(keyboard clicking)
(flies buzzing)
- Johnny?
Don't be afraid.
I'm looking for a woman with ashen hair.
Seen her?
Tell me everything from the start.
Where did you see her?
What was she doing?
It's important to me.
Why not?
What's wrong?
Can't talk?
Why?
Lost your voice?
Can I help you somehow?
(pleasant music)
- Today we're gonna take a look
at two elements of game production
that rarely, if ever, get talked about
despite the fact that they are absolutely essential
for the experience of millions of players.
The process of taking a game written in one language
and converting it into another,
what we call localization and adaptation.
To effectively localize a game,
it must be translated into the local language.
For The Witcher, this means translating thousands
of pages of dialogue and recording hundreds of voiceover
sessions in multiple languages,
but to simply translate from the Polish version
wouldn't be enough,
so this is where adaptation comes in.
Adaptation is the process of ensuring
that the idioms, cultural references,
and source material present in each version
are relevant, no matter where the person is playing it.
- My name is Ainara Echaniz
and I am the Senior Localization Project Manager.
And I'm Mikoiaj Szwed and
I'm the Senior Localization Producer.
- [Danny] Awesome.
- He's my boss.
(laughing).
- [Danny] For folks who don't know
what localization means, can you explain
what exactly your job is?
- Well, we just make sure
that the game is playable in all possible languages
so we take care of the translation,
adaptation, the voiceover recordings,
and localization QA.
- Yeah, a lot of people think
that localization is just translation and dubbing
and that's it, but actually the main objective
of localization is that every player will feel
the game as if it were developed in their language.
That's our main goal.
So no one will feel, okay,
this game was developed in Polish.
So, if they are playing Spanish,
they need to feel that, okay,
this was done for them in Spanish.
- Yeah, and actually it's always funny
because when we read the forums
and people always say, yeah, I like to play the game
in the original language.
There is no original language
because actually that's something maybe
not very common for other projects
is that we usually do all languages simultaneously.
There is no set language
and then all the other languages just try
to copy this one language.
Each version is made just as
if it was the original language.
Especially when you look at Polish and English
because both of those versions
are very rich on Easter Eggs and, of course,
the Polish version has a lot of Polish cultural
Easter Eggs and also what's very important,
especially with The Witcher because
depending on the language, we had to work
with different scenarios
because in some of the regions,
the books have been already out
so we had, like, established translations
that we wanted to follow.
In others, there were no books
so there was a decision whether,
like, are we keeping the English
or, like, are we sticking, like,
doing some translations?
- So it basically, the villages or other geographic
accidents or people's names,
they have that name for a reason.
So White Orchard is called like that
because probably there are orchards around the village
or, I don't know, beats like Novigrad's, you know,
like not very nice neighborhood.
It's called like that for a reason.
Basically we don't say the translators,
okay, you need to, you know, copy whatever
is there in English.
It's like, okay, this is called like that
because of that so find something in your language that will
evoke. - Convey.
Convey the message. - Convey the message.
- And the same was, for example,
with the Slavic monsters, for example.
We had a lot of Slavic monsters
or even, like, one of the characters like the Peller
which is, like, super important for Polish culture
because, like, we have this drama called Dziady
which is one of the biggest works of literature in Poland
and it evokes, like, something in Polish language
and, like, we tried to find words
that would have similar role
in other languages, for example.
- Yeah, that's actually a very good point
because The Witcher, specifically,
it's a very European game in content and flavor
and it's also a very Slavic game
so they are tough regions that maybe
are not familiar with all the folklore
that's in The Witcher
and definitely there are regions
that are totally oblivious of that,
like, Arabic or Asia in general.
- [Mikoiaj] So it's like a balance between
showing the people something new
so that they can see, like, or learn about
something totally different for them, like culturally
using the things that they have in their own culture.
- [Ainara] Yeah, exactly.
- [Danny] Adaptation is a time intensive
and difficult process requiring somebody
with knowledge of both the source material
and the culture it's being adapted for.
Borys Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz has worked at
CD Projekt since the first game.
Born and raised in the United States
by his Polish parents, Boris moved to Poland after college
where he majored in theater arts and semiotics,
that's the study of, would you believe it, signs.
If you tried, you couldn't conjure up somebody
more appropriate to adapt a game
for the English market than Borys.
- The games that we make are dialog intensive.
The source material that we get
is thoroughly Polish.
We have to make it just as thoroughly resonate
for the English language audience.
It entails taking place names that are thrown out in Polish,
finding equivalence that will resonate
in a specific way in English.
It entails a story that some an NPC tells in Polish
and tells it in a way that resonates, you know,
against the canon of Polish fairy tales or Polish legends
and retelling it in English
in a way where it resonates against the canon
of English language, you know, fairy tales
and English language legends and so on and so forth.
- I was digging some Warsaw slang,
so to say. - Okay.
- Something like that.
It was not easy to translate
so I was explaining everything.
There is a phrase.
Would you like to buy a brick?
- [Danny] Okay (laughs).
- It's completely nonsense in English said like that
but in Warsaw, after the war Warsaw was completely destroyed
so there was some smart guys from Prague
who were in (mumbles) when they see approaching
a guy with a nice coat or something.
They grab a brick and ask him,
would you like to buy a brick?
If he said no, he just get his head smashed with the brick.
So this was part of the folklore of the city
and I would like to have the same situation
in the dangerous Novigrad
so I explained it to Travis and Borys
and they were trying to translate it to the English.
- [Danny] Would you like a knuckle sandwich or something.
- Maybe like that, yeah.
- Most of those instances would have been invisible to you
in the sense that you would have just,
oh yes, that makes sense
and it makes sense to you,
as an English language player, in English.
You know, we've made every game in Poland.
Ultimately, our games have to compete against games
that are not made in Poland.
They are made in English.
Ultimately, nothing can sound strange
to, you know, the English language player's ear.
But I suppose that happens for absolutely every language
that is down stream of Polish.
I don't think the Spaniards in, you know,
adapting The Witcher 1, 2, or 3 to Spanish
would just retell what they got in the English.
They would retell it in a way
that would resonate for the Spanish language player.
That's to say, you have source material
and in games, especially, I think, our genre of games,
there's an incredible amount of information
that you need to get across to the player.
You can get that across in a lot of different ways.
The chief way is through dialogue with NPCs.
Now, with all that information that has
to be conveyed, you've got to engage in exposition
and ultimately what you want for the gamer
is for that exposition not to punch them in the nose,
you know, slap 'em in the face, but to be effectively
concealed behind a whole bunch of,
call it theatrical ruses.
Those ruses include, you know, extreme characterization,
they include, you know, hiding things in dialect
and accents and hiding things behind emotion.
Once we get a batch of source material,
it basically has the correct information,
it might have some characterization.
Our job is to make it as palatable as possible
and as entertaining as possible to the gamer.
The adaptation details, varied dialogue by character,
very specific ways of speaking,
even assigning characters strange habits
that will distinguish them against,
you know, the mass of NPCs that populate our worlds.
It essentially entails taking the source
and then rewriting it in a way
where the exposition is completely hidden
behind emotion, behind characterization,
behind accent, behind dialogue.
(pleasant music)
- [Geralt] Here.
(whooshing)
- Whiskey!
Slither!
Ringworm!
Rubbish!
Bumblebee!
Flabbergasted!
(laughs) The sound of it!
(whooshing)
(speaking foreign language)
(laughs) (speaking foreign language)
(speaking foreign language)
(laughs) (speaking foreign language)
(speaking foreign language)
(laughs) (speaking foreign language)
(speaking foreign language)
(speaking foreign language)
(speaking foreign language)
- [Danny] Can you name every language
that it's been translated into?
- Oh sure.
Fingers, okay.
So Polish, English, German, French,
Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Japanese.
That were the voiceover languages.
- Yeah, those were then dubbed as well.
- And then Spanish, Latin American Spanish,
Italian ...
- Korean.
- Korean, Chinese.
- Traditional Chinese.
- Czech, Hungarian, one more ...
- [Both] Arabic.
(Danny laughs)
- And then Turkish for Game of the Year.
The fingers always help
because, like, okay. - I'm missing one.
- Do I have 15?
Yeah, exactly (laughs).
- [Danny] You know, European sensibilities are
pretty much similar, but we were translating things
to Chinese and to Arabic as well.
Is there ever things that need to be edited or changed?
- In Arabic, yeah.
It was a pretty complicated project for us, like,
from the beginning, like, when we were actually
looking for someone to translate into Arabic.
- Oh yes.
- Because we usually send translation tests, like,
to test, like, the company's translators
and someone checks them and say, okay,
these guys did a better job than these guys
and right from the beginning
we had people refusing to do it, (laughs), the test.
- It was a test that I did
for the English adaptation, the recruitment,
which I just took, like, snippets of side quests
from The Witcher 2.
I didn't even think what I was doing,
but there was, like, prostitution there.
- There was prostitution. - And alcohol.
- And alcohol.
All the awesome things for the Arabic world.
(laughing)
- Yeah, they said, like--
- So we had I don't know how many companies.
- Six, I think six. - Six, let's say 50% refused
because they felt offended.
But then we tested the other three
and, of course, well, we had a publisher.
They help us a lot
because, of course, we don't read Arabic.
Then they started translating
and at some point they were, like,
super late with everything
and it's, okay, there's a problem.
Tell me, what's the problem?
And the guys are like,
we thought it was a normal game.
(laughing)
It's like, I already gave you all the numbers.
I told you it was a huge game.
We tried to find the balance
in, of course, adapting those things for the market,
but still keeping it The Witcher.
Yeah, like he mentioned,
no one thought about it in the beginning
but there were gods everywhere
and then the publisher said that we can't do that (laughs).
I said, okay, then let's just god
and they, okay, they started using god
and then when testing we discovered
that one of the (mumbles) in the word god
was corrupted on the screen.
Yeah, it was a big square like that.
That usually happens when one of the letters
is not present in the font.
And then I did some research
and it's like it's intended
that some fonts only include all the characters for Allah
because you shouldn't be writing that.
- [Danny] Of course.
(laughing)
Oh god, oh my god.
- You shouldn't be writing that
so we changed everything again
for, like, destiny, fortune, the stars, the lord.
- [Mikoiaj] But the general idea was to censor
as little as possible, so, like,
adapt that, keep the original spirit.
- Because, you know, if you remove those things
that are, like, very present in The Witcher,
maybe it was going to be weird,
but at the end we got feedback from the community
saying that it still felt like The Witcher.
That it was, like, pretty well done.
We had, well, they also, for example,
they have issues like they don't have elves in their culture
or they don't have--
- [Mikoiaj] Dwarves.
- [Ainara] Yeah, dwarves, you know, these kind of things.
- Yeah, the other market we had some work
to do is actually Japan but it was more graphic,
like, in terms of showing intestines, for example.
It's very interesting. - Or sex scenes.
- Yeah, because for example severe arms, legs is okay
but, like, when you show the insides it's not okay.
- That's generational.
They think it's disrespectful.
- Yes, yes.
- And also, no, no, no, no.
Like, usually, (laughs).
No, no, let me talk because this is funny.
Going back to the thing,
so the graphic assets that, so,
Japan has a very established, like, censorship.
You always have, like, very clear guidelines
on what you can show, what you can't show.
So basically we agreed with the Arabic publisher
that they will get the same censorship as Japan
and they said that's okay.
(laughs) But then the game starts and Yennifer's
butt appears (laughs). - It's naked, yeah.
On the screen. - On the first screen,
the first image, I think,
from the game or something like that
and the Japanese don't have a problem with butts
but the Arabs do (laughs).
- So we had to do a special case
and the only difference
between the Japanese and the Arabic version,
Yennifer has pants in this scene and Japan not
because Japan really insisted the butt
needs to be naked.
- Yeah, the butt is important.
- The butt is important, needs to be naked (laughs).
- And he's like maybe if that would
have been appeared, like, I don't know,
at some point, like, super late in the game
it wouldn't be important
but it was like, you know, first screen, Yennifer's butt.
(laughs) It's like, okay. - That's true.
- [Danny] They didn't have a problem later
when Yennifer's butt is out?
- Of course, like, when you have 100 hours game,
you don't really expect that they play the whole game
so but when you have the first cut scene in the game
that shows a naked butt,
that may be a little bit problematic, you know.
- Chose a lovely spot.
- Dammit, will you relent?
I plowing know I've done wrong.
- I shall see you at the wake.
And I'll not accept any excuses.
- T'were old, black with soot.
Not worth much, I suppose, but I've no other.
- [Danny] One of the more subtle pieces
of our world building in The Witcher
is its use of accents.
On the first game, Borys said that the
the team only had 15 days to record
over 20,000 lines of dialogue.
Their ability to design proper accents
for each race and region was severely limited.
So, for the Witcher 3, Borys and the team
made sure that the game had a broad palate
of accents that mirrored the scale of the game's world.
- We already had the accents established for Temeria.
The only thing that we added, actually, for Temeria
is when we go into Velen which is actually part
of, you know, occupied Temeria
but we went so deeply into the country
that we went deep into, you know,
a west country accent for the Velenese.
- Been howling the nights through lately.
Even the Baron's men are feared to come by.
- When we decided that we wouldn't actually
venture into Ettern for any part of The Witcher 3
we sort of felt safe to say that Welsh
would apply to sentient supernatural being.
- Right. - Okay.
So if it's not an elf, if it's not a dwarf,
but it's weird in some way,
whether a gnome or goblin, or troll,
or, I don't know, the three crones, actually,
we decided that if it's weird, it's Welsh.
- You've freed an ancient power.
- It will rise again.
Elsewhere, beyond our reach.
- Novigrad struck us as a metropolis,
enough of a melting pot
that it would become London.
And then we had, you know, this archipelago
of islands, you know, a good way off the coast
of the continent and we'd already used
the southern Irish accent for the Kaedwenis.
Actually, if I'd had my way I think
I would have had the Skelligers just speak Norwegian
in the English version
and have them have English subtitles.
But it would probably have been a stretch,
actually, for players to hear Norwegian
and read subtitles so we had to pick a dialect
and it actually our studio in the UK
that said, well, you know, give Liam Neeson a listen,
give, you know, James Nesbitt a listen
and see what you think.
- [Soldier] Wonder if he's as strong has he looks.
- [Soldier With Ax] We going by the tavern later?
You know, get splatted?
- [Soldier] Who knows, who knows?
- The major European accents in English,
being Italian, French, German, and Spanish,
have been thoroughly parodied
so they're really off limits.
For Toussaint, in spite of the place names
and wine names and so on and so forth
and a lot of the, you know, character names
being either French or from some other realm
or somehow related to one of the other romance languages,
the accent we went for was Danish.
- In matters best left to Geralt.
- Another challenge awaits me,
yet if Geralt is to hunt the beast
he ought to know it struck again.
The river surrendered a corpse.
It washed up in the meander by the cockatrice.
- [Danny] Of course, to achieve this broad
range of accents, you need voice actors
and a lot of them.
While the famous voice of Geralt, Doug Cockle,
recorded three to four hours every day
for, at some points, almost a month at a time,
there were also hundreds more people
who came in for short sessions.
The Witcher 3 has hundreds upon hundreds of voice actors,
so many that in countries like Japan
they had essentially exhausted
the actor pool available to them.
- China was, like--
- Yeah, China was, like, yeah, the pool is--
- Very limited.
- [Danny] Does that include, like,
you know Beggar 2 and--
- Yeah, yeah, definitely. - Oh yes, yes, yes.
We had a lot of those, especially Novigrad
because, like I think our system
for managing, like, the actors wasn't the best.
For example, we record someone and then, like,
four months later it turns out that this person
recorded two characters that now are in the same scene
or are talking to each other. - Oh no.
- Like, even I played a couple of them
in the Polish version.
Actually, my biggest role--
- Very nice drunkard (laughs).
- Yes, one drunkard who harasses Cirilla
in one of the side quests.
So that's my best role in the game.
- Ashkar. - Yes, thank you.
And Priscilla's song was also muchly finding
all the actresses who know how to sing.
Sometimes we had different--
- Because, no because that's another thing.
It's not just about adapting the lyrics.
It's how the dialogue industry works in each country
because, for example, in the UK they have
a pretty solid, you know, background
and the actors--
- [Mikoiaj] Musical background.
- Musical background. - In Poland as well.
- Actors and so on.
Other regions as well.
Maybe you can call an actress and she can sing
and she's also-- - Yeah.
- But, I don't know, in Brazil you need
to call for a singer because the actors don't sing
and you need a singer and it's going to cost,
like, three times more because,
and then you have different tiers
and then you call, okay, let's bring,
like, this tier because we can't spend,
like, a ton of money on a song.
I'm sorry.
It's the same with children.
- Oh yeah, oh no.
Children, yes.
- [Ainara] It's the same with children.
- [Mikoiaj] That's true, because in Poland, like,
we use children for children
so the children are real children.
- But that's not the normal thing
in the dubbing industry.
Usually have woman doing children
because bringing children ...
Well first there are no professionals.
Bring in children, they have very specific working times.
You need to bring a teacher.
You need parents' permission.
It's more expensive.
Basically, I mean, you can find, you know,
the diamond and have an awesome acting child
but they are children and ...
- Poland is like wild, wild west.
You don't have all that.
They just come with their grandmas
or moms. - And that's it.
- Yeah, I was really scared, especially--
- In other countries you need all that.
- I remember in the quest with the crones
and you have this kid who talks about
his daddy without a head and mommy was screaming
and it was like, the mom of this kid was
like sitting there and it was like
I really just hope that she doesn't just stand up
and say okay, that's enough.
I don't want him to do that.
- Oh, about that.
We tried to have children in the Brazilian version
but they came to the studio with the parents--
- We did? - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- I didn't remember that. - With the parents.
And then we learned that the song
was about the devil because it's about the devil.
They say no.
(laughing)
- [Danny] We always like to talk to developers
about the bugs they found
and how they fixed them,
but I've never asked that
of a localization department before
so this time I decided to ask them
what was the worst mistake they made
while working on the game
and it turned out their mistakes
actually made it into the game.
- My worst story is, like, but most of the people
probably haven't seen this dialogue
because it's very, very remote ...
- But it haunts our nightmares.
- Yes.
So, it was, like, very, very, very, very late.
Like, totally late, just before the certification.
Like, everything was closed
and when I was playing the game
I really liked this one thing.
When you're in Skellige and when Yennifer asks you
to help her with the side quest for Last Wish, etc.,
and you just ignore her there's no resolution
for the Yennifer romance at all.
Nobody mentions anything, anywhere.
It's, like, nothing.
- [Danny] Okay.
- Nothing ever happened.
I was like, oh my god, we don't, we can't,
like, it can't stay like that.
It was too late to record anything
so what we did was we created
a very small dialogue
which actually happens before the scene
with Emhyr when they meet in Vizima
and this dialogue is actually created
out of line from other dialogues.
(Danny laughs)
It's, like, it's more of the lines of,
"Yennifer, about what happened in Skellige..."
And Yennifer says, "I don't want to talk about it Geralt
"but stop Geralt," and that's the end of the dialogue
and we actually did it in all languages.
(Danny laughs)
And your story?
- Well ... - Chinese?
- Chinese, no (laughs).
No actually well, okay.
No one noticed so it's not my fault.
- I'm not saying it's your fault.
- Okay, we release the game, there was a side quest,
no, main quest?
- Yeah, it was a side quest.
- It was a side quest.
- Right after Assassination.
- Chinese version, it was not translated at all.
- [Danny] Oh my god!
- [Ainara] We patched the translation in
before anyone could get to that side quest.
- Because it's at the very end of the game
so, you know, it took people probably, like,
30, 40 hours to get there.
- I was like, how was it no one noticed that?
- Yes, that was ...
- The whole quest is in English.
- It was like a brain fart for us.
- So much happens, well, I don't know,
at the lunch table, at the coffee maker,
at the water cooler, in the corridors,
in terms of just, you know, thoughts and ideas
flowing back and forth between departments.
The writers with the quest designers,
the quest designers with the writers,
the writers with us, us with the writers,
us with the quest designers.
There are communications via various channels
that go, that flow, you know, between those departments
and ultimately every idea that winds up in the game
is not the product of a straight pipeline.
It's the product of a very, very, very winding path.
If I were to draw it on the white board
it would be (grunts) you know, just squiggly,
squiggly, squiggly, (moaning).
It'd be a squiggly drawing, you know,
and then you have a box.
- [Danny] Right (laughs).
- That's, to my mind, that's what game development is.
(dramatic music)
(citizens speaking foreign language)
(citizens speaking foreign language)
- [Soldier] (speaking foreign language)
- (speaking foreign language)
- (speaking foreign language)
- (speaking foreign language)
- (speaking foreign language)
- (speaking foreign language)
- (speaking foreign language)
- (speaking foreign language)
- [Soldier] (speaking foreign language)
- (speaking foreign language)
- [Sergeant] (speaking in foreign language)
- [Geralt] (speaking foreign language)
- [Sergeant] (speaking foreign language)
- [Geralt] (speaking foreign language)
- [Sergeant] (speaking foreign language)
- [Geralt] (speaking foreign language)
- [Sergeant] (speaking foreign language)
- [Geralt] (speaking foreign language)
- [Sergeant] (speaking foreign language)
(keyboard clicking)
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