Hello, Rogue Traders!

In today’s post, we’d like to talk about some of the translation rules we set while conducting our Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader localization project, including the way we addressed the narration, and a development that made us proud of ourselves and our work after the completion of the project.

We are sure you are excited by the fire of your faith in the Emperor to hear what we are going to tell. Let's start with a little news that will make you even happier. The Turkish localization process of Rogue Trader's first downloadable content is mostly complete, and the quality assurance and further editing processes are in full swing. We can say that you will be able to experience Void Shadows in Turkish very soon. May the Emperor guide you in this adventure where you will fight against some dark elements in the depths of your voidship!

Let's talk about the translation rules and other details we wanted to convey to you. First of all, Rogue Trader, with its deep universe, diverse setting and characters, complex language structure and challenging sentences, was a project that required some things to be determined from the very beginning. For example, since the game contains both real-life Latin phrases and made-up but very realistic expressions, we had to decide how to translate them and which ones to leave in their original form. So that was one of the first things we focused on.

At the end of the day, we made the decision to adapt the phrases that have some or all equivalents to traditional usage, to leave the made-up Latin terms the same, and to localize everything else, and for the most part we have proceeded accordingly. Of course, we have made exceptions from time to time.

Once the matter of the localization of phrases and terms was finalized, we moved on to determining how the different types of texts would be translated. Actually, at that point, we already had most of the stuff determined. After another review, we finalized most of the things, some of which had to change as the project progressed with Owlcat making some decisions. We have a lot of data on tenses, but for the sake of brevity, we'll share one of the most fundamental ones: This is the tense used in the sequences in the game where the narrator describes the setting and what is happening.

We can say that we had a lot of discussions about this and we changed our minds more than once. At first we decided to use the simple present tense, but over time we realized that it was a bit too toneless for the text and that it would be more appropriate to use the present continuous tense in order to immerse the players in that moment and make them feel that they were in the atmosphere and setting that is described in the text. At some point, we also analyzed the approaches preferred in similar games and made this change accordingly.

Another detail we would like to share is a cultural one. As you know, the Warhammer universe is one where loyalty and belief in the Emperor is very important and this is clearly seen in the characters. The Emperor is the god of this universe and it is clear that special expressions have been molded over time. Accordingly, we wanted to keep certain phrases (e.g. “Emperor protects”, “For the Emperor's sake”, etc.) in Turkish to reflect the strength in the faith of the Emperor in this universe, and we felt that they were appropriate to the game, the approach we decided on and the Warhammer universe.

We've considered many such issues in great detail and adopted appropriate localization approaches, and we're very happy to see that these have been well received by players so far.

Before we conclude our post, we would like to share the development we mentioned in the beginning. After the Turkish language option was added to Rogue Trader, Games Workshop asked us to prepare a very large glossary for them and informed us that this glossary will be used in future projects. We prepared a very elaborate and comprehensive glossary. We hope that the effort we have shown will help many more Warhammer games and products to be brought into our language. We are also happy to announce that our own glossary, which we have been updating since the beginning of the Rogue Trader localization project, has reached 10,700 entries. We look forward to continuing this effort both in the remaining downloadable content translations and in any future projects we may be involved in.