For Empires of the Undergrowth, the challenge was naming all the creatures. One of the biggest challenges of any project involving terminology that’s deeply rooted in entomology, zoology, or any other scientific field is… naming things. Another challenging reference was A Muppet Christmas Carol and “And after all, there’s only one more wave ’til Christmas!” because- even though the movie was translated-the song itself was not. I thought so too, until I realized that there are 6 different Polish translations of this one movie. You’d think that finding the scene in an already translated movie should be enough.
Finding their counterparts in Polish wasn’t that easy.Īt one point the narrator quotes Die Hard: “Welcome to the party, pal”. The client did provide us with the list of references, but that was only half of the job. The level is fun and difficult, and so was the translation. To make it even more interesting, the narrator constantly quotes a bunch of Christmas movies and songs. Empires of the Undergrowth includes a challenging level where you get to be a spider at Christmas time. I couldn’t find a bug phrase or idiom that would do the job in Polish, so I had to work around it. For me that phrase was “Just Isn’t Cricket”. You might spend an hour (or more) doing research and looking for something that will work and still convey the same pun, only to realize that it’s just not going to happen. But there are some that will really rattle your brain. Then there are some phrases that need a bit more work, like “Get Your Own Eggs” or “Prison Break”. In some cases, that’s quite easy: “Picky Eater” or “Quality Not Quantity” translate perfectly well into Polish. It needs to convey the same message as the original. Not only do you have to be able to spot them, but you also have to make sure that the translation is relatable in the target language. Finding and recognizing idioms or references is also quite a challenge.
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