I love word games. I really do. I'm not very good at them, but they're fun.
That said, however, they're a huge pain to translate if gameplay has anything to do with vocabulary, wordplay or puns. Even Scrabble requires some tweaks from language to language - the game is carefully balanced in English based on our letter frequency. If you translate it into French, suddenly you need to include more U tiles and the letter H needs its value increased.
Puns don't translate well at all, with very few exceptions. Occasionally, you'll find a word that has multiple meanings in multiple languages, but these words are very rare. Similarly, games requiring wordplay are a huge pain to translate.
I'm told that the Spanish-language editions of Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld books are exceptional. I'd love to read them sometime. Or, more accurately, have my wife read them to me, as I don't read Spanish.
Right now, I'm working on the translation of a game that uses wordplay. And has very strict requirements for this wordplay - the total number of available letters is limited, and there are limitations on the available words, too.
I've spent the better part of a month fighting with this one. And it just gets more and more frustrating as I work my way through it. Because it requires jokes and onomatopoeia and changing languages really screws with them.
It's the second-most frustrating gaming project I have ever worked on.
The first? Also based on wordplay, but it also required puns.
It took a team of four of us multiple evenings communicating via Skype to get it done.
And then the publisher decided not to print it after all.
Not. Fun.
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