English Amiga Board - View Single Post - Translation from Finnish to English (Turboraketti)

Rixa · 26 September 2009, 19:51

Turboraketti is one of my all-time favourites. I was myself toying with the idea of building a WHDLoad slave with optional translations, but that hasn't happened yet.. if you do a good job it might never. I'd like a WHDLoad slave though. Turboraketti does fairly well without, but there are some hassles in my setup. I seem to recall the mouse pointer needs to be in low res or the sprites get broken and I also needed to do some degrade with tude or the graphics were otherwise broken. A WHDLoad slave would simplify all that greatly.

Finnish likes compound nouns. I'm a native speaker but not a linguist, so I only know what I like and not why that is. "Turboraketti" should be grammatically correct. "Turbo raketti" on the other hand sounds very wrong. If you translate the name, it should in my mind definitely be "Turborocket" instead of "Turbo Rocket".

Some of the language used is intentionally(?) a bit wacky, and perhaps you would like your translation to reflect this. The fuel, for instance, is inexplicably written with a z: "benziiniä" ("amount of gazoline"). The status screen header for the statistics on how you've lost ships also uses a somewhat unlikely word; "särki menneet alukset" ("smashed ships"). It's hard to explain but its not a word you expect when you're not talking about cracks on the windshield - but it's not exactly wrong either. There is more.

Perhaps I could review what Bamiga2002 comes up with and offer some suggestions if I come up with any. If you intend to release a changed version, you should really contact the original author and okay it with him first. If you don't know how, private message me for an e-mail address that still worked last year. If that fails, I still know someone who knows him personally.

26 September 2009, 19:51	#5
Rixa Registered User Join Date: Sep 2007 Location: Tampere / Finland Posts: 127	Turboraketti is one of my all-time favourites. I was myself toying with the idea of building a WHDLoad slave with optional translations, but that hasn't happened yet.. if you do a good job it might never. I'd like a WHDLoad slave though. Turboraketti does fairly well without, but there are some hassles in my setup. I seem to recall the mouse pointer needs to be in low res or the sprites get broken and I also needed to do some degrade with tude or the graphics were otherwise broken. A WHDLoad slave would simplify all that greatly. Finnish likes compound nouns. I'm a native speaker but not a linguist, so I only know what I like and not why that is. "Turboraketti" should be grammatically correct. "Turbo raketti" on the other hand sounds very wrong. If you translate the name, it should in my mind definitely be "Turborocket" instead of "Turbo Rocket". Some of the language used is intentionally(?) a bit wacky, and perhaps you would like your translation to reflect this. The fuel, for instance, is inexplicably written with a z: "benziiniä" ("amount of gazoline"). The status screen header for the statistics on how you've lost ships also uses a somewhat unlikely word; "särki menneet alukset" ("smashed ships"). It's hard to explain but its not a word you expect when you're not talking about cracks on the windshield - but it's not exactly wrong either. There is more. Perhaps I could review what Bamiga2002 comes up with and offer some suggestions if I come up with any. If you intend to release a changed version, you should really contact the original author and okay it with him first. If you don't know how, private message me for an e-mail address that still worked last year. If that fails, I still know someone who knows him personally.