One thing I'm becoming increasingly curious about (for reasons) re: writing, is how the experience of people who grew up writing as a hobby or a passion without an inbuilt and potentially large audience of strangers (for example, without access to online fandoms, whether for generational or logistical reasons), differs from that of people who grow up writing already with an audience in the back of their mind—(or even the awareness of the existence of said audience, even if they didn't engage with it directly). Idk where I'm going with this other than wondering if it changes things.
How are Regill and the hand of the inheritor different in translations? And in what languages?
Thanks for the ask, Nonnie! Without getting super deep into translation theory, I should preface with this sort of well-worn platitude that translation in general is always an imperfect affair, and there are always decisions about what to prioritize. Here I don't actually claim that one language is the "original" and the other the "target" because I don't know how Owlcat writes their texts, and how collaboration impacts it. So let's treat the languages as just different versions/interpretations or avatarizations of the characters.
From there, I'll give you a couple of examples. Let's start with Regill then I'll move onto the Hand of the Inheritor. Obviously there will be spoilers so if you haven't played the game to the end, maybe don't click below the cut.
During Regill's final trial, (and should that trial go well), he offers the MC an explanation. In the English version he says after mentioning the Bleaching: "A shortage of time pushes one to extreme measures, and I am no exception." (Sorry I'm not at my desktop so can't link the screenshots). This "I am no exception" caught my eye because it is completely absent from the Russian language version, and in fact there he says something quite different. I'd translate it like this: "A deficit of time nudges one towards extreme measures. It is such an extreme measure that I utilized here."
The meaning, as you can see, diverges, and so does the impact, and changes some of how the whole topic of Bleaching landed with me, in the dialogues, banter, and lore bits you find in the game. If you're like me and like to make mountains out of linguistic molehills, I'd say that the English version of Regill experiences Bleaching as something that is happening to him, but as he says, he makes "no great fuss" of it (in Russian, he uses "problem" instead which has a different connotation to my ear). With the English version one gets the impression that he refuses, on principle, to mitigate the Bleaching, since to do so would likely be inherently chaotic (since that is after all his nature as a First World critter, and he mentions that many other gnomes go to great lengths to do so, which he finds unpalatable). The Russian version, on the other hand, sounds far more strategic or agentive about it, by extrapolation: if a deficit of time nudges one to extreme measures, then one might ask, does Regill find extreme measures useful, and thus the Bleaching also useful in a certain sense? From there, is he weaponizing it perhaps? it certainly sounds like this is what he implies in that sentence. After all, the awareness of one's finitude is a pretty big topic in the game as a whole, as we see with Daeran as well. So to me that puts Regill a bit out of the pragmatist camp and more into the existentialist one, at least in the Russian version, as far as characters are concerned. This, in turn, is in interesting dialogue with his ending slides on both the Aeon and the Trickster paths.
So now onto Inheribro. I won't bore you with the minutia—but there were some moments in the English version, especially in the back-end of the Angel questline where you free him from goat boy, that kinda felt emotionally flat to my ear, so that was the original motivation to switch languages and see whether this is a problem of translation. Turned out, he just sounds quite different across the board. In English he kinda has one register that seems to indicate his general celestial lawful-good angelic self. In the Russian version, he's got multiple registers, depending on what he's talking about: conveyed by syntax and lexical choice. And then some translational decisions really just made me raise an eyebrow. For example, in the English version, he refers to the KC as "Champion." In the Russian one, he calls them "Protector" or "Defender"—that's a really different connotation, once again, and a totally different emphasis at least to my ear.
Add to this inbuilt differences in syntax that simply don't translate across languages: Russian distinguishes between formal and informal you (often called the t/v distinction in linguistics), and that distinction carries quite a bit of meaning. In English, this is flattened into a general you, without differentiation, so the nuance—like when formal switches to informal, conveying, in different contexts, rank, or intimacy, or age—it can carry quite a bit of added nuance (and sometimes packs a real punch). For example, when as the KC you speak to Liotr, you address him with the informal you, and he addresses you with the formal one, denoting rank. During Regill's trial, the KC actually switches to what appears to be the formal you, whereas before they both spoke to each other using the informal/intimate one. Regill, for his part, barely addresses you at all, other than in third person during that bit, and often using subjectless sentences which Russian allows, but English doesn't. And then, when he challenges the KC to a duel, it is a direct, informal you address. It's hard to convey just how much whiplash that produces, linguistically.
I hope that gestures at an answer!
I'd like to take a look at the French version next, but that's where my linguistic fluency ends, I'm afraid. :)
Breaking my extended vacation from Tumblr, because in the throes of Pathfinder WOTR Trickster Path brainrot, and writing a fic that started as "oh this is just going to be a small project to see if I can write a story totally outside of fandom" and turned, inevitably, into longfic, I cannot help but comment on the absolutely unhinged, tongue-in-cheek metadiscursive quality of the Trickster mythic. Owlcat has the most corvid sense of humor, for which this corvid in a human suit is deeply grateful.
Why has it taken me 10+ years in fandom and far longer than that playing cRPGs to try to play one and actively compare the translations across different localizations/languages? How did it not occur to me to do this before? Current Victim: Pathfinder Wotr. Holy crap, some of the characters land entirely differently. Actually, some of the translations completely change the meaning. Speechless...
Back on my Pathfinder WOTR bullshit, this time with some of the DLCs (Dance of Masks was enjoyable, the Last Sarkorian was hit or miss). Razmir's pyramid scheme church was hilarious satire, but my favorite moment was probably Regill's "I challenge you to a game of dice, Commander."
It occurs to me that my unabashed love of Lae'zel in BG3 and of Regill Derenge in PWOTR are somehow the same species of thing.
While I contemplate your question, I have one of my own for you.
What do you make of the "rich" tapestry of accents of the various NPCs in Skyrim? (I did say I was a crow with a knife. Feel free to chew on this for a while.) <3
Thanks for this ask Winter! Ok. This is a tough one for two reasons, and the answer will depend on which hat we wear when we approach secondary world languages (fantasy linguistics lol), including conlangs.
So the first problem is "what do we hear." For most of us it's probably English, unless we're playing a localized copy (which is something I do love to think about too, but let's bracket it out because localization gets us into translation theory and that's a whole big can of worms). So either we (1) focus on the uptake side, eg: "Tamrielic languages have no equivalencies on Earth (obviously, why should they) so everything we're hearing is a translation/adaptation and hence will be just "flavor"—translation theory style, where a translation is meant to produce a similar "sign" in the target language, including various associations with the sort of person/social group that speaks the sort of language/sociolect/with the specific accent we're hearing; or (2) we think about the production side, and we pay attention to which actually existing influences the devs used, for example by taking a look at naming conventions: which is how we get to things like "Bretons seem vaguely French flavored," and "Imperials seem vaguely Latin-flavored" and so on.
But since you're specifically focusing or accents, and specifically focusing on Skyrim, which I take to be "what do we make of the lack of consistency in dialectical variation in that particular province, as we hear it in game, in the English version," I'd say the devs loosely slapped linguistic variation on "race" which is a strategy of convenience to telegraph "significant" cultural difference the player is meant to experience as they run through the world and interact with the characters, and left it at that. There's a bit of this even for Nords in the voice banks, where we have several different voice assets for Nord voices, marked as "accented" or not (otherwise, the variation is conveyed by a prosody modifier—"young eager, even toned" etc). But of course, it's a game, and that means resources are limited. But what do I think it might actually look like were any of this real, or were linguists or even better, sociolinguists to stage a hostile take-over of Bethesda? Or if Todd Howard was possessed by the spirit of Edward Sapir or William Labov or equivalent? (Sorry I know the thought is unhinged but it makes me cackle). Below the cut.
Ok, now firmly in the realm of my own personal headcanons, with my own personal sociolinguistic nerdery hat on, and that's dangerous territory because I could muse about this for hours. So I'll try to just pick one thing to focus on: regional dialectical variation, as per your question. I would expect (and really, how I write it/love seeing it in fic) different sociolects (with some sort of phonological specificity eg accents) mostly based on geography/cultural "cluster"; socioeconomic class; and if we want to get granular, occupation. So say Rift sociolects would sound differently from Reach sociolects, as an example—phonologically, maybe somewhat syntactically, definitely in terms of stock expressions, just by virtue of their geographic locations, unique linguistic influences so on. I would absolutely expect language gradients (which is that thing where a population shares a particular linguistic code, but as we move geographically from say one village to another to another, we will see differences until we reach the point where it takes a huge effort to understand each other because the codes have diverged enough, in which case another, shared "trade" language kicks in to pave over). Considering what we know of TES linguistics and history, I'd expect at least some degree of bilingualism for many of the characters, and as always with bilingualism, I'd expect a great deal of code-switching, loan words, and calques. How code-switching would happen is another can of worms and I can talk about it for hours, but I will exercise Chill and just vague-gesture at it. I'll also vague-gesture at language standardization and what processes might be happening around that with the Empire's waning influence.
Most importantly, I'd expect people to react to those linguistic variations, which is to say do what we (loose, encompassing we) do and treat them as something significant. How one speaks tells us something about the speaker (language ideologies ftw).
what’s a common writing tip that you almost always follow?
I am grimly behind on answering these, but thank you for asking, my friend! (And for your patience)
Off the top of my head, 2 common ones:
Show don't tell: I actually vehemently dislike the dogmatism of the way in which this advice is often used, because depending on voicing and project sometimes it really should be "tell, don't show." But as a shorthand, I find it useful for a couple of things. I have a slightly perverse reading of it, which is that, sometimes, "less is more." I think the advice can be taken relatively straight forwardly for, say, environmental descriptions, but I'll answer specifically in relation to voicing a character's emotional state. I prefer slightly underwritten stuff that leaves room for reader interpretation. Sometimes that means outright use of negative space where opposite readings are possible; sometimes that means just slightly opaque connectors, where I am not told, as a reader, in explicit and grueling details, everything the character is feeling and why. As I get older, I've developed a kind of "hives" response to over-emotional writing, and that's actually likely because I can infer, I don't need to be "told." I think I follow that general preference in my own writing as well. But I also realize this is a question of taste/preference.
Revise: No, seriously, it sounds stupid, but I used to write a chapter, do one proofreading read, and yeet. I don't do that anymore. 100% a second or third draft is better, and sometimes things need to sit for a bit (like a stew LOL), and then you come back to them with fresh eyes. It took me an embarrassingly long time to develop enough chill with myself to do this.
