[Translation] [Arabic] [The Curious Expedition] [14%] [1024W] | C11

"Maschinen-Mensch is a German independent game studio of former AAA developers (Spec Ops: The Line) that left the mainstream industry to experiment with new forms of generative storytelling and create innovative games that aim at unattended niches in gaming. The Curious Expedition was first released as an alpha version in May 2015 on Steam Early Access. During the Early Access phase is has been continually expanded and enhanced by the developers, incorporating valuable community feedback and developing a devoted fan base. The Curious Expedition has sold 25,000 copies so far (fully recouping production costs) and has already been nominated for various awards, including prestigious German awards including: “Deutscher Computerspielepreis” (German Computer Games Awards; category best youth game) and “Deutscher Entwicklerpreis” (German Developer Awards; categories: best browser game, best indie game, best game design, best German game). It also won the “Deutscher Entwicklerpreis” award as the best indie game in 2015 ". ⁽¹⁾

As a gamer, I have always been fascinated by how low budget games can provide such an amazing experience, sometimes even better than many AAA games. For instance, we can see this with games such as Undertale, Limbo, Machinarium (a great game), Rain, Fran Bow (one of my all-time favorite games), and many other games. This shows as that low budget games aka Indi games (without the financial support of a publisher), can compete with games with massive budgets (over 60 million dollars and even more in some cases). Playing the Curious Expedition is like playing Assassin Creed mixed with reading a novel feel, the developers were able to capture that cozy atmosphere with just some pixelated characters and images, which is really charming and adds a lot to the game’s charisma.

^{Maschinen-Mensch, press kit.}
Regarding the game itself, the game is officially presented as “a roguelike expedition simulation set in the late 19th century. Together with famous historical personalities, players will venture on unprecedented expeditions to regions never explored before for fame, science and treasures. They will put on their pith helmets and khakis and make their way through a lush, procedurally generated world full of wonder and mystery”. ⁽²⁾ In addition to this, the game proposes many features to make the game more interactive and less boring since you will never play the same map twice, here are a few things about the game:⁽³⁾

• Explore procedurally generated worlds, each with its own distinctive set of challenges for the ambitious explorer.
• Plan and equip your trek. A good explorer is prepared for any eventuality.
• Manage your resources to keep your trek alive and sanity high. Balance your needs with the desire to carry all that precious treasure back home.
• Visit and interact with the land’s natives. Enter villages, trade and communicate with local tribes and civilizations that are unknown to mankind.
• Loot mysterious temple ruins to gain fame and treasures, but watch out for deadly traps and curses that will compromise your trek and the world around you.
• Equip and utilize miraculous treasures to gain advantages, but be wary of unforeseeable side effects.
• Fight and defend your trek against a wide range of wild animals, mystical creatures and even dinosaurs.

Thanks to the discussion that I had we the project owner a few months ago, I am now authorized to deal with the translation according to what I deem correct and justified. The project owner also allowed me to remove any wrong translations in addition to the possibility to alter the strings according to the specification of the Arabic language. Below is more information that was provided by the project owner after we requested that the gender translation along with many other things, greatly differ from each language:⁽⁴⁾

$name will be replaced by the name of a person that is relevant in that event. Not all events have relevant persons, so you should only use the $name identifier if the original text already included the name.

{mmm|fff} will be replaced by 'mmm' if the relevant person is male, or 'fff' if the relevant person is female. As mentioned above, there might not always be a relevant person, so use it only if appropriate.

Each language may define its own special strings. Those are stated with the @vars line entry. They start with $ and have a similar syntax to the {} braces. For example the entry '$he=he|she' makes it so that $he in the text will be replaced by 'he' if the relevant person is male, or 'she' if the relevant person is female.

[xxx|yyy|zzz] will be randomly replaced by either 'xxx' or 'yyy' or 'zzz'.

[xxx] will be randomly replaced by 'xxx' or not appear in the text at all.

_text_ will be shown as emphasized in-game (colored red).

In addition, we also had to ask more questions to the project owner to clarify more things, these questions and answers can be found in our Workshop Document.

Even though I tried to avoid complicated strings in my first contribution, I had to use the gender randomizer in some cases. The translation of this project can be seen as easy by some people, but the more I dig in, the more complicated things can become. The project is completely full of idioms that are really hard to interpret and understand for a non-native speaker. On top of that, the translator will definitely need to play the game to know exactly what some strings really mean, knowing when to use gender randomizer (especially for NPCs) is also an important thing even though the variables are all related and linked to each other. From the player and non-player-character (NPC) perspective.

The translation was easily manageable, most of the work and time were spent on trying to find the right Arabic counterpart for many concepts and idioms, such as for “swallowed by the night” and “medium rare” and so forth, which can be really tricky sometimes. I was also able to find a few minor anomalies in the sources strings (additional white spaces) that I automatically took into consideration while providing the Arabic translation. I would also admit that translating a string that contains a high number of words can be confusing and will require several checks to make sure that everything, especial the separators, is set properly.

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W.C	Untranslatables	F.W.C	T.W.C.T	P.%	C.T.F	Cont.Num
~1024	~0	~1024	16660	14	01-24/01-30	11

Presented By Victor Frankenstein