Translating the Cyberpunk Future | Hacker News Reader

Translating the Cyberpunk Future

blog.neocabgame.com

100 pointswormold35 comments

I grew up in Germany and we suffered a lot from badly translated Games (and worse so in dubbed movies). Almost everyone of my generation ended up just learning English and played the original instead. Most of the time that was all that was available anyways.

Except of course for the games translated by Boris Schneider. They arguably were better in German because of his excellent (and hilarious) translations, most notably the Monkey Islands.

Apparently his efforts earned him a Wikipedia page: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Schneider-Johne

Much of my early English vocabulary was attained by playing Leisure Suit Larry with a dictionary in my hand.

Is it possible you remember some of those German Monkey Island quotes? Do any of them work when translated back into English? I'm intrigued...

Here you go: http://www.int33h.com/test/mi/index.html?lng=de

I wonder if Germany is still the biggest market for dubs, or whether China has taken over.

Italian here and vouching for the correctness of this. They picked an interesting way to "get out of jail", helped by flexibility in the scenario.

Another solution would have been to use the antiquated and formal "lei", which is gender-neutral, replaces the second person with a third, and technically defaults to feminine even when talking to a male (because it's short for "your person", "la sua persona", which is feminine in Italian) - although in practice this is not always the case and the verb can get gendered arbitrarily. "Voi" can also be used in the same way, but then the following verb is always gendered.

I know it would be unfair to ask you to defend the author's writing simply because you speak their language, but I would be grateful if you (or anybody else who speaks Italian) could explain this part of the article for me:

> We also analyzed the solutions currently adopted by some activists, like the use of asterisks, “x,” and “u.”

> Siamo tutt* bellissim* .

> Siamo tuttx bellissimx.

> Siamo tuttu bellissimu.

> I’d seen examples of this on signs before, but it had always seemed to me that asterisks and such were not meant to be a solution, but rather a way to highlight the issue and start a discourse on something that’s deeply ingrained in our language. For our cyberpunk future, we wanted a solution that was more readable and pronounceable, so we thought we might use schwa (ə), the mid central vowel sound.

I get why the * and x are unpronounceable, but what's wrong with the u? As an ignoramus on the subject of the Italian language, "tuttu" and "bellissimu" would have been believable to me as Italian words. They look pronounceable to me. Anybody know what I'm missing?

The "U" would be readable and pronounceable in Italian.

Stringing a few "U" ending words together does sound a bit wierd though... like your making a hooting sound or something.

It would read like a bad parody of someone from Sardinia speaking in Italian with a thick accent.

In this example, the ending u sound like you have some mental issue.

Anyway, that's an oversimplification of the problem. There hare many words that don't have just the final letter changed, like actor/actress (attore, attrice)

> the ending u sound like you have some mental issue.

Or you're from deep Sardinia. "Pattagarru, Ripireddu, Caruddu, Franco..."

> actor/actress

I believe the "pc" anglosphere has moved to actor being used for women too.

Another solution in such a language would be to abandon the feminine forms and use solely the masculine. The justification would be that since we want to treat sexes equally, they should use the same grammar. The masculine forms are chosen because they are already sometimes used as the "default".

A version of this in English is to take a traditionally gendered term like Actor/Actress and switch to using Actor for all.

Also Italian here. The other issue with using "Lei" is everyone would sound like some overly formal grand parent or maybe a government official... it would be like people suddenly breaking into the royal "we" in english.

Though funny enough, English has settled on the formal 'you' even when addressing peers.

On this, there is a historical note: the equivalent form exists in Italian ("voi"), but fascist ideologues considered it an "anglophism" and severely forbid it (because of course anything from "perfidious Albion" had to be uprooted)...

The body touches on common problems in internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) which should be familiar to programmers who have done properly internationalized software in the past. The canonical implementation is gettext.

https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html and https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural...

The final quote is a one-sided view of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, a fundamental debate in 20th century linguistics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

I must say I was excited at the URL because I thought it was a Quarantine remake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(video_game)

Something that I'm surprised they didn't mention:

They say that most Italian people would pronounce the schwas by just omitting the last vowel altogether which, if I'm understanding correctly, is the vowel that indicates gender. That itself seems like an appropriate way to communicate "not one gender or the other". It also strikes me as a very believable way for language to evolve.

This reminds me of a funny story about Chinese writing. Chinese is not a gendered language. A little while ago they decided to split the third person pronoun into masculine and feminine forms because that's what Western cultures do and they thought it'd be progressive. And now we're fighting back against our thousands of years gendered language inheritance.

1. By "a little while ago", you mean 100 years ago--during the May Fourth Movement in 1919.

2. This change wasn't made for the sake of becoming more "progressive", it was to accomodate translations of Western literature into Mandarin.

More information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_pronouns

Why exactly are we fighting gendered language? Don’t we want to know if the subject is male or female?

Do you also want to encode race, country of origin, height, eye colour, birthdate, into every sentence? Why is gender special enough that it’s worth the problems it causes for many?

Gendered pronouns cut the search space in half which makes them an efficient way to avoid ambiguity. Other traits aren't so clearly split. Gender is distributed roughly 50/50 across the entire population, regardless of nationality, skin color, eye color, etc.

You could phrase the question this way if @trianglem was suggesting to make some language more gendered. It totally makes sense to ask, why gender is special, in such situation. But what they did is different, they asked why do people want to make a language less gendered. Which is a completely valid question to people who advocate this.

Some languages already do make distinction between genders, and this is a feature that makes gender special enough, unlike height or eye color. Making changes to a language requires effort and causes inconvenience, so it's up to advocates of making a language gender-neutral to provide a motivation which would be worth the effort. If there was a language which had different pronouns for people of different height or eye color and we wanted to change that, we would have to motivate this too.

I personally think that it's convenient to have both neutral 3rd person pronouns, which can be applied to anyone, and pronouns that make distinction based on something (not necessarily gender) as well. Neutral pronouns are useful in cases, when you don't know enough to choose the right non-neutral pronoun. Non-neutral ones are good because they give you a convenient way to make distinction between things you talk about, as @theli0nheart already noted here.

For example, in English you can introduce two people of different gender and then refer to them as "he" and "she" without having to repeat their (possibly long) names. In Turkish, where they have only one singular 3rd person pronoun "o", this won't work and you'll have to either name the people every time or use some other shortcuts. In Russian, for example, you can go even further than English — in this language even nouns, which do not denote people, have gender, so you can conveniently refer even to objects in your speech.

As someone who occasionally reads but usually does their very best to avoid this topic due to its tendency to be a total minefield, I just wanted to let you know that this particular argument doesn't work for me at all.

You'd be better acknowledging the fairly obvious benefits that come from encoding so much more information into a single word, and then going on to argue why despite that it would be a good idea to move towards neutral suffixes.

When speaking Spanish, for example, I definitely feel the lack of information conveyed by su when compared to his/her.

It's not obvious to me that knowing everyone's gender at all times is important. In fact, as you say, there's a variety of languages where that isn't the case.

When I'm talking about someone I bumped into on the bus, why is it relevant what gender they are above pretty much anything else you could choose to encode there? I'd much prefer to encode, for example, my relationship with them - whether I'm close to them or not, whether I see them as equal, inferior or superior.

Gender is mostly a thing that becomes relevant when talking about relationships and sex or healthcare, and even then not always.

Which pronoun? “Tā”?

Ya those two. Same pronunciation different characters.

Recently there was a huge backlash in Poland over the translation of the anime series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power on Netflix [1]. There's a non-binary character named Double Trouble and the translators decided to change its gender to male and named it Kłopotowski (Mr Trouble).

All this despite the fact that we do have neutral pronouns in Polish. Unfortunately not everyone agrees on the use of neutral form because it was sometimes used as an insult. There are other options though, for example you can use the plural version (just like they/them in English) or Dukaj's pronoun (introduced in the hard science fiction novel Perfect Imperfection [2] by Jacek Dukaj, “a space opera to end all space operas”) which is similar to the neutral pronoun but replaces the “o” suffix with “u”: it was / ono było / onu byłu.

The discussion about the infelicitous translation started on social media [3][4] and eventually was covered by mainstream media. One of the translators gave an interview [5] and said that the reason for the unfortunate decision was organizational chaos and lack of information flow.

1. https://www.netflix.com/title/80179762

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Imperfection

3. https://www.facebook.com/MistycyzmPopkulturowy/photos/246543...

4. https://www.facebook.com/catusgeekus/posts/2450286248592517

5. https://wyborcza.pl/7,75410,25383618,awantura-o-meskie-konco... (paywall)

We've just encountered Double Trouble and they're hilarious. Sorry to hear they got a bit mangled in translation.

The title had me excited for a second there... guess I’ll have to go back to my diesel powered crystal ball..

The typeface they used and can be seen in the screenshot at the end of the article makes the schwa look almost like a regular a.

>We also analyzed the solutions currently adopted by some activists, like the use of asterisks, “x,” and “u.”

If non-binary people in Italy are already using x's or u's for their pronouns, why not just use that?

Most gendered languages have 2 or 3 grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and sometimes neuter) with gender expressed in nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs. Depending on the language it may not be practically possible to add a new gender (or 20 new genders) due to the sheer number of grammatical forms you must memorize just to handle 2 or 3 genders. These are not trivial changes. In English, learning someone's pronoun might mean learning three words. In another language, it might mean learning literally hundreds of new grammatical rules. Instead of asking 99% of people to conform to the linguistic wishes of less than 1% of people, why not just expect them to find a solution within the existing language?

It's not pronounceable and it's not even a standard. Note how they say "some" activists, it's not a settled matter even in activist circles.

X isn't pronounceable. U is, though it sounds a bit funky.

FTA:

> I’d seen examples of this on signs before, but it had always seemed to me that asterisks and such were not meant to be a solution, but rather a way to highlight the issue and start a discourse on something that’s deeply ingrained in our language. For our cyberpunk future, we wanted a solution that was more readable and pronounceable [...] Not a perfect solution, perhaps, but eminently plausible in a futuristic cyberpunk setting.

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