Translators for Estiah2 needed!

[Nipal]

Thanks for all your remarks. We should include an official sheet of common translations on the UI soon,
as for now, here are some most important ones:

Estiah (the game) : 永石记 (as in Shards of Eternity)
Estiah (the world/land) : 娑尘界 (not quite decided yet, so any suggestion is welcome, best if related to 六道轮回)
Rune : 符文 (Nile suggested 属性 and i like it very much)
Charm : 封石 (going with Shards of Eternity, although not all Charms are stones in Estiah's lore)
Gear : 装备 (easy to understand for new players, I hope)

NPCs : besides the main characters who have already their names in Chinese, others you can suggest whatever
you like (as long as it sounds Chinese)

Specializations : see accepted texts. We'll accept any texts that are better.

Rune names : well, waaaayy back then some player made this http://forum.estiah.com/index.php?topic=2544.0
so I simply copy/pasted. That's why they are single characters. But I agree, two-character words would sound
better. Suggest the ones you like and I'll mark them as final instead.

City names : I omitted 城 because some texts already have it (like "Move to %s" is translated to "移动到%s城").
I totally agree it would sound better if we included 城, but it's not that weird without, considering it's only a matter
of knowing. It's the same case of 洛阳 vs 洛阳城, most of Chinese know what it is I think. As for now, we leave 城
out but we can improve later of course.

Now the most important question: how do I mark translations as final? Well, I do speak Chinese (fluently) so I
have no trouble to identify good/bad translations. I could've translated the game myself but it would take years
since my typing speed is around 1 character per hour ^o^ And I don't play games in Chinese so I have no idea
at all how to translate words like Buff/Debuff (we should go with 增益/减益 btw, if it's easier to understand.

Anyway, our priority for now is to have 100% texts translated so the game will be playable, most of translations
will be marked as final as long as they are (almost) correct. With the voting system, we won't have trouble to
pick better ones later

Once again, thank you very much for doing this. We'll hand out rewards to all translators at the release, but from
our experience, devoted fans usually don't care much about rewards. That's why it's quite touching 


PS @Dolmick:
The connection issue you've mentioned is very worrying. Our server is located in Paris, provided by a major ISP,
so I never thought there would be any trouble. Most of pages load within 2 seconds for us, and we never experienced
any packet loss. Technically the battle should attempt to reconnect if the connection is lost, and you can F5 to
resume fight if there's any freeze.

Maybe you can try the HTTPS version of site (here's how to on beta server http://forum.estiah.com/index.php?topic=6567.0)
It helps bypassing the packet sniffing technique used by some antivirus.

If most Chinese players are having connection issues, we'll have to look into how to get a server on china mainland.
As for now, I have no idea how to do that. Please keep us updated about this issue, it'd be a pity if you do all
translation work and no Chinese players can play :E

[Zomby]

Your Chinese is really surprising, Nipal. No wonder you've given so many good translations, lol. It's really admirable being such a good game designer while fluently in a second foreign language.

Here is some analyzation and my personal suggestion of some of the Chinese name.

Estiah (the game) : 永石记 (as in Shards of Eternity)

"石"in Chinese means stones and rocks in usual, associates an image of rough grey stones with the word. While "宝石"(gem) means "precious stone". Sometimes we describe some gems with only"石", e.g. Opal is "猫眼石", which in fact "猫眼宝石", a cateye-looking gem. The reason why the "宝石" become "石" is 4 characters too long for a Chinese word.
The name "永石记" interpreted character by character will be "A story of a Long-living Stone". Doesn't seem like a cool name for Chinese players.  
My suggestion: 永恒裂片 sounds better.
And I believe old players will get intimacy from the name Estiah or "艾斯缇亚".

Estiah (the world/land) : 娑尘界
 (not quite decided yet, so any suggestion is welcome, best if related to 六道轮回)
 娑尘界 feels like a Dimension of Dancing(feminine) Dust. That's quite cool.

Rune : 符文 (Nile suggested 属性 and i like it very much)
Charm : 封石 (going with Shards of Eternity, although not all Charms are stones in Estiah's lore)

Rune and Charm bothered me a lot.  
I think Rune in games refers to a piece of stone that engraved with a rune letter. Seen Chinese translations are "符文","符石","咒文","雕文","铭文"
In Estiah 2, Rune is the cost of ability charms, similar with the land cards of MTG, mana crystals of Hearthstone.
Runes can be consumed, so "属性" (means attributes, or school/class of magic) doesn't fit.
And charm, I think, is an amulet or a trinket imbued or enchanted with magic. Like those various sized Charms that devoured my inventory in Diablo II. Seen Chinese translation are "护符","咒符"
(You see, I hate the Character "符" now. )
In Estiah 2 it feels like (to me) Charm is a trinket in a chain that release its power once every fight.
I like the word "封石" you made, sounds like a stone in which sealed mythic power, although it's more "stone" than "trinket".

So here we are:
1. Rune - 符文，Charm - 封石
2. Rune - 咒能，Charm - 咒符(The resource or power of Charms, and the Charms)

Gear : 装备 (easy to understand for new players, I hope)
To most Chinese players, "装备" is a interface of several slots and there corresponding items which can only be worn or wielded, excluding potions, spells and so on.
Gear is a random chain of Charms, so I assume "封石组" or "咒符组" (as Deck of Charms, depends on which translation we used above) is a better word for "Gear".

Names of cities

"城"
Adding "城" after the name is a tradition of translating cities in fantasy worlds, especially when the name is translated in its meaning but not its pronunciation.
e.g.
<A Song of Ice and Fire>, Riverrun is 奔流城, King's Landing is 君临城,  Yunkai is "渊凯"(pronuciation), Mereen is "弥林"(pronuciation)
<World of Warcraft> Ogrimmar is 奥格瑞玛(pronunciation), Ironforge is 铁炉堡
So I suggest "Move to %s" still be "移动到%s", let the word itself finish the "城". There will be future benifits if we need to use names of these cities with "城".

I could not understand some Estiah cities before, such as "Inachis", "Aleas"...
But thanks to these beautifully translated Chinese names, they gave me a image when I saw them.
And I'm describing them so you can see if I (or other players) can get the point or not
Aleas - 叹歌 - A song of sigh
Aleas - 奇息 - Strange breath
Zeal - 悬云 - City hang underneath the clouds (with a feel of nervous, I prefer this one)
Zeal - 云端 - City over the clouds (without a feel of nervous)
Inachis - 平蝶 - A flat butterfly
Lumina - 日照 - City of sunshine (And there is a real 日照 in Shandong Province, China)
Lumina - 流光(My version) - City of flowing lights (It's cooler, and not in Shandong, lol)
Eclis - 地蚀 - Eclipse of earth
Wildhowl - 绿啸 - Howl of nature
Triland - 盘沙 - City on quicksand
Night Tear - 夜嚎 - Roar in the night
(I'm afraid "嚎" is not a pleasant name for a city. If tear is the salty liquid of crying, I suggest "泪". Else if tear means pulling apart, I suggest "裂" )
Windscar - 风痕 - Scar of wind
Meropis - 霄梦 - Dream of high sky
Gaea's Dawn - 晓谷 - Valey of dawn
Eversweep - 永浪 - Waves that never end ("浪" may imply "dissipated". I suggest "汐"- night tide, or "涛" - greater waves)
Darka - 龙窖 - A cellar of dragon (an dragon maybe too big to a cellar, I saw Dolmick given a proper "窟")
Skyrift - 耸天 - A towering city so high

[Nipal]

We have quite a few texts hard to translate because of their double meaning. we really should have
done a proper naming job while making e1 so we wouldn't have these headaches now 

永石记 is actually short for Chronicles of Shards of Eternity, if literally translated the title would be
something like 永恒幻石传奇, way too long for a game title. Initially I wanted to go with 恒石记, but there
are zillions of google search results with 恒石, so it's not ideal (beside, it sounds like 很实际, so it can
become a bad joke). 永石记 doesn't sound great but it gives off an ancient vibe, so I've settled with it
for now after having discussed with Nile. If any player can think of another title short and cool, we
can change it.

As for rune/charm, it's really hard. In e1, runes were some kind of drawings, we replaced them by icons
in e2 because they are easier to recognize during fights. so I wanted to keep 文. Charms exist in all forms,
Estiah lore states they are basically weapons/spells entrapped in common materials (wood, metal, gems etc.).
Since gems are the most common form, so I picked 封(entrapping) 石(stone). And they are often worn with
trinkets, rings, necklaces, that's why 装备 is barely acceptable for Gear. 封石组 is way better, but too close to 封石
so I had to give up.

About city names, I just needed to come up with something easy to remember and to pronounce. No Chinese
players are going to remember Inachis if translated to 伊那奇斯, since inachis io is a kind of butterfly and the city
is about fair trading, thus (公)平(蝴)蝶. Night Tear refers to crying in the night, thus (深)夜嚎(哭), 夜泪 is more
literally correct but kind of weird. I like your translation 流光 for Lumina better so I'll change it later. I didn't know about
the real city. The English name is a tribute to Seiken Densetsu3, the Chinese one was a tribute to Okami (天照大神).
And you are correct about the meaning of the rest of city names.

I'm still hesitating about adding 城. Again, this is because of a mistake we've made during e1 conception.
After spending hours on choosing city names, we realized at the end we needed to find names for regions that
the cities are in as well. We went like "Darn it, no one's got time for this", so the city names  actually refer to both
city and region in the lore now. Maybe the Chinese translation is our chance to fix this ^o^

[Masterdolmick]

Can we merge this thread to http://forum.estiah.com/index.php?topic=6656.0?
We can discuss the terminology there and I will constantly update the reference book.

[Nipal]

This thread was for French translation too, we kinda hijacked it
We'd better leave this alone instead of merging it, we just need Chinese
translators to use the other thread instead.

[Sparky]

This thread was for French translation too, we kinda hijacked it
We'd better leave this alone instead of merging it, we just need Chinese
translators to use the other thread instead.

I'm planning to start a thread for French translation too, when I have a bit more time (within the next 72h I guess), I'd like some input/opinions on the approach to take about some specific issues (class charm names, etc.).

[Nipal]

Sparky, unlike Chinese, we are trying to keep French translations as close as possible to the original texts.

Except false friends (faux amis), we should usually keep the same words. About character names, we only need to
add some accents to help with pronunciation. For example, Thily is still Thily in French, Tyreph may be Tyrèphe
something like that.

The biggest issue we have with French is word length. [Soothing Dawn Light] may be translated to
[Lumière Apaisante de l'Aube] which will be truncated on game UI. I'd go with only [Lumière de l'Aube].

Another headache is grammatical gender (le/la). "xx is dead" may be "xx est mort" or "xx est morte". Just go
with "xx est mort(e)" so you won't go crazy over this. Btw, this is the main reason for the game's hero being a male,
otherwise we'd have (e) everywhere -_______-

[Sparky]

I was concerned with word length, indeed. My issue with class charms was also the fact that in English, you always get the class name at the beginning of the charm's name, making identification easy (ie "Wizard Chaos Ritual"), but in French we'd need to invert it ("Rituel du Chaos du Sorcier"), unless we'd go like "Sorcier : Rituel du Chaos".
Last, the "Specialization name" entry seems to have only 11 of the 25 "classes" available for translation, missing some such as "Arcanist", "Defender" or "Crusader".

[Nipal]

i'll add all spec names to the text group for reference's sake, the actual texts used on various pages are
in the challenge name group. but they are hard to find.

about the class name prefixes, it's a pain. there charms' name are too long even in english, so i once
suggested to drop them. guess lez kept them after all. i'll let you know what we decide.

[Zhern]

Oh, I have just found this thread!  You guys have been discussing a lot here!!
Skimmed through it and saw the connection issue being brought up.  I have something to add:

When I visited China in March 2013, I played E1 from there and the connection was great.  But this year, when I visited China last month, the accessing speed was sooooo annoyingly slow that I just had to give up.  My guild-mates thought I was afk and actually I was just trapped in the GFW (which banned all Google services yesterday, btw - OT)!  I asked a friend who was living in China, and she said it had been like that for a few months, and it also caused her to stop playing E1.

Both my friend's and my Internet operators were mainstream in Beijing.  So I guess it might really become an issue when E2 comes out.  I'm hoping either the GFW will hve relaxed a bit then, or you guys could figure something out.  If not, it would be so sad for players in China...

Much love for the game, <3
~Nile