Terminate the level: Bad in-game translations.

Some years ago, I watched a German dub of some kind of forgettable family drama the details of which now escape me, save for one line. At the end of some sort of rant, the protagonist said something which roughly translated as: “And not only that, but I now discover that my mother-in-law is an illicit extraterrestrial!”

I missed the rest of that scene and most of the next, because I was trying to work out when that particular film had transmogrified into a sci-fi spoof. I eventually decided that the original line must have been: “...my mother-in-law is an illegal alien,” which makes a lot more sense in the context.

Inexpert translations can mar just about anything. Ever installed an app and been met with garbled on-screen instructions? It happens more often than you think, and sometimes it even happens to the more professional software houses.

Good. No translations here.

Which brings me to Simon’s Cat. I enjoy Simon’s Cat. At the same time, I’m not any kind of gamer, and the kind of game I favour is the sort that relies on basic problem-solving skills and little else. So when Simon’s Cat came out with a game called “Crunch Time”, it was perfect.

In this game, you have to solve puzzles to feed treats to Simon’s Cat and his friends, catch moles and rats, and do battle with vacuum cleaners and angry neighbours. It’s not exactly Fortnite, but as I said: I’m not a gamer.

Since I’m in Germany and use a phone set to German, I have the German version of the game. And I can’t help but notice that some of the translations are a little... off.

For example, one button, which is obviously labelled “Go!” in English, is translated into German as “Gehe!” Which does mean “go”, yes; but “go” in the sense of “leave this place immediately, for I grow weary of your presence”. If you want to say “go” in the sense of “commence”, the more usual translation would be: “Los!”

If I succeed in completing a level, the game announces: “Level beenden.” Well, okay: “beenden” does mean “complete”, but it’s a verb: the phrase “Level beenden” is actually the instruction “bring the level to its conclusion” or even “terminate the level”. Myself, I’d probably have translated it as “Level geschafft,” although I’d ask a native speaker for a second opinion on that.

Basically, for those of us old enough to remember it, this is eerily reminiscient of “All your base are belong to us.”

The one that prompted me to write this article, though, comes in a kind of bonus round in which you have to complete five levels without losing a life to win some in-game goodies. This round is known to the German app as “Behandeln Raubüberfall”.

Okay... so “behandeln” is a verb, and it has several different meanings, among them “cure”, “medicate”, “medically examine”, “discuss”, “highlight”. “deal with” in the sense of taking as a topic for an article, and a few others. “Raubüberfall” is the word for an armed robbery, like a hold-up or a mugging.

So... what’s this? “Discuss the armed robbery”? Except that the word order is wrong: in German, infinitives go to the end of the clause, so it would have to be “Raubüberfall behandeln”.

It took me a while, this one. Of course, “behandeln” has all those meanings connected with medicine — which can be summed up as “treat”, as in treating a patient or treating a condition. A quick sesson on Google confirms that the round is called “Treat Heist”, the “treat” here referring to the delicious treats you have to feed to the cats.

In short, it’s as if whoever was tasked with translating the game looked up “treat” in a dictionary, then looked up “heist”, and just took the first words they found and typed them in. For the record, my suggestion — subject to approval by a native speaker — would be “Leckerli-Raub”.

The cinematic look: Not always appropriate

One of the things I’ve noticed thanks to my forays into “how to make videos that don’t suck much” tutorials is the emphasis apparently placed on the “cinematic” look — apparently crucial to making your videos look great and professional.

It’s not just about the lighting and the colour grading and all the stuff you might imagine, but also about the... aspect ratio?

Yes, the aspect ratio. To make your video look “cinematic”, you have to make it in ultra-crazy deluxe really-widescreen format. Kinda like this:

This is wiiiiiiiiide, man!

This, by the way, is a still from a YouTube short. It’s about seven minutes long. Incidentally, it’s a comedy short.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I watch YouTube videos on a bog-standard 16:9 monitor, which is wide... but not that wide. This is how it looks on my monitor:

Letterboxed.

Okay, not too bad. It has letterboxing top and bottom, which doesn’t really get in the way. Apparently, we are conditioned to look at an image like this and think, “Wow, this looks epic!” for some reason, so... okay.

Did I mention this was a YouTube short? Did I mention it was seven minutes long? Well, here’s the thing: these days people are consuming that kind of content on their phones. And most people hold their phones in portrait orientation. If it’s worth it — meaning, if they’re watching a Netflix Original — they’ll turn their phones to landscape orientation. But for this, they’re probably scrolling through a feed in portrait orientation, and this is what that looks like:

Where is it?

Suddenly, it doesn’t look epic. It looks microscopic.

Now, I’m going to continue making my videos in 16:9 format, at least for the time being. My point here is not that we should all switch to olde tyme Instagram 1:1 format: my point is that while striving for a cinematic look is great for films that are to be shown in a cinema, it may be counter-productive on other platforms. It makes the image smaller.

The reason we associate letterboxing with epic cinematography is not because letterboxing in itself is epic: it’s because movies shown on TV have often been letterboxed. That’s all.

For most purposes, landscape format makes sense because our eyes are arranged horizontally. Beyond that, I’d like to suggest that we bear in mind who is going to watch our stuff and where they’re going to watch it — and not make life difficult for them by making the image smaller and harder to see just because “it’s cinematic”.