An open letter
to CEO of CCP Games,
Mr. Hilmar Veigar Pétursson
Dear Mr. Petursson,
We, the undersigned members of Russian-speaking EVE Online community, appeal to you about the state of Russian translation of EVE Online.
First of all, we would like to express our deepest gratitude to all EVE Online developers and other staff led by you for creating such an awesome game, which offers a unique community space for people all over the world. One of the means to integrate us into this space is localization. Despite all positive changes lately, we have to draw your attention to this aspect of EVE, as it seems to have taken a wrong turn.
1) Lack of reverse compatibility
EVE Online is so unique and successful mostly due to its really global and multinational gamespace. Here the national borders are erased by common interests and speakers of different languages need to communicate. A rookie with Russian client might ask a foreigner encountered in game:
"How many synchropackages do I need to fly a leader?"
The question seems totally correct for a Russian client user, as he takes the words basing on current localization. But it makes no sense, right? What does this phrase mean? What could the second player answer? It means "How many skill points do I need to fly a command destroyer?" But it became this ugly because in Russian client "skill points" are translated as "синхропакеты"/"synchropackages" and "command destroyer" as "лидер"/"leader".
Reverse compatibility isn't a common requirement for translating computer games. As far as we are concerned, no players in World of Warcraft died due to Gadgetzan being translated as Pribambassk. Players speaking different languages are either separated by servers and zones, or their communication is not necessary for gameplay. But EVE Online is different. In EVE a Belarusian shares a wormhole with an Australian, and a Canadian hires Vladivostok Russians to destroy Aussie's citadel. A considerable number of terms in current localization have been translated with a partial or complete loss of original meaning, and for its users international communication has been obstructed. Worse yet, not only the cooperation with speakers of other languages is being annihilated ‒ the cooperation with Russian-speakers using English client starts to suffer as well!
We understand, that it's not always possible to translate a game term to Russian with the guarantee of a correct reverse translation. We absolutely do support literariness of the translation for cases which are not the matter of player cooperation. If player cooperation happens in a peaceful situation and does not require immediate reaction, such translation is also acceptable. That is to say, we are happy with mission, skill, ship and module descriptions. But elements of interface, skill names, ship and module group names require immediate and full revision to gain their original meaning.
2) Excessive сomplexity
EVE Online is a sci-fi computer game about life of immortal capsuleers in the distant future. But the localization staff seems to be unable to understand it. So, they work based on authenticity rule, i.e. only terms from real world industry or warfare are used. The result resembles a product of a neural network trained on fifty-years-old technical literature, its linguistic structures are disturbingly unnatural. Overspecialized industry terms are used on a par with military acronyms without any explanation or any regard to players having to pronounce or just remember them. As the result, monstrous terms like "Ракеты дальнего боя сверхбольшой мощности c высокоточными ГСН"/"Very high yield long-range combat missiles with high-precision HH" emerge. Originally this string was "High-precision XL Cruise missiles"; and the acronym ГСН (головка самонаведения)/HH (homing head) is never even expanded in game client.
Russian language is long. But not this long. And EVE Online as a game definitely does not need any further complication. Simple and short versions of translated terms should be preferred.
As an example of stated in paragraphs 1 and 2 we append a document which illustrates possible translations of EVE Online terms without above-mentioned drawbacks.
3) Disregard for community feedback
Current letter is not the first attempt of Russian-speaking community to turn attention to localization problems.
For instance, in 2007 the players were presented a "localization" made by a third party company. It was almost entirely composed by an automatic translation system. After a natural wave of disturbance among players and contractor representative's dubious excuses the translation was removed.
The next outburst, dated 2013, ended with an open letter by an active CSM 2013 member. Despite the official answer by CCP Shiny and the fact that the person in charge of localization changed, overall company policy regarding translation quality control remained the same. Now, in anticipation of the possible influx of new players, we think that the problem became worth your attention.
We do understand that it is not easy to control the quality of regional localizations, especially when it comes to remote employees. For this reason we feel compelled to directly inform you about certain CCP Games non-regular employee's quality of work. The person in question is Paul Clancy (Dotted Line), who was in charge of Russian localization of EVE Online for the past three years. We do not put in question his competence as a translator. However, he completely fails to grasp aforementioned needs of player community.
A vivid example would be the recent events on eve-ru.com forum, the largest (according to CCP) Russian-speaking EVE Online portal. A player has created a thread about the translation of "heavy assault missiles" term. The readers were offered to take part in a poll to express their opinion regarding the best possible translation. The poll options were as follows:
‒ "Облегченные ракеты большой мощности"/"Lightweight high-yield missiles", present in client before the August patch ‒ 1 vote;
‒ "Малогабаритные ракеты большой мощности"/"Small-scale high-yield missiles", present in client after the August patch ‒ 0 votes;
‒ "Тяжёлые тактические ракеты"/"Heavy tactical missiles", linguistically correct, but barely conveying the meaning and poorly susceptible to reverse translation ‒ 4 votes;
‒ "Тяжёлые штурмовые ракеты"/"Heavy assault missiles", linguistically correct, literal and fully conveying the meaning ‒ 241 votes!
The result of this poll displays at least several facts:
But after a few dozens of pages of discussion Clancy came out with an unambiguous answer:
Clancy: "...There will be no assault missiles. They simply do not exist. [...]
If the player community cannot back down on a single term, well... this is the community we have."
An outburst of discontent with this and other Clancy's messages impelled the most active players to take decisive actions. An open TeamSpeak meeting devoted to the discussion of the first edition of this letter was assembled. Clancy was also invited and participated in discussion.
During the meeting and further forum discussions certain agreements were achieved. Clancy promised to accept community-proposed "heavy assault missiles" translation, to fix character attributes translations (which were a bright example of p.2 at that moment, because, for instance, "memory" was translated as “способность к запоминанию”/"ability to memorize" instead of obvious "память"/"memory") and, thereafter, to pay more attention to the length of translated terms. Writing the letter was postponed, and for a brief period of time Clancy seemed to be ready to participate in the dialogue with the community and to tend to compromise.
Unfortunately, this impression was false.
Clancy used several our suggestions from the discussion on forum and from the TeamSpeak meeting to add to the test client. But his versions of translation were once again inconvenient, as he could not step over his own “vision” and urge for so-called “authenticity” instead of obvious and adequate translation and proved to be looped on his subjective approach. The community tried to help him to deal with those problems and created a thread containing a poll about character attributes. The poll revealed the fact that players would be happy with the well-established in many other games (localizated and not) system of attributes names. This opinion was expressed by 80-90% of participants. Clancy didn't like this initiative and declared that from then on any discussions regarding localization will only be held on the official forum (not as functional and neutrally moderated as eve-ru.com, and with a way less audience).
Clancy also announced Russian localization focus group being extended by players. However, even in the new format CCP and ISD members will outnumber players two to one. On top of that, the candidates were imposed with requirements of being a Russian client user (as stated above, localization problems affect players regardless of what language do they use themselves) and "ability to conduct a constructive dialog", which sounds rather odd taking the circumstances into account.
Of course, a developer has every right to communicate with players only on official resources. However, on the part of Clancy, who is an eve-ru.com veteran, retreating to a forum which allows no polls and surrounding himself with cherry-picked yes-men looks a pretty obvious way of dodging the actual community feedback.
Conclusion
In view of above-mentioned facts we, the undersigned, by the right of your clients, EVE Online players and Russian language speakers, ask you to obligate all localization staff to keep to the following regulations in their work:
We hope you will take our appeal with due attention. Existing problems should be fixed before they begin to undermine gaming experience of new players, attracted by the upcoming update. We do not want this, because, no matter what, we still love playing EVE Online.
While it stays "EVE Online" and not "Military Science Simulator 1966".
Appendices: