The new year has risen and German IF hits the road again. Just in time we proudly present season #1 of our “Textpäckchen” project.
Two games are finished yet waiting impatiently to be played at textpaeckchen.org
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Wasser-Hasser by Mischa Magyar
Die Geschichte des Herrn P by Hannes Schüller
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Additionally we have one big game in closed Beta and two others in an advanced development state. The scheduling of season #2 is ongoing.
BTW: We always search new authors and testers, so if you’re capable of writing or reading German and willing to join the group, then don’t hesitate: just jump in the line, we’ll be happy to have you in our team!
I’ve always been wanting to ask a german, what he has against english. I see lots of german dubbed movies, and german games, and yet nobody speaks german but germans. Don’t you have english as a second language at your schools?
Congratulations! I don’t know much German at all beyond the usual received knowledge, but part of me does want to sit down with these games and Google Translate and hope things work out. Text adventures shouldn’t be more or less confined to just English.
And they aren’t, there are flourishing non-english communities. And er, I’d advise against “google translating”. An online dictionary would be much better, especially dictionaries that also translate. My favourite is thefreedictionary.com/
No, they don’t. They might have been forced to sit in a classroom teaching german as a third language, but nobody actually speaks german in Europe. If you look at Sweden in that chart, it says that 20-49% speak german. Well, I’ve lived my whole life in Sweden, and I am yet to hear people on the street speak a single word of german to me. Swedish people don’t speak german. What those statistics are based on, is whether or not they’ve been forced to sit in a classroom that has tried to teach them german, where teachers have fruitlessly been wanting them to take the language seriously. …but you can’t take a language seriously that applies three arbitrary genders (das, der and die) to everything in the entire world, because nobody wants to relearn what’s feminine and masculine according to some foreign country standard. Swedish people know what “der zug” means, and that’s how much they even want to remember that annoying, obnoxious language. It’s not going to happen, but still germans keep dreaming about them being the center of Europe while everybody laughs at them and their poor movie dubbing.
Never used it for that! I think I should. I also think Google Translate works in a pinch…and yes, to get a more rigorous translation, you need to be more careful and know alternate/conditional/idiosyncratic meanings.
It’d be cool to have a list of communities somewhere. Just to know. Or maybe there is, and I’ve failed to stumble on that, too.
Fine, you hate German. We get it. Now please stop “welcoming” non-English projects and communities to this forum with speeches about how you believe their language is dead and crappy.
I don’t know if you are a troll, but you sure post troll posts sometimes.
I apologize for my rudeness. I’ve spent three years being forced this language, so naturally the mere mention of it upsets me. Please get back to the topic at hand.
To steer this into a slightly more useful direction: I am actually in the process of making an English version of my game, but I’m not as naive to believe I can speak that language as well as my native one (German). Together with the original alpha and beta testers, I spent a lot of time to get the wordings exactly right and to make the playing experience as smooth as possible by putting much work into synonyms for actions and objects. To achieve the same quality in a translation, I will definitely need the help of a native speaker at some point – which, I’m aware, is not probably not a particularly thrilling prospect. Still, I found this community to be very helpful in the past, so I’m hoping for some support on this as well
I do have a practical question already: How would Babel feel about a game translation? Should all versions sport the same IFID or should I generate a new one? Also, how would you handle release numbers? Should the English game be Release 1 again?
Since I’m not speaking spanish, swedish or italian at all (though having latin at school gives me sometimes a slightly hint what italian words could mean), and my knowledge in french is a third-language-at-school one (which means not very good, but understandable with some help), I’m always happy to read in this forum about news from other IF-communities across the world just because I’m curious what’s going on there. I would appreciate to have translations of good games in other languages, but since IF is way more complex than a book, it shows up that only a few games ever were translated.
This is the reason why I’m pretty sure you’re not a troll. Welcome back. Yes, being forced to learn something we feel no connection to is often the best way to hate it for life…
I think it would make sense to give the translation a new IFID, because it is, in some pertinent senses, a separate work. It is contained in a different file which is not intended to replace the original file in archives and databases (it’s not merely a bugfix release). Also, it is at least conceivable that the translation uses some cool new Glulx-only extension and therefore is a Glulx file, whereas the original was Z-Code (of course, I’m speaking in general terms here; this might not apply to your game). Moreover, a translation will probably have different cover art (because of the changed title) associated with it. So, if some automated tools use the IFID for cataloguing, for fetching cover images and info from a database, for auto-selecting an appropriate interpreter and so on, it would be good to have a different IFID.
I think the analogy between IFIDs and ISBNs also supports the idea of separate IFIDs. With ISBN, you can order by number alone (or generally, query a database using the ISBN), and you know what you’re going to get. Accordingly, translated books will have a new ISBN.
As far as I can tell, Babel does not provide a neat way to systematically capture the close connection between an original and its translation(s). Cf. the Treaty, section 5.1:
So I guess I’d just mention the fact that it’s a translation in the blurb and the >ABOUT text.
Concerning the release numbers: I’d start with Release 1 (since it’s not a bugfix re-release of the original work) and write in the ABOUT text that the translation was “based on release X of the German version” or something like that. The release numbers of the original and the translation are probably going to get out of sync anyway, as soon as you fix some typos in only one of the versions.
I agree with this. Also, since “translations” between programming languages usually are given different IFIDs, even if the games are exactly the same (see the list of IFIDs for Colossal Cave), it would make sense that translations between different spoken languages would be as well.
Would testers need to know German as well, or just English?
Welcome back. Yes, being forced to learn something we feel no connection to is often the best way to hate it for life…