Localizing Children’s Games

Sopelki, sacrifices and the Prince Charming’s Pulsating Sword of Love, or the localization of applications for children according to All Correct

Over the six years that our games division has existed we have translated several dozen products for children. These weren’t just computer games, we also translated cartoons, books, fairy tales and tabletop games. We would like to share our experience using some of our projects as an example of what should be avoided when localizing children’s applications as well as the principles which should be followed.

When we received an order for a translation of this kind for the first time, which was a cartoon for children aged 2–3 years old, we decided to contact a child psychologist to find out more about the specific features of children’s perception. We also added to our list of principles while working on other projects.

Applications for pre-school children should not have certain elements.

• Compound and complex sentences, participial phrases and participles. Grammar of this kind is too complex for small children to understand.
• Phraseologisms and combinations of words with a metaphorical meaning, because children often perceive them literally. For instance, it is better to say ‘got into trouble’ than ‘got into a bind’ or ‘I’m really bored’ instead of ‘I’m bored to death’.
• Mention of sex and alcohol. No comment is needed here.
• Words taken from other languages. For instance, the Russian word ‘чудовище’ works just as well as the anglicized word ‘монстр’ (monster) and it is far more understandable.
• Slang. We used the synonym ‘здорово’ for the words ‘круто’ and ‘классно’.
• Words with negative connotations We decided to change the word ‘жертвоприношение’ to ‘подношение’, as the context allowed this.
• Complex language. An example of this is when we used the phrase ‘My tummy hurts’ instead of saying ‘I have diarrhea’.

This is what should be used instead of the examples above:

• simple sentences;
• simple language;
• an informal mode of address;
• the words with diminutive suffixes.

I think you have probably already understood the general principle of translating products for children — everything must be as logical and understandable as possible and there should be no phrases with a dual meaning.

Localization of children’s applications does not usually cause any problems as they do not have much text and the skills that the child learns while playing are relatively simple. This was what working the Chili Fish application was like. This is a teaching game where the child can create and color in various fishes of different shapes.

Our job was to translate the marketing texts for it. The text mainly consisted of simple sentences using the present imperative form of verbs. We used the informal mode of address (‘раскрась’, ‘смешивай’), extremely simple turns of phrase (‘покорми рыбку’, ‘раскрась ее’) and words with diminutive suffixes (‘икринки’, ‘рыбки’).

However, we did encounter some difficulties when translating the game Smurfs Epic Run for Ubisoft, one of our most major clients.

Smurfs: Epic Run is an arcade game for mobile devices based on the world famous series about blue-skinned creatures. The game is not just aimed at children, but also at adults and smurf fans in particular. However, we still approached the translation as a game for pre-school children as the application is rated 4+.

Ubisoft provided us with reference materials that described the game before we started working on it and we watched several series of the cartoon and the full length films.

The game had its own special features, even though this sort of thing often happens in other projects as well.

• Strict line length limits. It was necessary to make the translation fit a particular number of characters.

Usually, the length of each line had to be no greater than the length of the original line. For instance, the Leaderboard title had a limit of 12 characters. It could have been translated as the usual ‘Список лидеров’ (14 characters), but we used ‘Лидеры’ (6 symbols) this time.

Unfortunately, the Russian language is not as laconic as English, so we often had to abbreviate words. These phrases were often difficult to understand, especially for children. After we had voiced our concerns to the clients, they listened to our opinions and increased the line length limit.

We are especially happy with the fact that the game has no phrases like ‘Товар.: скидка #% (алм. или мон.)’ — which is an abbreviated translation of the phrase ‘Companions prices: #% off (gems or coins)’ . Otherwise, many children would have been unable to immediately understand that ‘Товар.’ stands for ‘товарищи’, ‘алм.’ stands for ‘алмазы’ and ‘мон.’ for ‘монеты’.

Translation of names

Here, everything depends on whether the characters are new or not. If they are, then we either use transliteration or transcription or a literary translation if they are meaningful. If these characters have already appeared somewhere (in cartoons, in our case), we look for information on the Internet to find out the existing translation to keep consistent.

When we translated smurf names we used encyclopedias of their world made by their fans. However, we sometimes came across names that did not yet have any translations in public sources. In these cases, we followed the general rule for the translation of Smurf names: the word ‘smurf’ is not used and the name describes the main feature of the character. In cases where it was appropriate we also used diminutive suffixes.

King Smurf — Король

Snappy Smurf — Придира

Chilly Smurf — Мерзляк

Thief Smurf — Воришка

Informal form of address. It is best to address a child using the word ‘ты’, but there are some cases, particularly when translating grammatical forms in the past tense in games, where the gender of the character is not stated where this can cause certain difficulties. These difficulties are typical for localizers and this is one of the first things that we teach our translators.

Let’s look at this using the example of the sentence ‘You have received 5 gems’ — ‘Ты получил (получила) 5 самоцветов’. We have to apply one of the following translation solutions:

– making the phrase gender-neutral: ‘Мне удалось получить 5 самоцветов’

– use the present tense instead of the past tense: ‘Ты получаешь 5 самоцветов’

– use the passive voice: ‘Получено 5 самоцветов’.

We had mostly used the latter solution for this project:

‘You have collected 80 Stars!’ — ‘Собрано 80 звезд!’

‘You have jumped 15,000 Times!’ — ‘Совершено 15 000 прыжков!’

However, this is not that appropriate in certain sentences, so we used the present tense instead of the past tense: ‘You failed!’ — ‘Ты проигрываешь!’ instead of ‘Проиграно!’.

• Simplified choice of words. When we translate applications for children we try to use words which are as simple as possible.

We mainly work on application for children of pre-school or early school age, which means that we don’t have to be all that strict with following the rules we have been talking about. Even the youngest school children can already understand sentences that are more complex, as well as plays on words and the meanings of phraseologisms.

We used this fact a lot when working on Rayman Adventures, which is another Ubisoft project.

This game continues the saga of the adventures of the fearless Rayman and his brave companion Barbara. In this installment of the series, the heroes are on a quest to search for the missing eggs of the Incrediballs to give new life to the Sacred Tree.

‘Невероятыши’ is a translation of the English word ‘Incrediballs’, which combines the word for ‘balls’ (‘шарики’) and ‘incredible’ (‘невероятный’). At first, we wanted to translate it as ‘Потряшарики’, but this seemed to be too similar to the name of a famous Russian cartoon series.

Overall, we had to use our creativity, fantasy and erudition to the full when working on this project, studying thesauruses and various reference works and information about the previous editions of the game.

The most interesting aspect of this localization was probably translating the names of Incrediball families and the personal names of these characters. As always, Ubisoft had provided us with a lot of reference materials, including pictures of family members, their descriptions and even some of their own translation ideas. We had to take into account that every family of Incrediballs has a unique shape (each group of Incrediballs look like a particular fruit, vegetable or substance) and an overall theme (some families are strong and belligerent, some are sweet, some are involved with computers, etc.). The names of creatures from the same family had to be connected and reflect one of the general themes of that family. Our client offered us complete freedom, apart from using swearwords and mentioning alcohol.

Here are some examples.

The name of the family called ‘The Gleaks’ is a play on words, using ‘geek’ and ‘leek’. It was translated as ‘Ботанчики’ to reflect the strangeness of these Incrediballs and their plant origin.

Literal translation was not always right when translating names because the original used plays on words that were only present in the English language.

Original names: Paige 404, Buff’ring, Mbits, Dawn Load.

Our versions: Клава, Проц, Моник, Кулер.

For instance, Paige 404 is a mixture of the error message ‘Page 404’ and the English name Paige. If this was translated into Russian using that play on words, the overall idea of uniting all creatures from one family might have been lost. This is why we decided to play with the fact that these Incrediballs are described as lovers of sitting at their computers, so we named them using slang words for computer components which are well known to Russian users. We could not avoid the use of slang in this case as we had to keep to a particular theme.

We tried to use diminutive suffixes as recommended to us by the psychologist. This can be seen in the names of the families.

The Snifflers (to sniffle — сопеть) — Сопелки

The Petrolers (petrol — бензин) — Нефтята

The Blingblings (blings — побрякушки) — Побрякунчики

We also made sure that each character had a name that suited them. To do this, we asked for information about the name of each Incrediball. We found out that you could tell girls apart from boys because they had black eyelashes. Take a look at ‘Лозочка’ from the Wy-Ners family and ‘Лучок’ who is one of the Green Pieces.

It was actually hardest of all to invent names for the numerous Wy-Ner family members as they needed to remind people of grapes, as opposed to wine. The original used different types of grapes as names: Chard-O-Nay, Merl-O, Caber-nay, Rose-A, Pin-O, So-Vin-Yawn. However, a Russian user would most probably associate a literal translation of these names with alcohol. As you know, we were asked to avoid any associations with drinks of this kind. We called one of these Incrediballs ‘Усик’, as it referred to the vine strands and it because it was a funny abbreviation of the surname of our in-house translator. Here is the rest of the names: Изюмчик, Лозочка, Гроздинка, Изабелла, Кишмиш. The last two were named after types of grape that are famous in Russia.

We also had to adapt the description of this family when we were translating.

The Wy-Ners are a tight-knit family that stays in groups for safety. They may whine a little when stepped on…

As you can see, the original uses the homophonic words ‘wine’ and ‘whine’. We played with this by using words with a common root in Russian, with the word ‘градинки’ (taken from ‘виноградинки’) and the well-established phrase ‘град упреков’.

Градинки — очень дружная семья. Ее члены всегда стараются держаться группами, потому что так безопаснее. Если вы наступите на них, они обрушат на вас град упреков.

The developers regularly update the game and add new creatures to it. Once, there was an amusing situation when the latest update had come out and we had to urgently come up with a name for a family called The Roses (later renamed to The Best Buds). It seems like it should just have been translated as ‘Розочки’, but it’s not that simple. One of the first families were The Pinkies, translated as ‘Розовастики’, and we feel that names with the same root can confuse a young player. We knew that they looked like rosebuds, that they were very attractive and that they were named after well-known couples. This is what they were called originally: Juliet (from Romeo and Juliet), Louise (from Thelma and Louise), Sally (from When Harry Met Sally), Fiona (from Shrek), Bella (from Twilight) and Anastasia (from the cartoon about the Russian princess). Unfortunately, some of these names are not as famous in Russia, so we decided to adapt them by slightly changing the names of beautiful girls from Disney cartoons. This is how the ‘Чаровницы’ family of princesses came to be: Розахонтас, Авроза, Розоснежка, Розабелль, Розмин, Розушка.

As we already mentioned above, we translate fairy tales as well as applications. Another project for pre-school and young school children that were involved in was providing voice-overs for books written by Anna Solnechnaya (Sunny Anny): ‘The Furry Story. Rainbow Colored Rains’ and ‘The Furry Story. Mystery of Moon-forest’s Tower’.

The language used in a fairy tale should not be too literary and difficult to understand. We tried to make the text so that it would be easy for a child to understand and so that it would sound good. This is especially important for a piece of literature that parents will read to their child to send them to sleep.

We used Participle I and II as little as possible in the translation and tried to avoid overloading the text with tense agreements. We also tried to use generally recognized and simple words. For example, when we translated the word ‘спячка’, we did not use ‘hibernation’, which is the generally accepted term, as it would be more suitable for a documentary or science fiction film. We used the word ‘sleep’ instead. Special attention was paid to conveying plays on words and phraseologisms. This was due to the genre of the work and the age of the audience.

When we translated the things said by дядя Улей (Uncle Buzz), who is one of the main characters in the book and who looks like a bee, we added buzzing sounds to his speech to make him sound like one too. Our client supported this choice.

Все жалуются, что в меню нашей кофейни одни и те же сладости.
Everyone keeps complaining that my dezzzzerts are always the same.

Это все уже было.
I tried zzat already.

‘Дядя Улей’ was also sometimes abbreviated to ‘Дядя У’. When this is translated into English, Uncle B sounds like Uncle Bee. We decided that this was very appropriate, as the target audience could already understand plays on words.

A native speaker was employed to work on this project so that the text sounds authentic as well. We usually use American English for our translation, but we used British English this time because the client demanded it. An example of this is that the word ‘ученик’ was translated as ‘pupil’, as opposed to ‘student’.

When certain words such as ‘класс/классная комната’ and ‘предмет/занятие’ were translated that could have been called the same word — class/classes, we used different words to make sure that we did not confuse the child.

Однажды близнецы-пушистики дольше обычного задержались дома и влетели в класс в последнюю минуту.
One day the Furry twins were so late for class that they burst into the classroom at the very last minute.

И предметы были совсем необычные.
And the subjects themselves were very unusual.

The word ‘classroom’ was used for the word ‘класс’ in its meaning as ‘классная комната’, the word ‘class’ was used for ‘занятия’ and ‘subjects’ was used for ‘предметы’.

As we mentioned, we were also involved in working on the voice-over. This was done in two languages, Russian and English. There were many voices used and we tried to choose the right ones to suit the main characters: furry mum, furry dad and the furry twins.

As you probably already know, English to Russian and vice versa is not the only language pair that our company works in. One of these projects was the German language online browser game Wickie Online, which was based on a popular cartoon. One of the things we liked the most was that the game includes English lessons and a geographical knowledge competition.

We were presented with very good and detailed reference materials, but we still looked for additional information and discovered that there was an anime series in 1974, a film in 2009 and a 3D cartoon series in 2014. Only the film had been translated into Russian. This is what we used as a basis for our translations of names. Some online sources say that the father of the main character is called ‘Халвар’, while ‘Хальвар’ is used in the Russian version and it sounds more correct in Russian, keeping to the traditional way of translating Scandinavian names.

We managed to avoid the use of slang in the localization:

Cool, was?!
Здорово, да?

We also managed to avoid words with negative connotations. For instance, the German word ‘Opfergabe’ translates as ‘жертвоприношение’. We had two variants it could be replaced with — ‘подношение’ and ‘дары’. The second word has a very tangible positive connotation, which is why we decided to use the more neutral ‘подношение’.

We also decided to use phraseologisms because this is an educational game.

Das erfreut den Göttervater, und da will er sich nun auch nicht lumpen lassen!

Это обрадовало Отца богов, и он тоже не хочет ударить лицом в грязь!

The English teaching part is presented as a competition, and its nature was reflected during the localization process.

This is what one of the teaching pages looks like:

There were no problems with words such as when (‘когда’), sun (‘солнце’) or to rise (‘восходить’, ‘вставать’). However, both the English and German language feature articles that have no direct translation into Russian. We decided that it’s best not to leave an empty space in such cases, but to state what type of article it is (in this case it was ‘the’ — the definite article).

The player had to pass a test of their knowledge after every teaching block. Here’s an example of the various answers to choose a German version of the verb ‘to run’.

• rennen (to run)
• rufen (to call)
• reden (to talk)
• reiten (to ride)

As you can see, the selection is based on them sounding similar and we wanted to show the principle of the similarity by using verbs related to movement — ‘бежать’ (to run), ‘прыгать’ (to jump), ‘плавать’ (to swim) and ‘ездить’ (to ride). We first checked the numbers of the correct answers with the developers, of course.

The country knowledge quiz is arranged so that the player studies a text and then answers questions about it. Some of these texts, questions and answers were not just translated, but culturally modified by us as they were primarily aimed at people living in Germany.

We would now like to say a couple of things about the names of items in applications for children. Imagine what we felt when we came across two swords in the game: Prinz Charmings pulsierendes Liebesschwert and Prinz Charmings geöltes Liebesschwert. Their literal translation is the ‘Prince Charming’s Pulsating Love Sword’ and the ‘Prince Charming’s Oiled Sword’ (this could also be translated as ‘Lubricated’ sword, which is no better). After a short brainstorm we came to the conclusion that if there are two of them, then one sword must be the main one and the other one must be a spare one (if the prince had not got the ‘dual wielding’ ability). This is the way that the less original, but far safer sounding versions of ‘Prince Charming’s Favorite Sword’ and Prince Charming’s Spare Sword were born.

We would just like to say one last thing about the Horse Haven project. This is a farming game with a target audience of young and teenage girls.

Even though this was the case, we tried to be as neutral as possible with our translation as we know that brutal and bearded males can also love horses. This is why we used gender-neutral word forms when addressing the player (cuz — the abbreviation of cousin in English) with the word ‘кроха’ in Russian.

I see you got the old Storage restored, Cuz.

Вижу, тебе удалось восстановить старый склад, кроха.

We have already mentioned ways of making words gender-neutral, but other, shorter ways of doing so would have been inappropriate in this case. It is not possible to say that ‘I can see that you are restoring the warehouse’ when the screen shows the end result, or to say that ‘I see that you have repaired the warehouse’ as it sounds rather formal.

Sometimes, the translation used complicated turns of phrase:

This horse isin breeding (to breed — размножаться, разводить).

Лошадь участвует в процессе выведения новой породы.

Here we decided not to put the emphasis on reproduction but to actually slightly distance ourselves from this intimate process.

It is great that this game, like many other modern games for children, serves to teach as well as to entertain — it also contains a quiz. The questions depend on the country where the farm is located, as farms can be built in different corners of the Earth. We did not have to culturally adapt the questions, but it was very interesting to translate many of them and especially those that related to horses. The game contains several dozen different breeds, so we used encyclopedias and studied photos so we could translate their names, learning a lot of new things in the process.

These were a few interesting moments from the life of children’s app localizers. There are actually far more of these peculiarities, and a lot more projects that we work on, but that is a story for another time.