Sempiro wrote:
Hello everyone.
I involved in game translation and I am a gamer myself. For past years I see some weird trend in game industry (even AAA games) when general terms (hero, tower, player score, gold etc) being capitalized in the middle of a sentence, especially in RPG, MMO and MOBA games . For example:
En: This Hero does not exist.
Ru: Этот Герой не существует.
En: Battle to earn Gold and purchase awesome Heroes.
Ru: Участвуйте в битвах, зарабатывайте Золото и приобретайте куртых Героев.
En: Attacking enemy Heroes within range of an Enemy Defense Tower will cause the Tower to target you.
Ru: При нападении на вражеских Героев в зоне поражения их Башни, она будет атаковать вас!
En: Your Credibility Score is an evaluation of your in-game behavior.
Ru: Ваш Счет игрока — это оценка ваших действий в игре.
...
I personally think that all general terms shouldn't be capitalized, but can be colored. When I translate general terms I do not capitalize them.
What do you think? How do you deal with general terms during translation? Do you follow the source and capitalize them or not? And why?
I work in this sphere and in this exact pair, and I'm lucky enough to have my clients either prepare a sheet with projects specs, where they list end client's preferences, or just stick to common sense and rules of Russian language.
I advise you discuss the matter with your clients and maybe consider creating a ТЗ (тех.задание, project specs) to have some technical stuff settled, like capitalization, usage of ё, preferences about quotation marks, string length etc.
I never come to the idea of creating such a thing for my non-gaming clients, but it's really invaluable for gaming projects.
I personally am an advocate of using ё all the time and following Russian rules of capitalization. But at the end of day it's the client who sets the rules.
[Edited at 2017-06-26 19:13 GMT]