be very burdensome and distracting to players, but I could see focusing on identifying the particular issue, and then sharing the specific effect that it had on the reader’s experience of the work. E.g., the frequent subject-verb agreement errors really took me out of the story; the author’s ambiguous use of prepositions made it hard for me to figure out what commands to enter; the author used a lot of idioms that I’m unfamiliar with and it filled the story with moments of surprise and delight :star_struck:. An approach like that might be helpful to authors regardless of whether English is their first, second, third, or fourth language.

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Well said. I suspect many are more concerned about the manner folks use in addressing these issues than their choice to acknowledge them in the first place.

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I think writing IF is hard, and translation is hard on top of that. Is there a big IF translation award? Perhaps the languages and audiences are too scattered for that.

I think/hope people here would be very open to a call for testing/reading a translated work. While my writing was in English, I relied heavily on testers for typo detection and other issues because I just don’t have the attention span for adequate proofreading. My game would have been a complete mess without their help.

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On the subject of translations, I think back to One Way Ticket, where the writer’s first language was Russian, I think. One of the characters’ names was Bing Dingle. From a native speaker, this would be an almost immediate heck-no, but I think it worked really well in OWT, way better than, say “Fred Jones.” And of course there were the general dialogue tics.

But I’ve also found that UK and Australian English and their quirks open up so much I wouldn’t have seen from just reading American stuff, and sometimes even regional differences (Texas would be the obvious one e.g. “all hat no cattle”) have a different way of speaking where I hear something I haven’t heard before and I immediately know what it means.

Helping proofread Marco Innocenti’s translations of his two Andromeda games was enlightening for me, too, as I realized just how many ways there were to say something logically that didn’t conform to grammar rules, and so many of my translation suggestions might, in fact, not bring some of the meaning Marco wanted to put into his writing, and I could only guess at the aesthetic bits that might be lost.

I’ve even found trouble when writing about, say, chess, because analysis has a language of its own, and it’s tough to translate into something non-players can understand without either insulting their intelligence or going way over their head. But it’s really neat to see how many content creators etc. formulate things in certain ways.

And of course chess has a lot of non-English-speaking writers who really know what they are doing. I’d feel like such a schmuck telling a non-native writer “oh hey you left out three the’s, not that it affects the meaning, but it’s there, and it feels dumb compared to the ideas you’re throwing out” but you sort of have to… fortunately there are mechanisms to say “Oh hey if you’re interested in tweaking things, trivial style fix here” over at, say, chessable. One example in particular is This extensive course on the Two Knights where the author is obviously very sharp and has a great writing style and it’s very likely if they’d been native speakers I might have missed a few details.

But with chess in particular, there is little doubt that someone knows more than you (e.g. they are a titled player or have a higher rating) and you’re much more aware that any grammar suggestions are trivial–and it’s hard to balance “let’s get everything as good as it can be” with oh, man, this is a nag after a while. And I guess/think something like a pull request could work well in other cases e.g. “suggested changes for smoother translation, reject or accept as you please.”

I’m talking a lot about chess here but I think there are some examples of how even something misstated says its own thing. For instance here in the first 2 minutes, Baadur Jobava tells Anish Giri “I’m not someone you can ironic” which is technically bad grammar, but it SAYS so much. (87) 2 Chess Grandmasters Got In A “Fight” - YouTube

And the more infamous example is one Russian GM’s rant after being accused (very credibly) of cheating. Now it’s bad form to mock people for trying to be understood in a second language, but when they go on an arching rant, and the evidence is against them, and they slip up … well, the impressive thing is, just how many of the phrases are memorable, if for the wrong reasons!

Content alert for sexism and slightly coarse language: “Chess grandmaster accused of cheating, responds hilariously”

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I’ve just been writing a review of Mirror, 4 Twine stories written in Slovakia, and thought really carefully about whether I should mention typos. In the end I did, constructively, but praised the English as strong where appropriate. I tend to take a very relaxed attitude to language, especially where the author has another native tongue. Because that’s not really what the story should be about. But I still feel that as a reviewer it’s helpful for me to point out typos. Not least because the authors may want to fix them, and they can be in many cases a very easy fix. I have phenomenal admiration for IF authors writing in languages other than their native ones. Thank you so much all! And also delighted that there are such flourishing IF communities in languages other than English as well.

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