Translating Tinykin to Simplified Chinese: Hiding the Easter Eggs and Planting the Puns
By Sirius WolfSlight spoilers relating to the character ‘Meneth’
In D&D, the most challenging monsters are often those with lots of immunities. With their spells doing nothing and their weapons not leaving a scratch, adventurers have to find innovative ways to get the upper hand, or they’re doomed.
For translators, these monsters are called humor.
When translating humor, the common weapons and day-to-day magic of a translator are often denied. The reason is simple: humor is often specific to languages and cultures. That’s why translators are often seen scratching their heads trying to find innovative ways to rework humor, sometimes recreating their own versions from scratch.
So, when From the Void’s Director, Marc Eybert-Guillon, approached me and my friend Luminous in February 2022, inviting us to work on a game that “features many puns and jokes in its writing”, we instantly knew it wouldn’t be an easy quest. Still, with a mixture of confidence and curiosity, we opted in. Later, we learned that the game in question was Tinykin, and it’s overflowing with humor indeed, in that almost every single character’s name is an easter egg or a pun.
After weeks of sweat and joyful tears, Luminous (as translator) and I (as editor) localized the game into Simplified Chinese, and we’re proud of what we produced. What challenges crossed our path, and how we tackled them, you may ask? Well, here’s an article explaining our decisions regarding two of the characters’ names, which hopefully will satisfy your curiosity!
Hiding the Easter Eggs
As aforementioned, there’re a lot of Easter Eggs in Tinykin. A familiar name here, a famous line there... You get the idea.
There’s a character, Meneth, who resembles Arthas Menethil, the famous prince-turned-Lich-King from Warcraft. Meneth keeps pursuing something that drives him mad over time, quite like the story of how Arthas becomes the Lich King, and he even speaks a couple of Arthas quotes. “Well, this should be an easy one,” you may think, as the Warcraft franchise is enjoyed by Chinese players as well. “Just transcribe the name and people will get the reference!”
But it’s much more complicated than that. Generally speaking, all Chinese names carry meaning, but when western names get transcribed, they look like random syllables with no concrete meaning. As a result, Chinese players often have difficulties remembering transcribed names. Not to mention that most Chinese names consists of 2 to 4 characters, while Arthas Menethil’s official transcription, “阿尔萨斯·米奈希尔”, has 8! Most people will only remember the first half. To prove this, I asked some of my Chinese friends who are familiar with the franchise if they can recall Arthas’ family name on the spot: most were oblivious to it, while the best answer was “米-something”, only getting the first character/syllable right. Had we done a simple transcription, there’s no way they’d ever link it back to Arthas!
Well, then how about we transcribe “Arthas” instead and give it a similar twist? From “阿尔萨斯” to “阿尔萨”, maybe? This way, people would surely understand it as a reference to Arthas, right? But that’s exactly the problem: we don’t want to shove the easter egg into the player’s face, either. It would spoil the fun, and it’s done more subtly in English anyway. Also, there are hundreds of NPCs in the game, and a lot of their names are similarly twisted from their references. If we translate all of them this way, we’ll surely overcook it for the Chinese players, who’d end up with a mountain of random syllables!
Now, it’s also worth considering that Meneth speaks several of Arthas’ lines, which we’ve taken extra efforts to make sure resemble the original lines’ official localization from Warcraft. So if we make the reference in the name too obvious, players would think “Oh here’s a character that’s a nod to Arthas. Oh, look, he speaks like Arthas, too.” Which is less fun. Ideally, we’d want them to be like: “Oh here’s a character that speaks like a certain someone from a franchise I know... Oh, it’s Arthas! Ah, his name is a subtle hint, too!”
With this in mind, we took another look on what we are actually aiming for. A name that can actually be linked to Arthas, but not too obvious to spoil the fun. But we tried all possible combinations already! At this point, it seemed like we were out of options and had to pick a less satisfactory translation and live with it.
But then another idea came to mind: there’s a double-translation technique for Chinese, which means that we transcribe the name (so that it matches the original name phonetically) but also pick characters that carry a meaning (so that it also describes the subject). I used this technique in my past work, most notably when translating Wildermyth. Back then I translated a group of evil mechanical skeletons called Morthagi as “魔煞机” (pronunciation: Mo-sha-ji. Literally: “deathly demonic machines”). If we translate the name Arthas this way, its pronunciation can still be linked to Arthas, but it’ll have another layer of meaning as a cover-up, which makes it more subtle, and the players may take a while to realize (but ultimately should be able to do so)!
Once we thought of it, we knew it would be the approach. After some more discussion, we ended up translating Meneth to “厄丧思”. At first glance, it means “doomed and consumed by madness” or “mad by misfortune”, which is a fine description of Prince Arthas on his pursuit of Frostmourne (and also of Meneth, who has a similar experience in Tinykin). But if you read it out, it sounds just like someone who has a slip of tongue pronouncing “Arthas”. Now we believe we’ve hidden the easter egg well—not too obvious and not too subtle, and even with a pun on top!
Speaking of puns, the next character’s name is a pun itself:
Planting the Puns
There’s another NPC in the game called Ridmi: a helpful fellow who offers the main character tips and advice—basically the tutorial character (a lot of games have characters like this). Now, the pun lies in the name, which sounds like “README”, a file that contains information about a software in computer science. Simple, right?
Well, again, not exactly simple for us translators. This time, the problem lies in the term “README”. It’s usually left untranslated in Simplified Chinese! We made some researches and found that in Chinese, people sometimes call it “读我档案” (literally: “read me file”) or “自述文件”, but neither is well known. And not to mention they’d make for very awkward names no matter how we twist them! (And in case you’re wondering, leaving the character’s name as “Ridmi” untranslated would be a really bad idea.)
Of course, there’s also the option of transcription, but the pun would be lost, and it would just become a name. Going with this option would amount to admitting defeat. Well, it wouldn’t be that bad, but it’s a lackluster option and we seriously hoped we wouldn’t have to resort to it.
It did feel like a dead end: this is a term without a generally accepted translation, period. What could we possibly do? Well, we can change the term! README is a term in computer science that bears some similarities to a tutorial person in video games. Perhaps we can change it to a similar term in another field?
Of course we could! After sitting on it for a while, we figured we could call Ridmi “庞白” in Chinese—a pun on “旁白”, which means “narrator” or “aside” (as in a play). It’s in another field unrelated to computer science, of course, but calling the tutorial person “aside” also has an ironic effect, much like calling them “README”. The humor is saved! And there’s also a kicker: “庞” is a family name in China, so this looks like a normal Chinese name too.
Each of these two names took us a lot of time and creativity to nail down, but they’re definitely worth it, as we believe they’ll play their part in making the game more fun and enjoyable for Chinese players. And they’re satisfying in their own right!
Tinykin is available on PC, Xbox (Game Pass), Playstation, Switch
Localization by From the Void:
German, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (EU), Russian, Japanese, Simplified Chinese
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