Risus - the Anything RPG is an excellent free RPG from the likewise excellent S. John Ross, who (as you know) is a regular here.
I thought it would be good to have a Swedish translation of it, so I started making one. I’ve gone through it (it’s not very long!) and have a first draft ready, but I feel it does not yet have that previously mentioned level of excellence.
So, Swedes - there are a handful here that I know of - would any of you be willing to read it and come with some feedback? Or maybe I should just post some tricky bits here?
I don’t have it on front of me right now, but some issues I recall are these:
what’s good translation for “grunt squad”?
should I use the new neuter “hen” pronoun?
translate wizard and sorcerer
is there an abbreviation for PC?
If you want to help, comment, PM me, or ping me in some other way, such as e-mail to peterorme6@gmail.com.
For now:
• “Grunt-Squad” in Risus seems to be a technical term in the RPG system. There is no need to find a Swedish equivalent that has anything to do with a squad of footsoldiers. Go for something that suggests what the term refers to: ”hord”, ”mobb” or something like it.
• I’d say that’s all up to you. I think i would be a fitting use for a gender neutral pronoun, and I expect most RPG-players to be less hostile to the use of ”hen” than the average Swede.
• Is there a real distinction between wizards and sorcerers in Risus? Or does Ross use the two words interchangeably, as synonyms, just for variation? In the latter case you can simply use ”trollkarl” for both English words (or any other synonym for it in Swedish, like ”magiker” or ”besvärjare”).
• I think RP (for ”rollperson”) is not too uncommon.
So, not super-exciting, though I am fond of the adjective + -ard construction and think we should revive it.
‘Wizard’ lost much of its power through constant post-Tolkienian overuse, so to me ‘trollkarl’ has oomph mostly because it’s unfamiliar. (I can’t really say it without adopting a vaguely-Germanic accent.)
Oh boy, yeah. Our neighbours, the Spanish, dub and translate everything. And when I say everything… well, in Spain, the “Spice Girls” are “Las Chicas Piri-piri”, so I hear.
Lots of respect for the Spanish, they make great IF and push the media envelope every time they can. But they DO go overboard on the dubbing.
Way off-topic (so rant tag, and I promise to avoid this behavior, sorry).
Peter, [rant]I never heard that “piri-piri” name, ever. Maybe you heard a joke or something. Just saying it’s not common to translate that kind of things, AFAIK.
It’s true that we lost many opportunities because of dubbing, starting with more exposure to foreign languages. Long story short… thank a dictatorial regime for starting that habit. :([/rant]
It’s possible that it was a joke, yes. I’ve often heard it repeated as fact… but that’s what ignorant people do, and I’m ashamed to have perpetuated that. A quick google shows it’s simply untrue. My apologies.
You still dub too much. You still also make about +1000% more and better IF than the Portuguese.
The going up at the end would depend on context and not really needed (as you can hear in peterorme’s version), but pronouncing the L at the end will sound either strange or quite old-fashioned. (I can’t think of any Swedish dialect that would say the L, but that doesn’t mean that one doesn’t exist. Sweden has a wide range of dialects, and that’s also something that fascinates me. A big reason for that is probably that I come from one of the areas with the most distinct pronunciations. My dialect is usually instantly recognised as coming from the part of Sweden where I was born, but I have also several times been asked if I come from America, or “which country do you come from?”.)
Regarding the Spice Girls thing, neighbours tend to make fun of each other. We mostly do it to the Norwegians. For example claiming that their word for banana is “gulebøj” (yellow bend), which is false, but it isn’t completely unusual to find Swedes that believe it to be true.
I don’t pronounce the final L, do I? Like Trumgottist says, nobody does that. Well, probably somebody does. Swedish-speaking Finns tend to pronounce letters nobody else says aloud (such as the d in djur).
Actually, if we were talking about a troll named Karl, it could be Troll-Karl, and then the final L would be audible. Very simple.
Trumgottist: it’s hard to pinpoint your accent from just one word. But ok, I’ll play Sherlock. The sing-song melody says Dalarna, Gotland, west coast - hardly Stockholm or northern Sweden. The a is quite open, so probably not west coast, but not really open like in Finland. The r is trilling, so Skåne (Scania) is out, unless you have one of those tricky “Stockholmized” Scanian accents. A slight hint of that “whining” associated with cities like Örebro.
Tricky. I say south of lake Mälaren, somewhere east or north-east from Gothenburg.
Ha. There’s an anecdote about a comedian (I forget which - Ronnie Barker springs to mind but I’m failing to Google it) who was able to tell police exactly which small English town a criminal came from based purely on his knowledge of regional accents. (It’s an old story, and I doubt anyone could manage that now - but forty years ago, absolutely.)
Haha. Ok, I would like to revise my conclusion in the light of additional evidence. I say northeast of Gothenburg, north of Mälaren. Definitely somewhere in Dalarna.
Just the other week I lectured to a bunch of teacher students in Gothenburg (a city or whatever of half a million people) that I’d never met before. One of them — a future Swedish teacher — was in the habit of guessing, from dialect, where any new lecturer had grown up, and apparently she had a really impressive record track. She pinpointed me, all right! — naming a really tiny place called “Lerum” (less than 20,000 people) some 20 kilometers from Gothenburg. The next day she did the same with a colleague of mine from Hisingen (i.e. the northern half of Gothenburg) …
That is impressive. And so are those who can imitate accents. I can only do one accent imitation reasonably well (in my own opinion, that is - in reality that too is probably pretty bad), and I can only do that one by imitating an uncle of mine (from Virserum) who had a quite distinct way of speaking. (Very slowly and deliberately, and would also speak silliness quite a bit.)
