A joke is not a sentence. It is a mechanism. Translating the sentence and losing the mechanism is the single most common failure in game localization. We work at the level of the mechanism.
Bramblewick, a herbalist, introduces himself. The joke turns on “roots” — plant roots and family roots.
Bramblewick's the name. Roots are my business — and I do mean roots. Family tree's mostly nettle.
Bramblewick, zu Diensten. Ich handle mit Wurzeln — und ich meine wirklich Wurzeln. Mein Stammbaum besteht größtenteils aus Brennnesseln.
Bramblewick, pour vous servir. Je vends des racines — et je parle bien de racines. Mon arbre généalogique est surtout composé d'orties.
「ブランブルウィックと申します。根を売って食っておりましてね——ええ、文字通りの『根』を。うちの家系図、辿っていくとほとんどイラクサでして。」
「브램블윅이라고 하오. 뿌리를 파는 게 내 일이지 — 말 그대로 뿌리 말이오. 우리 집안 뿌리를 캐보면 죄다 쐐기풀이라오.」
German Wurzeln/Stammbaum, French racines/arbre généalogique, Japanese 根/家系図 and Korean 뿌리 all carry the same double meaning. This is luck, not skill — and recognising the luck is what keeps us from over-engineering a line that was already fine.
A tavern called The Salted Wyrm. The player walks in badly injured. The English joke is a near-homophone: wringer / Wyrm.
New pair: Hölle / Höllenwurm. Same escalation, same rhythm, same deadpan. Different sounds.
French gives us verre / ver — “a drink” and “a worm”, identical in speech. The barkeep's line is rewritten entirely, because the joke now needs him to offer a drink. The words changed so the effect would not.
揉まれた / 飲まれた — “put through the wringer” / “swallowed”. One syllable apart. The ruby gloss keeps the monster's name intact.
용케 (“by sheer luck”) / 용 (“dragon”). The player catches the barkeep's word and flips it — exactly the move the English makes.
Four languages, four different jokes, one intact scene. The player in Seoul and the player in Lyon laugh in the same place, for the same reason, at words that share nothing.
An item called Widow's Comfort. It is a soothing tea. It is also a poison. The name must read as harmless, then curdle on second thought.
Sweet, floral, and entirely fatal in the third cup. The first two are genuinely pleasant. That is rather the point.
Süß, blumig und ab dem dritten Becher vollkommen tödlich. Die ersten beiden sind aufrichtig angenehm. Genau darin liegt der Sinn.
Douce, florale, et parfaitement mortelle à la troisième tasse. Les deux premières sont sincèrement agréables. C'est bien là tout l'intérêt.
甘く、花の香りがして、三杯目で確実に命を奪う。最初の二杯は本当に心地よい。そこが肝心なのだ。
달콤하고 꽃향기가 나며, 세 잔째에 반드시 목숨을 앗아간다. 처음 두 잔은 진심으로 기분이 좋다. 바로 그 점이 핵심이다.
The dry final sentence is the joke. In every language it lands last, short, and without apology.
A correct translation that overflows the button is a bug. UI work is constrained writing, and the constraint is not negotiable.
The dictionary answer. Renders as “Einstellunge”. Replaced with the established form across German console and Steam UI.
Both overflow. The replacements are marginally narrower in meaning, exact in a skill-tree context.
Chosen after confirming the game has no separate Strength stat to collide with. A short synonym that duplicates another term is worse than an overflow.
German fits by dropping the full sentence. “Schalten Sie den PC nicht aus” is 44 characters with the polite frame; the bare imperative is 33 and reads as native system language.
English barely marks social distance. Japanese and Korean mark it in every sentence. That decision cannot be improvised line by line — it has to be a chart, agreed before the first word is written.
“The bells will ring again at dusk.”
One English line. Three different people. In German and French the difference would live in word choice; in Japanese and Korean it lives in the grammar itself.
I wore a crown for ninety years and never once sat down. Come. Take the weight. I dare you to keep standing.
Neunzig Jahre trug ich eine Krone und setzte mich kein einziges Mal. Komm. Nimm das Gewicht. Ich wette, du bleibst nicht stehen.
J'ai porté une couronne pendant quatre-vingt-dix ans sans jamais m'asseoir. Viens. Prends ce poids. Je te défie de rester debout.
「九十年、余は冠を戴き、一度たりとも腰を下ろさなんだ。来い。この重みを負うがよい。立っていられるものなら、な。」
「구십 년을 왕관을 쓰고도 단 한 번도 앉지 않았다. 오라. 이 무게를 받아라. 서 있을 수 있다면 말이지.」
“Take the weight” is doing two jobs — the physical crown and the burden of rule. Every target keeps both. Note also the three-beat rhythm; this line is voiced, and the pauses are load-bearing.
English source text is almost always written as though the world has two plural forms and no grammatical gender. It does not.
Japanese and Korean have one form. That is correct, not an omission — and the counters 個 and 개 are additions the English never needed.
The other branch is deliberately built to need no gender agreement at all. When the engine cannot tell us who the player is, the writing has to route around the question.
Korean subject particles change depending on whether the preceding word ends in a consonant. The player types their own name, so we cannot know. 이(가) is the safe standard form; if the engine supports character-code lookup, we supply the rule instead.
Placeholders and markup may be moved within a sentence. They are never translated, renumbered or deleted. Japanese frequently needs them moved:
The name moves to the front, because that is where Japanese puts it.
Send us whatever your pipeline produces. Below is the same UI string in each format, with the comment syntax each one supports — because the notes between translator and developer matter as much as the strings.
{{ fmtNote }}
Three documents travel with every delivery: the locked glossary, the style guide the writing follows, and the LQA report from a tester who played the build.
Proper nouns and game terms are never translated from memory. They are translated once, approved, and locked.
Dark fantasy, dry gallows humour. No epic register. Characters speak like people who are tired. Short sentences. Exclamation marks only in combat barks.
Final stage. A tester plays the build in the target language and files everything that could not be seen in a spreadsheet.
Issue types we classify
truncation · overflow · over-translation · under-translation · grammar · gender · consistency · context · typography · audio sync · encoding · line break
Jokes rebuilt from scratch, strings written to fit a button, register charts for Japanese and Korean, and every file format we hand back. All of it original, written for this page.
A joke is not a sentence. It is a mechanism. Translating the sentence and losing the mechanism is the single most common failure in game localization. We work at the level of the mechanism.
Bramblewick, a herbalist, introduces himself. The joke turns on “roots” — plant roots and family roots.
Bramblewick's the name. Roots are my business — and I do mean roots. Family tree's mostly nettle.
Bramblewick, zu Diensten. Ich handle mit Wurzeln — und ich meine wirklich Wurzeln. Mein Stammbaum besteht größtenteils aus Brennnesseln.
Bramblewick, pour vous servir. Je vends des racines — et je parle bien de racines. Mon arbre généalogique est surtout composé d'orties.
「ブランブルウィックと申します。根を売って食っておりましてね——ええ、文字通りの『根』を。うちの家系図、辿っていくとほとんどイラクサでして。」
「브램블윅이라고 하오. 뿌리를 파는 게 내 일이지 — 말 그대로 뿌리 말이오. 우리 집안 뿌리를 캐보면 죄다 쐐기풀이라오.」
German Wurzeln/Stammbaum, French racines/arbre généalogique, Japanese 根/家系図 and Korean 뿌리 all carry the same double meaning. This is luck, not skill — and recognising the luck is what keeps us from over-engineering a line that was already fine.
A tavern called The Salted Wyrm. The player walks in badly injured. The English joke is a near-homophone: wringer / Wyrm.
New pair: Hölle / Höllenwurm. Same escalation, same rhythm, same deadpan. Different sounds.
French gives us verre / ver — “a drink” and “a worm”, identical in speech. The barkeep's line is rewritten entirely, because the joke now needs him to offer a drink. The words changed so the effect would not.
揉まれた / 飲まれた — “put through the wringer” / “swallowed”. One syllable apart. The ruby gloss keeps the monster's name intact.
용케 (“by sheer luck”) / 용 (“dragon”). The player catches the barkeep's word and flips it — exactly the move the English makes.
Four languages, four different jokes, one intact scene. The player in Seoul and the player in Lyon laugh in the same place, for the same reason, at words that share nothing.
An item called Widow's Comfort. It is a soothing tea. It is also a poison. The name must read as harmless, then curdle on second thought.
Sweet, floral, and entirely fatal in the third cup. The first two are genuinely pleasant. That is rather the point.
Süß, blumig und ab dem dritten Becher vollkommen tödlich. Die ersten beiden sind aufrichtig angenehm. Genau darin liegt der Sinn.
Douce, florale, et parfaitement mortelle à la troisième tasse. Les deux premières sont sincèrement agréables. C'est bien là tout l'intérêt.
甘く、花の香りがして、三杯目で確実に命を奪う。最初の二杯は本当に心地よい。そこが肝心なのだ。
달콤하고 꽃향기가 나며, 세 잔째에 반드시 목숨을 앗아간다. 처음 두 잔은 진심으로 기분이 좋다. 바로 그 점이 핵심이다.
The dry final sentence is the joke. In every language it lands last, short, and without apology.
A correct translation that overflows the button is a bug. UI work is constrained writing, and the constraint is not negotiable.
The dictionary answer. Renders as “Einstellunge”. Replaced with the established form across German console and Steam UI.
Both overflow. The replacements are marginally narrower in meaning, exact in a skill-tree context.
Chosen after confirming the game has no separate Strength stat to collide with. A short synonym that duplicates another term is worse than an overflow.
German fits by dropping the full sentence. “Schalten Sie den PC nicht aus” is 44 characters with the polite frame; the bare imperative is 33 and reads as native system language.
English barely marks social distance. Japanese and Korean mark it in every sentence. That decision cannot be improvised line by line — it has to be a chart, agreed before the first word is written.
“The bells will ring again at dusk.”
One English line. Three different people. In German and French the difference would live in word choice; in Japanese and Korean it lives in the grammar itself.
I wore a crown for ninety years and never once sat down. Come. Take the weight. I dare you to keep standing.
Neunzig Jahre trug ich eine Krone und setzte mich kein einziges Mal. Komm. Nimm das Gewicht. Ich wette, du bleibst nicht stehen.
J'ai porté une couronne pendant quatre-vingt-dix ans sans jamais m'asseoir. Viens. Prends ce poids. Je te défie de rester debout.
「九十年、余は冠を戴き、一度たりとも腰を下ろさなんだ。来い。この重みを負うがよい。立っていられるものなら、な。」
「구십 년을 왕관을 쓰고도 단 한 번도 앉지 않았다. 오라. 이 무게를 받아라. 서 있을 수 있다면 말이지.」
“Take the weight” is doing two jobs — the physical crown and the burden of rule. Every target keeps both. Note also the three-beat rhythm; this line is voiced, and the pauses are load-bearing.
English source text is almost always written as though the world has two plural forms and no grammatical gender. It does not.
Japanese and Korean have one form. That is correct, not an omission — and the counters 個 and 개 are additions the English never needed.
The other branch is deliberately built to need no gender agreement at all. When the engine cannot tell us who the player is, the writing has to route around the question.
Korean subject particles change depending on whether the preceding word ends in a consonant. The player types their own name, so we cannot know. 이(가) is the safe standard form; if the engine supports character-code lookup, we supply the rule instead.
Placeholders and markup may be moved within a sentence. They are never translated, renumbered or deleted. Japanese frequently needs them moved:
The name moves to the front, because that is where Japanese puts it.
Send us whatever your pipeline produces. Below is the same UI string in each format, with the comment syntax each one supports — because the notes between translator and developer matter as much as the strings.
Columns prefixed with “_” are ignored by the engine and reserved for translator and reviewer notes.
Three documents travel with every delivery: the locked glossary, the style guide the writing follows, and the LQA report from a tester who played the build.
Proper nouns and game terms are never translated from memory. They are translated once, approved, and locked.
Dark fantasy, dry gallows humour. No epic register. Characters speak like people who are tired. Short sentences. Exclamation marks only in combat barks.
Final stage. A tester plays the build in the target language and files everything that could not be seen in a spreadsheet.
Issue types we classify
truncation · overflow · over-translation · under-translation · grammar · gender · consistency · context · typography · audio sync · encoding · line break
Every string, character, joke and place name on this page was written for this showcase. Nothing here is taken from a shipped title — and your sample comes back the same way, written for you.