Want to help us with translating The Witcher to your language? Read how the Turkish version was made.

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Want to help us with translating The Witcher to your language? Read how the Turkish version was made.



A few hours ago we posted some info about the Turkish version of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition. Some of our fans contacted us, saying that they would love to help us localize the game. As weve written before, we are open to initiatives like this. To give you more details on this process we contacted Gkhan Halil Dzgn from www.oyunceviri.com and asked him about his work on The Witcher 2. So if you want to see The Witcher in your own language, follow his steps and contact us. We really appreciate your contribution!
Enjoy this short interview:
1. How did you come up with an idea with localizing The Witcher?
First of all Im Gkhan Halil Dzgn, a great RPG fan. I have played nearly every RPGs that were released for the PC, including the first Ultima, Wizardry or MM games. I have been watching the progress of the The Witcher 1 since CD Projekt RED bought the Aurora Engine from Bioware. I was watching the videos, reading the interviews and knew that this would be a great game. As you know I wasnt wrong. I immediately became a Witcher fan and were waiting for the next game. By that time I had begun to translate games for a hobby and definitely want to show the Turkish audience how great the story of the witcher is. I want them to understand the great story, characters of the game and to see their choices consequences in the game. Language is a great barrier for RPGs and without knowing whats going on in the background it quickly becomes an action game with meaningless combat.
2. How many people worked on the game and how much time did it take to finish it?
We have 10 people on the team. All of my team members came from www.oyunceviri.com, our platform dedicated only to translating games. It took us 6 months to translate the game completely with the additional Enhanced Edition content. Of course we could translate it in a shorter time, but we have other jobs, school, etc. Also one of the reasons it took 6 months was that I made a heavy proof-reading every one of the sentence in the translation. I didnt want it to be a rushed project, I wanted a quality translation that could match up the high quality of the game. And I think as a team we achieved this goal, as Im sure Turkish audience will agree with me once the EE version is released.
3. Did you have any experience with localizing games?
I began translating games in 2010 with Dragon Age Origins. I was the project leader of this translation, very ambitious project, as you know how text heavy this game is (over 700.000 words). It took us 1 year to translate it. Ive encountered lots of problems, people joined the team but left at some point without translating much. My second project was Risen. Its a one man translation project and took me 6 months to translate it fully. By that time I met with the great www.oyunceviri.com family and saw dedicated people like me. My team members also are experienced with translating games. They have worked in the translation projects of Oblivion, Batman Arkham Asylum, Mass Effect 2, Borderlands, Half Life 2, Sanitarium, Star Wars KOTOR and many others.
4. How did CD Projekt RED help you with the Turkish version of The Witcher 2?
They helped a lot. First I contacted with Marcin Iwinski and he leaded me to Mikolaj Szwed and the localization department. One of the things I feel about communicating with the CD Projket REDs team is that theyre more than gamers that theyre businessman. Theyre passionate about their games. They provided us all the necessary documents, detailed walkthroughs with detailed script files. Even a person who didnt play the game, can understand the dialogues with reading these documents. Sometimes other firms do not provide such documents to professional localization teams, so the quality of translation can drop because of that. For this Im grateful to CD Projekt RED.
5. What was the most difficult part in the localization process?
Most difficult part was finding Turkish terms for the original ones, like Witcher, Blue Stripes. In some terms we made serious brainstorming on our forums. As you know two synonymous terms in real world can have different meaning in an RPG. Sometimes youre not satisfied with the translation of the a term, and you need to change that in the middle of the project and sometimes it needs serious backtracking.
6. What is the word for "witcher" in your translation?
Turkish translation of the witcher is efsunger. We made heavy brainstorming about translation of witcher word. Witcher is an English word, but isnt used much in the literature. So we have to use a word which has the same meaning in Turkish, but also must be unique. We browsed some old Turkish dictionaries for the term. So we decided in Efsunger, Efsunger means man who makes mystic magic in the old Turkish language.
 
Thanks for posting this! This has given me hope to start a project like this to translate the Witcher 2 into my language.
 
awesome job guys, looking forward to checking your work, I don't speak turkish but I'm very curious how it turned out.
 
It's awsome
Where should we start for translating it to Persian , it will be great :)
please help me how to start ;) I will pick a team and go on to translate it to Persian

Thanks CDR , great job :)
 
Nice interview! :)

Good job with the translation! Great to see high quality stuff from fans that has a passion for games and also being supported by the developers of that perticular game is absolutley amazing!
 
In the first paragraph you misspelled initiatives you have it spelled "iniciatives" just thought I would point that out![font="BellGothicRegular, Arial, serif"]"[/font]
 
Oh yes! what a nice news! The Witcher verb gets spread... mwaahaha *evil plan is taking shape...*
I think E ahmet will apreciate this hugely

TOGVulcan said:
It's awsome
Where should we start for translating it to Persian , it will be great :)
please help me how to start ;) I will pick a team and go on to translate it to Persian

Thanks CDR , great job :)
Fantastic idea

I think you should contact privately on of the Devs to gather all the infos you need. Try asking MM360, Masos or Keth
 
It's really great to see how the devs are helping and supporting their fans by improving
or adding misc stuff like languages to the game or where the devs are responding and listening to them.
I really don't know any other developer besides CDP who helps, talks and support their fans.

You're the best CDP
 
great job oyunceviri.com, and all the best in the future projects guys! who knows they might even get some early access to TW3 and other projects from CDPR soon!
 
Turkish Language Pack too Wow. I'm Turkish and been in UK for 21 years. Since I was 10 :) I speak Turkish and English very fluently. As a way of saying Thank You to you CDProjekt Red, I can help you as well. I'll be looking forward for the Turkish version of the game see how it is been translated. I will post any errors I find within the game in the forums. :)
 
hmm, going to start working on Latin translation, for all those people who only speak latin. Then I'll work on Proto-indo European language. After those are done I'll work on Pig Latin =P

anyways kudos to those who work on translating this game into other languages, everyone in the world should be able to enjoy this game.
 
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