Our first LocJAM [post-mortem, English]

Greetings, fellow players and translators!

My name is Apolline, one of the translator behind Aventures d'un Autre Monde, our submission for the 2021 LocJAM. In this post-mortem, I will present our project, our team, the challenges we faced and bits of our translation we are really proud of. Let's get started!

Our localisation team

Apolline Descy (Aikya) [she/her]

That's me! I'm a 21 years old student from Belgium. I just completed a Bachelor's degree in translation & interpretation (EN/ES - FR) at the Université libre de Bruxelles. I'm now doing a Master's degree at the University of Salamanca, where I also work as a language teaching assistant in French. I'm a huge fan of video games and tabletop games, and I dream of working in video games localisation. Actually, I even have some experience already! Since 2020, I translated four indie games (two RPG and two visual novels). Check my profile to find out more about them!

Estel Birchler [she/her]

I met Estel in Brussels, as she was studying for the same degree than me (but in English and German). She's now studying for a Master's degree in literary translation! She did an amazing job during this LocJAM, coming up with clever solutions and making sure no grammar mistakes would get past her eyes.

Johanne Druez [she/her - they/them]

Estel is the one who introduced Johanne to me. I'm glad she did, as Johanne is an excellent translator with a lot of creativity! She finished her Bachelor's degree (in English and German as well) this year, and is now about to start her Master's in interpretation. She is really interested in gender-neutral writing in French, and would like to do academic research on this subject one day. This gender-neutral translation was right up her alley!

Maxime Wallyn [he/him]

Maxime and I met during our first year in Brussels. We were both taking English and Spanish, and we ended up in the same class. As we were both interested in video games localisation, we immediately clicked. It was only natural we team up for this JAM! Maxime was a fantastic teammate. He made sure his translations could always be understood easily by new players who would not be familiar with tabletop RPG.

Victor Kozsuch [he/him]

Victor and I became friends six years ago, during high school. That take me back! He does not come from a translation background nor translated parts of the booklet, but it does not mean his role was not important! He has played tabletop RPG for seven years now, and as a result he proved to be a wonderful editor. Thanks to him, we could make sure our game was playable, without any incoherence or mistakes, and used proper terms from tabletop games.

As far as I'm concerned, I couldn't have wished for a better team! We were all very invested during these 3 days and, since we all got along, we had a lot of fun. We also come from different French-speaking countries (Belgium, France and Switzerland), which was really interesting. This way, we could make sure we wouldn't accidentally add incomprehensible Belgian slang in our translation for example ;-) I really hope we will get to work together again in the future <3

How did we decide to took part into the LocJAM?

We did not all have the same goals when we created our team, but that never stopped us! The LocJAM was an amazing opportunity for us to meet other translators, to learn new skills, to start building a portfolio and to know more about the profession. But most importantly, it was an opportunity to have fun! Working without pressure (except for the deadline!), with our friends, with as much creative freedom as we wanted was truly a nice way to spend our weekend.

The main challenges we faced

Sure, the LocJAM was really fun, but it does not mean it was always easy! We discovered lots of new challenges and had to come up with solutions each time. But, luckily, I think we nailed it.

Teamwork

As you probably know, translators are used to work on their own, alone in a dark room with their laptop, a cup of tea and their cat (the cat being, obviously, the most important element!). Of course, we all did some groupwork in the past, but we still weren't used to working with such a large team! Sometimes, an English word can have several translation in French, and it wasn't always easy to get five persons to agree on one word! Especially since translators and editors tend to pay really close attention to details. Sometimes, we argued over what might seem like the silliest things! You can be sure than whenever we writing feedback on someone else's translation, we would always start with "This might be nitpicking, but..."

But teamwork also have its advantages! We were faster as a group and, because we were a team, no one got discouraged or felt like giving up in the middle. We also were more efficient when proofreading the translation (it's easier to have five pair of eyes looking for a missing space instead of only one) and were more creative, as everyone was always suggesting ideas and solutions to our problems.

In the end, we really worked well as a team. We sometimes disagreed, but we never fought and always came up with solutions that pleased everyone. We also all loved receiving feedback from our teammate. It was a great way to improve, and everyone was being respectful and constructive. For example, we pointed out the bits we disagreed with, but also the parts we loved, where we felt like the translator had made great choices. This was really rewarding.

The time constraint

The LocJAM was our first time working with such a short deadline. This scared us a little bit at first, especially since some of us were a bit busy moving out or working a summer job for example. Luckily, we were really efficient, and after the first day, we completely stopped stressing out about the deadline! Of course, we still wish we had time to experiment more, but we are really satisfied with the translation itself, as we didn't have to sacrifice the quality at all.

Using new tools

To spice up our LocJAM, we decided to use CAT tools for the first time! We settled on Smartcart, which was mostly free and online. I knew the basic thanks to a class I took during my Erasmus exchange, but the rest of the team had to learn how to use it before the beginning of the LocJAM. It was a bit tricky at first, but it was a really good investment as we gained a lot of time during the JAM. Thanks to Smartcat, we were able to translate without worrying about the HTML code, to easily write comments on our teammates' segments, and to make sure our translation was coherent and consistent.

We also used Antidote, a French software meant to help checking the spelling, the grammar and the typography. Thanks to our Bachelor's degree, we already knew how to use it efficiently and we saved a lot of time.

I wish we had time to experiment with the HTML and the CSS as well, but unfortunately we had to make sacrifices in order to submit our work in time. I would have loved to add accessibility options, such as a way to change the font for dyslexic people, a way to download a PDF of the booklet, or a button to switch the language to French or English. Maybe we could add these in the future?

Making our translation gender-neutral

Our last and main challenge was actually... A challenge we chose ourselves. Our team is composed of two men, two women and one non-binary person and, as a result, we were really committed to produce the most inclusive translation we could! The source-text itself was actually gender-neutral, which reaffirmed our will to be inclusive. The issue was that, unlike English, French is a heavily gendered language! It was truly a difficult task, but I think we did a pretty good job in the end. We'll discuss this point more in detail in the next part, where we'll present our translation and talk about choices we made we are really proud of.

Our translation

I'm now going to give more details about our translation itself. Even if you don't speak French, this part might still be of interest to, you so please keep reading!

Making French gender-neutral

As I said earlier, French is a heavily gendered language. As a result, it's not always easy to translate gender-neutral text in English, but we still did our best! Here is an example:

• The word "player" has two translations in French. If you're talking about a male player, you will say "un joueur", while you will use "une joueuse" for a female player.
• Usually, French use the masculine form as a default "neutral" form. But we didn't think it was neutral at all! If we had used "un joueur" during the whole translation, it would have seemed like all players, or most of them, were men! We wanted to show that games are for everyone, and so we started looking up for solutions.

More and more, inclusive spaces in French-speaking countries tend to use l'écriture inclusive (inclusive writing).

What is l'écriture inclusive?

This is a way to write in French that is meant to include women and non-binary people in the language, instead of using only masculine form. L'écriture inclusive offers many different solutions, and not all of them are used all the time! Take a look to see what are the most common ones, and whether or not we used them.

• The interpunct · is the most well known one. Instead of writing "les joueurs", you can write "les joueur·euse·s", which is a mix between the masculine and the feminine form. Although this solution is often the most common, we decided against using it for two reasons. Firstly, the interpunct messes with screen readers and makes a text harder to read for dyslexic peoples, which was totally against our goal of being inclusive. Secondly, the interpunct cannot be read aloud, while you will need to do so with the rules of a game so you can explain them to the rest of the players! As a result, using the interpunct was out of the question.
• Sometimes, people will invent new neutral forms, like "lea joueureuse". Unlike the interpunct, these can be read aloud and are not ableist. However, they are still very rare in French. We didn't want to confuse older people, children, or people who are not familiar with inclusive spaces at all. As a result, we decided not to use these recently created neutral forms either.
• The neopronoun "iel" is also very common. It is a bit similar to the English pronoun "they". As it is a neopronoun, you won't find it in any dictionary (for now!), but it does not mean it does not exist. Many non-binary people and inclusive spaces use it. It is a mix of the two gendered pronouns of the third person, "elle" and "il". As we really like this pronoun and wanted to encourage its use, we used it several times in our translation to make it more gender-neutral.
• We also used neutral words whenever possible. For example, "joueur" and "joueuse" are the gendered translations of "player". To avoid them, we decided to use "partenaire de jeu" (litt. "game partner"), which stays the same in the feminine and masculine form. We tried to come up with this kind of solution as much as possible, as this was definitely the most inclusive option we had.
• Whenever we could find a neutral word, we tried to write both the masculine and the feminine word, like "les joueurs et les joueuses". Of course, we tried to that as little as possible, so our translation would still be easily readable!
• Finally, we also made some tiny grammatical changes. For example, "the GM" is not gender-neutral in French, and we would have to write "le ou la MJ". However, "votre MJ" (litt. "your GM") is! Whenever we could safely make these changes without changing the meaning, we did, which helped us keeping an inclusive translation.

As you can see, we really tried to make this booklet as gender-neutral as possible while still making sure it would be easily understood, I hope we succeeded!

Some others interesting facts about our translation

• Fate Dice™ and Deck of Fate

The original game was probably released in 2012 or 2013, but our translation was made in 2021! As a result, we had to take into account the "time jump" when translating. Take a look at this sentence: "The Deck of Fate will be available from Evil Hat in 2013 or 2014." Here, the original author used the future tense, as the Deck of Fate was still not available at the time. But in our translation, it wouldn't make any sense to use the future for an event that took place eight years ago! As a result, we first checked if the Deck of Fate was indeed available on the website. Then we translated the sentence to "Le deck de la destinée est disponible sur le site d’Evil Hat (en anglais)." (The Deck of Fate is available on Evil Hat's website [in English].). As you can see, we switched to the present tense! Notice also how we add this "(en anglais)". Indeed, we are writing for French readers, who might not always speak English (or not very well). As a result, it's better to let them know beforehand that the website we're sending them on might not be translated!

Even though we translated the names "Fate Dice" and "Deck of Fate" (so the rules would be clearer for non-English speakers), we also still had to make sure the English names appeared somewhere in the translation as well! Indeed, there is no official translation for these accessories yet. If a player want to buy them, he will need to look for "Fate Dice", as he won't find any "dés du destin" on Evil Hat's website. As you can see, translators always need to think how their text will be used by their readers ;)

• Aspects

The word "aspect" exists in French as well... But this isn't the word we used in our translation! You always need to be wary of false friends when translating from English to French. In French, "aspect" would strictly refer to something's appearance, which wouldn't match the examples given in the rules. As a result, we decided to use "attribut" instead, which has a broader meaning, similar to "aspect" in English.

We also translated "high concept" as "concept clé" and "trouble" as "mal". We really decided to be creative to find translations that would be clear, easy to remember and natural for a French speaker. But there were many possibilities and we rejected many proposition before settling on this one! I can't wait to see what the other French translations have used!

What's next?

Sooo... LocJAM is over, does it mean we are done with game localisation? No! We had a lot of fun translating AAW, and we actually plan to translate the rest of the manual over the summer! This way, French speakers will be able to enjoy the full game!! :D

Also, as far as I'm concerned, I am also working on a new visual novel translation... It should come out really soon, so stay tuned <3

And that's the end of this post-mortem! Thank you for reading everything. We all look forward to hearing your feedback on our work and checking out the rest of the submissions :)

Thanks as well to Allan Dellepiane for organizing this JAM! We can't wait to participate again!!

Apolline