BOOK OF HOURS localizers talked about the process of working on the translation

As with any game, the translation process involves many nuances.

Below is a direct speech from the localization author:

Well what can I say? This is certainly a completely unique project. Unique at least in that How you have to work on it. It’s funny for you, but we sometimes sit for an hour on one line, edit, edit. It seems ready – and then another couple of hours or days pass, and you break down in the middle of lunch and run to rewrite it because an even more perfect word came to mind!

I asked Alexis Kennedy (author of the game): but how does he, in fact, generate all these texts himself? Like Mozart in Amadeus, writing with ease as if taking dictation? Or like Fitzgerald, who tortured his ideal text through thousands of revisions? He responded by quoting Hemingway: “For ninety-one pages of crap, I get one page of masterpiece. I try to throw in the trash can.”

And by the way, I mentioned Fitzgerald for a reason. I remember how at university they once gave us a chance to compare several translations of The Great Gatsby. And I’m so young, green… I read one of them – and I can’t understand: what kind of gag? Well, the translation is completely inaccurate! There are no such words in the original!

The secret was that, as often happens, besides the actual meaning of the words in the text there are other, sometimes no less important (we’re not translating instructions for a toaster!) things… For example, melody. Imagery. Alliteration. Fitzgerald had it all and, translated “head-on”, “precisely”, would be completely lost – and yet, this was almost the most “tasty” in this extremely poetic text…

Kennedy has a similar story, and I, taught by that example, now try to always look at what else the text hides. Alexis Kennedy hides a lot (and we are not yet talking about “secret knowledge”, but purely about linguistic aspects).

Let’s say there is a description:

There in a smoothed hollow at the altar’s foot – something coiled like a serpent, but stiller by far.

It would seem, what’s wrong? Words and words. You take it, enter it into Google Translate and you get:

There, in a smooth depression at the foot of the altar, something wriggled like a snake, but much quieter.

Are the words translated? Translated. Norm! We are in the age of AI, “intelligence” generates texts, “intelligence” translates them. Robots work hard, not people, so to speak.

But if you dig deeper… For example, let’s arrange the same text a little differently:

There in a smoothed hollow at the altar’s foot —

something coiled like a serpent,

but stiller by far.

Even without knowing English and not being able to read this text out loud, you can already see (if you are, of course, a human and not ChatGPT) that it is very, very similar to poetry. Not necessarily in the sense that these are direct poems, no! The same principles are used in prose speech, and the name of the technique is the same for both rhetoric and poetry: “descending tricolon.” This is when lines (or stanzas) gradually increase or decrease in duration to achieve a certain artistic effect.

Let me illustrate this with an example from Churchill:

(Never before in the history of human conflict)

there weren’t that many

so much obliged

so few.

In Russian, visually, the length of lines is not as different as in English, but if you read them out loud (or just stupidly count the number of syllables), everything becomes quite clear.

By the way, the same tricolon can also be ascending. Churchill again:

This is not the end.

And it’s not even the beginning of the end,

but perhaps the end of the beginning.

So now you can take a different look at, say, this description from the Book of Hours:

Here, impossibly preserved, enfolded in the scars inflicted by the former prisoner’s energies.

Let us emphasize the poetic structure of the phrase contained in it:

Here,

impossibly preserved

enfolded in the scars inflicted

by the former

prisoner’s

energies.

And all this is not some subtlety that is interesting only to specialists, but one of the most effective means by which politicians charm listeners, and writers charm readers. To lose this component of the original would mean, sorry, to castrate it, to render it powerless.

And now let’s pause at the most interesting point (without giving out a single line our translation), because the mentioned structure is far from the only thing that Kennedy’s text hides and that needs to be preserved in translation. And I would like to first bring the reader to an awareness of all these components, and not put me in the position of wondering why so many new words were inserted in Fitzgerald’s translation.

BOOK OF HOURS is a narrative RPG set in the 1930s. Players will have to restore the occult library, filling it with many grimoires and other magical books. The game can already be added to your wishlist on Steam.