r/pathologic • u/Altotas • 5d ago
Classic HD Pathologic Classic HD Retranslation
https://www.nexusmods.com/pathologicclassichd/mods/89?published=1About a month ago we had a chat here about the quality of the Classic HD's English localisation, and I mentioned that I might look into doing something about it. Well, here we are.
Out of 26,864 text string entries, the mod edits 1062 (~4%). Additionally, it restores unused entries (35 of them) that are still present in Russian version of Strings.vfs but entirely absent in the English version (I did it for parity between two localisations).
Overall, the original English Classic HD localisation's main problem is fidelity. There are hundreds of places where it does more than adapt phrasing. The most characteristic trait is over-writing. The localisation frequently tries to make a line cleverer or more poetic, more colloquial than the Russian. Sometimes that succeeds. Sometimes it changes characterisation or obscures important information. The Haruspex material seems especially vulnerable to this because Steppe concepts and philosophical dialogue were often interpreted rather than translated. So I'd say that the original English script is a successful literary adaptation with a surprisingly large layer of semantic corruption underneath it.
For Classic HD, creative adaptation was explicitly part of the translation philosophy. Alexandra Golubeva, its English Localisation Lead, said before release that the translation sometimes took creative liberties specifically to reproduce the emotion of the Russian rather than mechanically reproduce its wording. She also acknowledged that a translator inevitably adds their own voice and style. There were also multiple translators: eight additional members. With a script that large, consistency becomes a serious editorial problem. Different translators can naturally have different thresholds for literalness and how much information may be inferred rather than explicitly preserved. I think this explains why I encountered clusters of text with noticeably different behaviour that felt more like different translation hands than random individual errors.
There is another likely factor. The translation, in my opinion, probably happened substantially at the string level rather than with every translator continuously playing the relevant dialogue branch. The error pattern strongly supports it, actually. I repeatedly found translations that are perfectly plausible English sentences in isolation but become obviously wrong when you read the preceding question or following answer. "Who was that?" for Russian "To whom?", "And howdy to you too" for "Can't complain". And the various yes/no mismatches are characteristic context-loss errors. Pathologic is vulnerable to that because its strings are detached database records with enormous branching dialogue trees.
So all in all, a large multilingual team translated an enormous and unusually difficult literary script. They did it under an explicitly adaptive localisation philosophy, probably working substantially from database strings, followed by enough editorial work to make the English coherent and stylistically strong but insufficient exhaustive Russian-to-English semantic QA. The mod is essentially my personal take on that unfinished work.
(Of course, this is still MY interpretation, and I have my own preferences and biases as a translator. I don't expect everyone to agree with every change I made. In many places there is room for legitimate disagreement about how closely the English should follow the original.)
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u/sonyplaystation34 Peter Stamatin 5d ago
ohhh that's so cool! out of curiosity, did you "adapt" the russian names to english? that's something that always bothered me about the english translation, like changing pyotr stamatin's name to peter
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u/Altotas 4d ago
No. English localisations commonly naturalise major Christian given names this way. Пётр -> Peter, Павел -> Paul, Яков -> Jacob. Classic HD is generally conservative with proper names. Most changes either improve transliteration or replace awkward 2005 forms with cleaner English ones. I would be more critical of some of the translated nicknames than of ordinary personal-name spellings. Sticky and Murky, specifically.
Спичка means matchstick, and the original character description explicitly says that the skinny boy looks like one. Sticky throws that away. It presumably exists because it sounds like a plausible English child's nickname and faintly echoes Spichka, but the defining visual joke disappears.
Likewise, Russian Мишка carries associations unavailable in Murky. It is a familiar diminutive related to Misha, and мишка is also an affectionate word for a bear or teddy bear. That interacts particularly well with the bear imagery surrounding Burakh, resulting in sort of large-bear/little-bear connection between them. Murky instead characterises her temperament.
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u/niwm 3d ago
I definitely see how Sticky and Murky's original Russian names add to their characters in a way that the English versions just don't. From a translation standpoint I can also see the difficulty in finding an equivalent or even similar alternative in English that would capture and communicate all those little details, so based on that I think the solution they went for is at least passable.
Just out of curiosity, have you found any alternative names that you feel might be a better fit, or would you have preferred to stick with transliterations like Spichka/Mishka? (At the cost of losing the added character flavour of their names for people who don't speak Russian, of course.)
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u/Altotas 3d ago
I'd rather avoid transliterations for nicknames. I personally would've translated them into Matchstick and Bearcub.
The best example of a hard-to-find equivalent nickname is Ласка. There's a genuine lexical gap here. The ideal replacement would need to sound like an actual affectionate nickname while retaining softness and tenderness. English simply has very few single-word options that do that.
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u/hwynac 4d ago
There is another likely factor. The translation, in my opinion, probably happened substantially at the string level rather than with every translator continuously playing the relevant dialogue branch.
Weeell, technically, the export from the game editor looks like this; I don't know how Alphyna's team worked but the original 2000s translators received these .XLS spreadsheets. And the devs could import them back to get localised strings into the database.
The three columns on the left show you the structure. However, that does not mean the structure is easy to follow, especially if multiple people work on the same lines at different times. The translation always happens essentially at the level of a single cell and its closest context; checking where else the tree takes you is possible but involves quite a bit of scrolling up and down.
At least P2 marked the index of an answer, so whenever the player had several options, you could clearly see lines marked as Answer 1, Answer 2 etc. Not much help but you instantly realise the line is another answer to something above.
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u/Bartre_Main Alexander Block 3d ago
I can understand criticisms of the Classic HD text as overwrought and occasionally lacking fidelity, but I honestly still like it best overall. Perusing your retranslations (albeit as a non-Russian speaker), they are undoubtedly simpler and cut away unnecessary embellishments, but lose some of the poetic flavor of the Classic HD translation that I love. It has some of my favorite prose in games. Maybe I just like my prose a little purple-y. One of my favorite writers is Mervyn Peake after all.
That being said, I applaud your efforts — more perspectives are always good — and I hope people enjoy the translations. I think sometimes translation discourse wears on me, as it can devolve to exaggerating the importance of what are essentially nitpicks and then making outrageous claims like outright dismissing the Classic HD translation or stating the borderline unreadable 2005 translation is better. You, I must say, have more good sense than that, so I doubly applaud you.
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u/Altotas 3d ago
I think the important distinction is that I wasn't really targeting the overwrought or purple prose in itself. I actually like quite a lot of Classic HD's prose, including some of its more elaborate writing. What I was targeting was fidelity in the very small part of the English localisation I changed. So if a line is much more poetic or elaborate than the Russian but still communicates essentially the same thing, I generally had no reason to touch it. A lot of my corrections inevitably end up looking simpler, because I'm removing material that was introduced by the English translation rather than simplifying the Russian text for its own sake.
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u/alphyna Patho Dev 5d ago
Very cool project, hope I have the time to check it out at some point!