Director of Narrative
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From having a number of non-native English speakers in the Paizo fan club, both here on the boards and when I'm asleep in the chatroom, I have noticed a pronounced interest in having the Pathfinder and Game Mastery material translated. I was simply curious about the process in which that occurs.
Is it farmed out to a company that publishes in that certain tongue? Is it handled by a firm that is in business to translate published English material? Has fan-supplemented work ever sufficed for this kind of request?
There seems to be a fair number of competent German-speakers here on the boards that it seems that the translation process could easily go forward if there was a green light to do so without fear of IP issues. I was just wondering what this part of publishing entailed.
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Hmm, I don't really get the question... :)
Well, we germans have to translate the adventures, backgrounds etc. all the time, if we want to play Paizo stuff or material by other publishers.
I know a lot of german players that use Paizo-material but I don't know of a german group that plays in english.
There might be some, but I doubt it.
There isn't much translated D&D-stuff in Germany. There's a company, Feder & Schwert, that is licensed to translate and publish WotC books, but they focus mainly on rule-books and fiction and only occassionally publish adventures.
There are some smaller companies that translated some of the 'Qintessential'-books from Mongoose and some Kalamar-stuff, but this isn't really much.
D&D players in Germany have to do homebrew-stuff or translate english material if they want to play on a regular base.
Our group had english books but played german, with english terms in it like: "Mach einen Fortitude-Save, DC15." or "Ich caste Magic Weapon auf seinen Quarterstaff."
Even names and places didn't get translated.
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I guess it takes a native publisher interested enough to bring the product to the native market. Then it deends on this publisher - does it have its own translators, does it depend on freelancer translators to do a localization... There was a time when i was sure one certain german pubisher relied mainly on computerised translations (any player out there remembers terms like "Riesenvettern" (Giant kin) or "watschelnder Komposthaufen" (shambling mound)?
As I never read out flavor texts to my players I don't mind to much if adventures aren't translated (though I'd really love to see german pathfinder products I don't see this coming any time soon) as I'm reading english fluently enough. since some of my layers don't I'm always glad when the main rules are translated though.
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Translating the blog posts to German has been approved, but anything that is available as a product is off limits for us (we were gunning for the Player's Guide and Hollow's Last Hope).
Translation rights are still under negotiation. (French, Italian, Spanish and Hebrew have also frequently translated D&D material). And no details about partner companies (or company) in Germany are known.
Since there is no German OGL (the translation of the rulebooks itself is a work under copyright... i.e. a glossary may not be distributed - even tables listing English and German equivalents is off limits), a translation team would need to build such a glossary for its own use.
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Since there is no German OGL (the translation of the rulebooks itself is a work under copyright... i.e. a glossary may not be distributed - even tables listing English and German equivalents is off limits), a translation team would need to build such a glossary for its own use.
Which is quite sad. And I guess this won't even change with 4E. It's a shame that there isn't a german OGL. This would vitalize the whole RPG scene in germany, but I guess F&S (the german publisher that holds the D&D license and the rights to the translations) is afraid of competition.
Our group had english books but played german, with english terms in it like: "Mach einen Fortitude-Save, DC15." or "Ich caste Magic Weapon auf seinen Quarterstaff."
Even names and places didn't get translated.
Hehe...Same here.
Our group had english books but played german, with english terms in it like: "Mach einen Fortitude-Save, DC15." or "Ich caste Magic Weapon auf seinen Quarterstaff."
Even names and places didn't get translated.
Yup, that's the way our group is playing, too - since there is no translation, by definition, that could rival the original. What's more, using translated names and stuff often gives me the feeling of it detracting from the "fantasy" feel of the game. No sense in ruining the escapist aspect of it all :).
Anyways, for Pathfinder, I'm in the process of translating an updated/improved version of the Player's Guide that contains most of the Sandpoint information from PF#1. As was pointed out, already, it's for "home use only", though.
I actually work as a professional translator for a major player in the computer industry (English to Norwegian). The way it works is that the company sends out the material they want translated to their European office. The European office then sends out the material to the various translation companies throughout Europe who are contracted to translate for them. We then translate, edit, proofread, do a little programming now and then and tests the software and websites for errors.
Translation is, like other services, relatively expensive, and not something I would think Paizo would spend money on. How many more German buyers would've bought products if the products were in German? Not many, I suspect, and the additional income wouldn't cover the costs.
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Our group had english books but played german, with english terms in it like: "Mach einen Fortitude-Save, DC15." or "Ich caste Magic Weapon auf seinen Quarterstaff."
Even names and places didn't get translated.
I'd like to say that I'm a French Canadian (Quebec Province) and we do the same in my gaming group. We use English only sourcebooks (PHB, DMG, MM, "complete" series). I'm doing my own translation of PF, but translate mostly only the descriptions of rooms/events I'll need to give the players during session, so I'm not at a search for words during play. Otherwise, game terms, names and long descriptions I'm never going to read to the players stay as they are.
I can add a few points to the discussion here: Translations could be a good thing to have, but even if there was a French one, I'm not sure I would buy it for the following reasons.
- French translations I've seen in the past (like 2e core rulebooks), ruined most of the flavor text and terms. Translation of PF/Modules content would NEED to be done by people that understand gaming content and can translate it properly. And I would require that nothing is lost. As in no summarizing (or worse, cutting) of description/flavor content.
- I'm used to the English terms and game system, and learning French equivalents would end up in misunderstanding and time loss at my table. So, I could buy translation of description/fluf text, but I'd like to keep most of the stat blocks intact (save for tactics and parts of abilities descriptions, but game terms would need to stay untouched even in those.)
- On top of that, translating names of NPCs, monsters and places would also ruin it for me. I want to be able to come to this board and discuss Sandpoint, the Hagfish, Sinspawn or Shadowmist without having to guess who's who and where's where, if translations changes the names too much.
- And last, but not least, I'm not sure I would wait extra delays to get my PF/Modules in French.
I know this post is quite negative, but I just want to point out a couple obstacles I see in translating and selling translated books.
Our games are a mix of a lot of English terms for rules items, some (very little) German and the rest Saarlännisch.
Since we're used to use English rulebooks*, we don't mind that there's no German Pathfinder stuff.
It's not all bad, though: You keep in practise. I don't think that my English would be as good as it is if I wasn't playing RPGs.
* That's because of several reasons:
- A lot of RPG stuff is never translated. Even for big games, there's stuff that never saw translation (Monster Manual 3 is Monster Handbuch 2 in Germany since they never did MM2), and smaller things? Forget it. So unless you want to play only the most popular stuff (akin to listening to pop music), you have to stick to English stuff
- I'm impatient and don't want to wait till they get around to translating books
- Lots of stuff that is translated is translated badly. I mean, really crappy. Effectively raping both languages involved, forcing them to carry the child, and sell that as translation. Most of it is people having no idea what they're translating (translating magic missile like magic rocket), but there's cases of people just screwing up, and bad.
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- Lots of stuff that is translated is translated badly. I mean, really crappy. Effectively raping both languages involved, forcing them to carry the child, and sell that as translation. Most of it is people having no idea what they're translating (translating magic missile like magic rocket), but there's cases of people just screwing up, and bad.
The german translations aren't that bad...
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Hi everyone,
hello Oliver,
we already had this kind of discussion before, but may I point out that there *are* german adventure publishers who use the OGL *and* who use german equivalents of the english class expressions (come on: is there any valid possibility to copyright class names like fighter/ Kämpfer etc.?).
It would require a bit of work but who could prevent you from translating OGL content into german (and the spell, skill, and feat titles should be sufficient, shouldn't they be?) After all there are already countless d20 games which build upon OGL rules and heavily modify them/ expand on them (take e.g. Iron Heroes et al.).
Not the OGL is the issue, it's getting a license, finding translators and a company willing to shoulder the risk...
Greetings,
Günther
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About translation quality in german and availability of german D&D material:
It's one of the most snobbish opinions I encountered in Germany and yet I heard it again and again: German translations are generally horrific and you can only enjoy the game if you use the original.
Most of the people expressing this opinion never layed hands on any german D&D book since 2nd edition (remember "Thac0" = "ETW0"? ;-) ). I can confirm that translations of that time were often unwillingly funny.
But have a look at the german 3.5 core books, at the FRCS and other books. They are well translated, don't cost considerably more and at least for my former D&D group they managed to sway them to D&D (all of them were RPG newbies and very hesitant about it, even worse 80% of them didn't understand english that well).
I never felt sorry for using the german books and favoured translating Paizo content during the preparation phase over having to translate rules expression during the game.
There is a following for german D&D. But there are trends (e.g. the one which made WotC virtually abandon adventure publication until Paizo's successful launch of adventure paths).
There are currently two companies publishing official german D&D (i.e. D&D and not d20) adventures:
- Feder & Schwert, which publish WotC translations (unfortunately they currently only offer the 3.0 "blue" adventures): translation quality = good.
- Games In Verlag, which publishes "Kingdoms of Kalamar" adventures. Their first adventure trilogy was very well translated and seemed to be a commercial success, too. In the meantime a steady stream of new translations was published. Actually these translations are in some way *better* than the original: some of the adventures were published with 3.0 rules. Games In Verlag updated the rules to 3.5 and felt free to improve the content, too.
According to this text (scroll down the page: "(quotation of the above mentioned source: "Die jetzige 3.5-Version ist führend und zukunftorientiert, da machen wir mit! Um jeden Abenteuerband den nötigen Schliff zu geben, werden diese vollkommend neu layoutet und dem "Neuen Stil" angepaßt!
Ergo, da gibt keinen alten AMI-Schrott und auf deutsch aufgewärmt, nein, es werden völlig neue Abenteuer, da staunte sogar unser Lizenzgeber und US-Herausgeber KENZER, und von WOTC wurden wir bereits für diese vorzügliche Arbeit belobigt.") Btw. the (german) description of how quality checks by the licence givers are done is quite enlighting. In the case of Paizo any translator could be glad that only *one* company is involved! ;-)
You see, there are options and there is demand for high quality D&D/ d20 translations. Of course you are right that the translations have to be sound.
Greetings,
Günther
It's one of the most snobbish opinions I encountered in Germany and yet I heard it again and again: German translations are generally horrific and you can only enjoy the game if you use the original.
I might be a snob for it, but I think that. Maybe not "generally", but there are enough translations I don't like at all. I might not shudder all the time, but wince often enough to make it undesirable to use the translations.
Most of the people expressing this opinion never layed hands on any german D&D book since 2nd edition (remember "Thac0" = "ETW0"? ;-) ). I can confirm that translations of that time were often unwillingly funny.
My opinions are actually based on 3.0 material, though I guess that they had to keep lots of bad parts when they made the 3.5 translation, because all the "compatibility talk".
For a time, we had a couple of people who used those books in some of our groups.