Overreacting, Part 1: Localization compromises in reactive dialogues

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This guy

Why Kenshi's reactive dialogue poses a grammatical challenge for Polish localization.

A game that hates you

Kenshi is jokingly described by its creators as a game that hates you. It places you in a brutal, unforgiving world, and mercilessly beats you down time and time again. If you manage to stay alive and uneaten — these are separate concerns, by the way — you can do anything you damn well please. And if it pleases you to explore, the game will reward you with deep, thoughtful lore. That freedom, and the hostility wrapped around it, have earned Kenshi a cult following.

In that respect, localising its sequel into Polish is very Kenshi. This series explores some of the localisation problems I tackled during that project.

The examples and explanations in this series have been adapted to the systems used in Kenshi 1. The second installment is rather more complex in many respects, but that would be telling.

Just a simple variable

Kenshi ships with a modding tool called the Forgotten Construction Set (FCS), which pulls double duty as its translation interface. The dialogue’s structure is familiar to anyone who has worked with narrative design. Each dialogue node in the tree may branch out depending on the state of the player or the game world (Is the Big Bad still alive? Are you weak, or strong? Are you a woman, or a man? Does my faction like you?), and so on. Nodes can also apply effects (give you items, adjust money, set your wanted level).

Imagine, then, that you open a random dialogue package and see the following line:

In English, this makes perfect sense. Have the game look at your equipment and substitute sword, crossbow, or blade accordingly. Job done.

Now let’s translate it into Polish. An experienced translator immediately has a few questions for the game developers:

• What’s the gender of the speaker? This matters for the ending of I stole;
• What’s the gender of the player? This affects the translation of Fool;
• What values does /WEAPON/ return? This affects the entire grammar of the sentence.

They already know they’ll have to rewrite the sentence or simplify it a bit — and then the answers come back:

• The speaker is a randomly generated NPC. Their gender may be either male or female;
• The player character is defined by the player; they can be of any gender, and they can travel either solo or with a whole group;
• /WEAPON/ can return nouns of different grammatical genders;
• And it is not a one-off; the same /WEAPON/ variable is reused across many different contexts.

Their heart sinks.

The grammar problem

To understand the plight of our translator, you need to know that in Polish, every noun has a grammatical gender. Adjectives, pronouns, numerals, and some verb forms may need to change to agree with it. Polish also features seven grammatical cases that further modify word endings depending on context.

To illustrate this point, the Polish word for tall will look and sound different depending on whether you are describing a tall boy, a tall girl, or a tall tree, and whether someone is climbing the tall tree or standing under it:

The upside is that Polish allows considerably freer word order, giving writers more control over emphasis, rhythm, and tone. The downside is… well, let’s find out, shall we?

Tackling the weapon

Easiest one first. Since /WEAPON/ can resolve to nouns of various genders, defaulting to your|twój♂️ in the masculine:

…is not a solution we can generalize. The possessive your|twój♂️ will work with masculine-gendered weapons stick|kij♂️ or sword|miecz♂️. The nominative a sword and accusative case I stole a sword forms of these nouns are also identical. But the moment /WEAPON/ resolves to crossbow|kusza♀️, the noun phrase breaks:

Because crossbow|kusza♀️ is feminine and because it is the direct object of stole|ukradłem♂️, we would actually need a feminine possessive in an accusative case your|twoją♀️, and the accusative case form of the noun also mutates:

For neuter blade|ostrze⚲, we need a different possessive pronoun your|twoje⚲:

So one English phrase your /WEAPON/ may need to change depending on the /WEAPON/:

• twój miecz
• twoją kuszę
• twoje ostrze

…and that is before we account for whether we mean single character’s your|twój♂️ or the whole team’s your|wasz♂️, where the possessive would have to change yet again.

Quickest way out — replace /WEAPON/ with a general term, weapon|oręż♂️, to ensure it’s stable.

That’s compromise #1, and the game is now incapable of reacting to the weapon the player’s holding. Let’s move on.

Tackling speaker gender

Since many NPCs in the game are randomised, this line might be said either by a man or a woman. We can’t just use the masculine form of I stole|ukradłem♂️

If the speaker is a woman, using the masculine form immediately breaks the illusion. The correct form would be:

So instead, let’s avoid marking the speaker’s gender and put the focus on the noun weapon|oręż♂️, which we know is masculine:

That’s compromise #2. The act of theft has been reduced to a simple statement of possession. Working out how the weapon changed hands is an exercise left to the player. But it still makes sense, so – good enough.

Tackling target gender

Now, the NPC is calling the player character a fool. If we keep the masculine form of fool|głupiec:

…the insult would misgender player characters who are women. A feminine version would need a different form, such as:

If the line addresses a whole group, we need a plural form fools|głupcy♂️ or fools|głupie♀️ instead. But that’s irrelevant, because we’re not going to be calling the player character a fool. We could try to come up with an insult that doesn’t depend on gender or number, but that’s another constraint — and many Polish insults are gender-specific. We make compromise #3 and replace it with a generic ‘Ha!’ instead. We can live with this, I guess.

Tackling target number

Now, if the speaker is addressing the player’s whole group, your has to become plural:

Fine, then — either we address only the player character in the singular, or avoid addressing anyone specific, referring instead to the generic “weapon” itself. This makes for compromise #4:

We look at our work, and despair

Let’s assess the damage: the line is now grammatically safe, but in a Kenshiesque turn of events, we’ve lopped a lot of meat off that torso. We no longer name a specific weapon, directly insult the player, or make clear who has stolen from whom, blunting a lot of the original attitude. One down, thousands to go.

Also, those individually sensible compromises add up. Even if you write yourself out of every grammatical pickle — and let’s face it, you won’t — what will all those linguistic acrobatics achieve?

Chances are, you’ll turn a game that begins with a detailed character creator and prides itself on reactivity into something that, when played in Polish, doesn’t acknowledge the identity of the player character, and speaks to them in a voice far removed from the original intent.

The challenge, then: adapt to an alien world that wasn’t made for you.