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What language should an RPG be written in first?

Sigourn

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English is the beautiful language. Aside from stories that are set in specific countries and thus would be most enjoyable being read in the language of the country the story is set in, I will always prefer English. Even above my native language, Spanish.
 
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I don't even remember the last time I've read some fantasy in Serbian and any fantasy I'd try to write in Serbian would probably sound incredibly awkward. At least to me.

It's not about the language you speak but the language you read.
 

deuxhero

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Nipponese. A bunch of Nipponese devs tried writing their games for western audiences for a few years, and they wound up shit because of it.
 
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Harry Easter

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In the end you can always work wonders with a good editor and more often it is importat for publishers that you get shit done, not writing the next great american novel. So I guess, whoever speaks and writes english fluently enough and delivers on time is the better choice?
 
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Grauken

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I'd assume that writing in another language thats not your native language will always be problematic because no matter the proficiency you'll always lack a certain element of language awareness or nuance that a native writer will intrinsically have.

Maybe they aren't as good as the best native writers, but given how many native writers are mediocre, I doubt those good non-native writers are worse than most native writers (given that people who a non-native writers need to have a good grasp of the language to write in it in the first place, on a professional level)
 

Butter

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I'd assume that writing in another language thats not your native language will always be problematic because no matter the proficiency you'll always lack a certain element of language awareness or nuance that a native writer will intrinsically have.
Joseph Conrad and Salman Rushdie have an incredible proficiency with English despite not speaking it natively. They're exceptions of course.
 

Grauken

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I'd assume that writing in another language thats not your native language will always be problematic because no matter the proficiency you'll always lack a certain element of language awareness or nuance that a native writer will intrinsically have.
Joseph Conrad and Salman Rushdie have an incredible proficiency with English despite not speaking it natively. They're exceptions of course.

I would say most people who write in English and are not native speakers are exceptions, allthough I don't have the numbers to back it up. I think it's much rarer with other languages, as English books have such a massive market it makes sense for non-native speakers to try to write in it
 
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I don't consider prose that important in a video game, so I'd lean towards doing good writing in your original language and then translating it afterwards. If some elegance or quality of prose is lost I'm ok with that as long as the plot doesn't change.
 

Nifft Batuff

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Nov 14, 2018
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The most ubiquitous languages in the world are in the order: Chinese, English, Spanish and Hindi.
So if you want to sell more you should use Chinese.
 

Urthor

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Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
The important thing is to have the actually good writer with the vision of a brilliant story write the original dialogue even if he learnt his English from the game boy advance instruction manual.

Most of my enjoyment from a game really comes from control of the story, the pacing, the worldbuilding, and that is mostly design rather than sentence by sentence execution. Your points in the OP are correct about how translation and language in general works. But consider that you are thinking about theatre, where the interesting thing that everyone is paying attention to is *how* the actors are saying something technique and control of dialogue is the *most* important thing.

A badly worded sentence ruins the whole show, but frankly that's because you can barely make out what the actors are even doing on stage so it's almost an audiobook-like experience.

For a game it's far more important to consider which character is talking now and what it adds to the story. Because your entire experience hangs on that *design* of the narrative.

In a game, all the graphics and gameplay and noises really distracts you from the grammar of a sentence in a format that is communicating in so many dimensions of multimedia at once.

If weebs can literally read a machine translations of the latest Nipponese waifu desu in a google doc because they really want to play the game, then let me tell you they do not care all that much about the subtle intellectual mix of religious and sexual metaphor.

A translation that is probably not exactly Cormac Mccarthy tier prose is of secondary concern to having a story that is actually fundamentally enjoyable.
 
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Darth Canoli

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Option 1. Hire an English native speaker writer, but of very dubious quality. Because they live in first world countries, good writers are more expensive. And if they were great, they'd be published already, presumably.
Normally, unless the guy was a prodigy, the writing will be mediocre. Sort of like what JarlFrank was producing for that German game - mediocrity.

Option 2. Hire a non-English writer, pay him less, but in his country that's a lot of money, so he'll be dedicated to you full time, and he's probably going to be of better quality. The only problem is that languages of different groups translate poorly into each other. That is my personal opinion as someone who speaks 3 languages rather fluently - Russian, French and English.

Option 2 doen't guaranteed dedication.
Option 1 doens't guaranteed mediocrity.

I'd advise not to rule out any option but to try your translator with a text to translate + as an option a text to write by themselves about your game (of course, you'd give them enough material to do so).
But motivation and inspiration should be you hiring criteria.

About you language dilemma, i'd say write in the language the writers are more comfortable with if there is a market for your game in that language, otherwise, pick english.
Or, if you think you can write something exceptional in your own language but just mediocre in english, try to do both during the development phase.
 

Swigen

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Interviewer: “How’d you write so many goddamn amazing games Mr. Gygax?”

Gary Gygax: “Well, first I went to a message board to ask what language games should be in and the rest, as they say, is history.”
 

Swigen

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Gygax didn't write anything of worth

Interviewer: “How’d you write so many goddamn amazing games Mr. Gygax Salvatore Greenwood?”

Gary Gygax R.A. Salvatore Ed Greenwood: “Well, first I went to a message board to ask what language games should be in and the rest, as they say, is history.”
 
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Bester

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R.A. Salvatore: “Well, first I went to a message board to ask what language games should be in and the rest, as they say, is history.”
Salvatore definitely should've picked another language, cause English isn't his forte.
 

Lacrymas

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Pathfinder: Wrath
There are very few instances where I've come across a sentence that would've lost its meaning had it been translated in another language in games. This usually happens with jokes and puns. Game writing isn't as sophisticated as your examples, which are examples of masterful proficiency of the highest caliber in a language, most native speakers wouldn't be able to write or think up something like this. So yeah, I don't think it's that important and the few jokes or puns that are going to be lost can either be replicated in some other way or we can live without them. When the time comes where games have insanely highbrow uses of syntax/vocabulary/wordplay, we can ask that question. And most will still be written and voiced in English regardless.
 

HarveyBirdman

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Jan 5, 2019
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In the native language of the person who thought of the core concepts.

A better question would focus on translations.
Literal vs. colloquial?
 

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