[Translation] [Arabic] [The Curious Expedition] [16%] [1048W] | C18

• The translation is from the English language to the Arabic language.
• My Crowdin account: Victor Frankenstein
• GitHub repository:Maschinen-Mensch/curiousexpedition
• Crowdin page: https://crowdin.com/project/the-curious-expedition
• Website: https://curious-expedition.com

"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 about 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 60million 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.

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 differs 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'. <p></p> [xxx] will be randomly replaced by 'xxx' or not appear in the text at all. <p></p> _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. In general, and after work on this project for a long time, I believe that the hardest things to deal with on this project are 3 main things:⁽⁵⁾

• The first one is this project contains a lot of idioms that are really hard to depict and find the proper counterparts in the Arabic language. e.g. (Now there’s a sight to behold.) and (Some kind of parlour trick perhaps, just without the parlour).
• The second thing is gender variables which make the work take a lot longer, on top of knowing where exactly you need to place the variables. The translator will also need to know when to use the variables or not, but I have to say that in few strings, it’s 50/50 situation since some objects are randomly generated and the translator can't really know for sure.
• The last thing is the composition of the strings, too complex, long, and can contain many cuts, whitespaces and many other things that can make the work for the translator a nightmare.

The project owner also allowed and entrusted me to omit, change, and rephrase the strings or words if doing so was a necessity. The project is a bit complex to deal with and will for sure need a less restrictive approach to deal with the linguistic characteristic of every language out there.

One of the project managers contacted many people lately (who are active on the project) because they are planning to close The Curious Expedition project at the end of this month. Well, I tried to understand the reason behind this decision since the project is open source. Apparently, and after receiving a message back from the project the main reason is the very low activity on the project which pushed the PO to think about ending the project. The manager has, however, mention that things can change if the activity on the project rises again.

Apart from the usual gender and variables issues, there are no other issues faced in this segment. The only difficulty I could probably mention is finding many variables that are properly linked to a specific gender such as for [pack|group] which required some tweaking in many strings to retain the smoothness of the original (source) strings.