Tag: translations

Book: Elena Khudenko – “Translation and Localization: An Introduction to the Profession”

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I’m absolutely in love with the field of localization in development. Once, in my youthful overconfidence, I dove headfirst into translation and became the translator of the first novelization set in the Starcraft universe in Russian (these days, I would never agree to such a thing—so youth definitely has its advantages). Later, I helped build and for many years led the localization department at Wargaming (though I’ve mentioned that many times already, I think). That’s why almost no book on this topic escapes my attention. And that’s exactly the case with Translation and Localization by Elena Khudenko.

From the blurb, it seemed that Elena would dive into the specifics of the field—why it’s important and interesting. Especially since she herself has extensive experience in this area. She has translated books, brought Russian text to many TV shows (Killing Eve, Silicon Valley, and others), worked as a localizer for the Duolingo app, and translated many video games into Russian (The Whispered World, Batman: Arkham Asylum, etc.). In other words, she truly knows what she’s talking about.

And in this book, she tries to cover different types of translation, essentially following the arc of her own professional experience.

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“Ten Little Indians”: On the Changing Titles of an Agatha Christie Novel

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Content note: This post examines the publication history of Agatha Christie’s novel and the evolution of its title and associated rhyme. To document that history accurately, it includes direct quotations of period wording that contains racial slurs. Such language is unacceptable in modern usage; it appears here only as part of quoted historical material, for context and analysis.

Today I’d like to talk a little about Agatha Christie — more precisely, about one of her most famous works, the novel “Ten Little Niggers“. In Russian, both the novel and the 1987 Soviet film adaptation by Stanislav Govorukhin are still known under the title Desyat negrityat (“Ten Little Negroes”). In Russian usage, the word negrityonok historically functioned as a neutral racial descriptor rather than a slur, which partly explains why the title remained unchanged in that cultural context.

I first encountered this work in childhood — not through the book, but through Stanislav Govorukhin’s 1987 film adaptation, released in Russian as Desyat negrityat (and often referred to in English as Ten Little Indians). I saw it a year later, while vacationing at the seaside with my parents. The film was being shown at the resort cinema, and if I remember correctly, my younger brother and I even went without our parents.

I remember how that closed-circle mystery (Christie specialized in exactly that kind of structure), combined with an excellent cast and the oppressive atmosphere of the production, made an indelible impression on me. It didn’t exactly frighten me, but it was impossible to look away as, over the course of the story, nearly all the main characters disappear one by one. And yet — what could an eleven-year-old boy, which is what I was at the time, really understand of it? Back then I looked like this (not exactly a heartthrob, of course, but still reasonably presentable):

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Book: Minako O’Hagan, Carmen Mangiron “Game Localization”

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In game development (and software development in general), there is one discipline that, in my opinion, receives far too little attention. Yet it is extremely important and can significantly impact both the perception and the sales of a product. This is localization—the process of preparing a product for another market, which is often understood simply as translating it into another language.

I can talk quite a lot about the topic of localization in general and game localization in particular (and, if all goes well, I’ll share more separately), as I spent many years as the head of several service departments at Wargaming, including the Localization Department. This is precisely why any materials on this subject are always of interest to me.

One of my former colleagues recommended the book Game Localization, where the authors decided to take an in-depth look at this phenomenon from the perspective of a scientific approach to translation in general.

The scientific approach is both a strength and a weakness of the book. The strength lies in its thorough exploration of the topic, its study of the history of the issue, and its examination of many aspects of localization. The weakness lies in the same excessive scientific rigor: countless references to other academic works on translation, an overwhelming number of quotes from analytical studies by other authors… in short, all the hallmarks of a scholarly work that tend to be too tedious for the average reader. Such readers are usually more interested in understanding the essence of the topic rather than the various methods for preparing academic research.

The authors begin their narrative from afar, discussing the history of video games in general and their localization in particular—covering the period from the mid-1980s to roughly the present day (the book was published in 2013, and much has changed in the industry in the past eight years). They then delve into the essence of the game industry (GameDev), explaining key terminology, genres, the role of narrative elements, the industry structure, and so on.

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