TheFrogAndTheCamera

I'm just gonna slide this on in here for anyone that is interested in preserving old games. They take it very seriously too, they want an archive of every single game. Like, they have lists of every game ever released for a system, and once that system gets old enough, they add it to their archive and start collecting. Their latest addition was the Xbox 360, they opened that vault up in September 2022, and proudly announced they'd finished their collection of games for it back in April.

Also, while their game archives are almost entirely complete, they've got another project of archiving the manuals that came with those games, and that is... considerably less well filled out. Their collection of Xbox 360 manuals is especially rough, they've only gotten manuals for three games. So if you've got some Xbox 360 games kicking around, and the manual's still with them, please consider scanning them and submitting them to the site!

-> Phonics For Adults <-

- "the term is gendered" (it's not, and feminine equivalents were sometimes created specifically for the purpose)

- "they didn't actually do things as knights" (who didn't? The Hatchet women fought the Moors. A few other Orders had women as masters of arms. Both martial and formal examples)

...and a few other reasons that come down to "I don't like imagining my manly men in steel had women in their ranks, girls have cooties".

And the reason I say this is because recently, Wikipedia updated their page on "Knight", specifically adding a section about women with the title of knighthood, and what function they performed. And I know: "Wikipedia is not an academic source"--but every academic institution will accept the sources and articles used to back up wikipages, which confirm what has been said.

I saw this and needed to answer.

The gendered versions of 'knight' come from Romance languages, and literally just change the word to fit the gender of the subject (within a binary). So it isn't like English, where a female knight has always been a 'Dame', but, using Spain as an example, the word for Knight in Spanish is 'Cabellero'. This is the default masculine.

The feminine word for Knight? 'Cabellera'.

Similarly in French: "Chevalier" becomes "Chevaliére".

In Italian, "Cavaliere" becomes "Cavaliera".

Outside of Romance languages, "knight" is just a title for a social rank, so even the English Dame is by default a knight by rank, but may not have the title (although not impossible).

Just a note about translations and ... well, patriarchal bullshit.

When you say "Hatchet women fought the Moors" I was like "hey, that seems to be part of my local history, how have I never heard about it?", and when I googled it ... I actually have heard about it, it's the Orden del Hacha from Catalonia (Orde de l'Atxa in the original Catalan). But ... there's something odd going on. Why the fuck in English they have translated like "Order or the hatchet"? You know, in Spanish and Catalan there's no really a difference between "Axe" and "Hatchet": There's a single word for them, "Hacha/Atxa". But in English, there's a difference. A Hatchet is a hand axe, pretty much the smallest one you can think of:

So It's pretty remarkable that whoever translated the name of the order to english first decided to use "Hatchet" and not "Axe". I'm pretty sure if this was a order of men warriors the name would have been pretty different. Specially when THIS was their coat of arms:

Just starting abortive medications already improved my quality of life so much and now that my doctor started me on preventatives, I might actually be able to have more than a handful of headache-free days each month.

Migraine is frequently misdiagnosed as chronic sinusitis or tension headaches according to research. Mostly because people have a very rigid (inaccurate) idea of what it actually is.

But even if it's not migraine, you still deserve treatment for your headaches. Just because someone else has them worse than you doesn't mean you don't deserve relief.

I continue to torment my friends with art and terrible ideas.

Hebra, and the Heroine of the Sands from the Father of Time series, a moment in the past long, long ago.

here's mickey, goofy, donald, and chip & dale. yeah they turned mickey & friends into anime boys. they're an idol unit or something. they're technically not anime boy versions of the source characters, they have different names. mickey's guy is "Neo Michel". not michael, michel, like he's french. chip & dale are "Ruska Moncrief" and "Ranka Monk", they have different last names, they're not brothers anymore so that they can be yaoibait instead, anyways this post isn't actually about these guys I'm just setting the stage for the actual humanizations I wanted to show you

They also did monsters inc. And. Well it's obvious from the designs who mike and sully are. but you will also notice. the blonde one on the left. with glasses. monsters inc is kind of famously about just the two guys so they didn't really have a lot of other non-villain characters to take anime boys inspiration from, I guess, so, well,

(Or it isn’t; as you rightly point out in the tags, it’s a capitalism problem. But I’ll expand on this point of “capitalism”. I need to rant. I need to scream.)

I’m a professional translator. I work in video games and software, with an occasional dash of literary translation. I’ve worked in translation proper, I’ve worked on editing other people’s work, I’ve led a couple of translator teams. I’ve worked the occasional miracle, working around some Really Dumb Choices the developers made.

(Spoiler alert: other languages have different syntax and grammar, if you give me a list of nouns to translate, and then give me the plural “s” to translate separately, this is not good. Even in English, woman -> womans is dumb.)

I am a fan of making things affordable and accessible. I am really happy that Google Translate and similar things can tell me the gist of what people are saying in conversations I only half care about. As the poster above says, it’s great! Not perfect, but ok!

Do you know what’s not great? Do you know what the OP in the original image means?

The client the original image is talking about isn’t you. It’s not some person on the internet trying to find out what someone said in a Post. The client they’re talking about is, essentially, the corporation: the translation agency, the publishing house, the IT giant.

You, the individual, do not have the power to demand how I do my job. If you come to me and say, “Sarshi, I want you to take this 300-word post, run it through Google Translate, and then charge me half of what you usually do for translating it”, I can take it or leave it.

But I get contacted by agencies - half of them want this. “We have a game, Sarshi! Just post-edit the results of a machine translation!” “We have support articles, Sarshi! We’re paying you a lot less to post-edit the results of machine translation!”

You say it’s ok to have 80% accuracy, and I feel you! Yes, sometimes it is! But companies are like “lol, this works”, too!

It’s happening over and over. And these aren’t… they’re not people, you know? They’re not Auntie May trying to figure out what the dough recipe she got from her niece in Indonesia says. They’re agencies, trying to increase their earnings by promising top quality to companies, then going, “gosh, we said we’d do it for cheap, how can we manage that?”

Or they can even be large companies themselves. Oh, you’ve spent a bajillion trillion dollars trying to create the CryptoNFTVirtualRealityAI hybrid that everybody knew wouldn’t work and now you panic because your earnings are lower than usual? Oh, and you want to “cut costs” by screwing over every contractor you have? Great. Just great.

This is going to screw you over - you, the individual. Not my client, not the translator’s client in general - the company’s client. The corporation is too big to really care about how you feel about their product - the employees individually might, but the company’s only metric is if you buy it or not. And the company makes decisions based on what brings the most money for the least cost.

So your hardware manuals might be crap and you might be in tears because you have no idea how to make your new appliance do the thing. You’ll go on YouTube and you’ll find a solution, and you’ll eventually figure it out. And maybe you’ll forget about the crap manual in time. So next time, they still won’t get a good translator, because they already have a cheaper solution that seems to work.

So your game looks like it was translated by a bunch of rats in a bunker and you can barely understand what anyone’s saying? Well, maybe they got a bottom-feeding agency overpromise that they totally have legit translators working for $1/hour. Pinky swear! Did you buy the game? You did. So… the system worked! They’ll hire the same agency again!

It’s like the clothing industry all over again. We could have better clothes, but it’s cheaper not to. They’re doing us a service by selling us shoes that won’t last a season, and T-shirts that will look like crap after washing them twice - they’re cheap, aren’t they? They’re affordable. Anyone can get clothes. (So you pay more in time are are more frustrated? Who’s counting!)

And meanwhile, it’s easy to forget things might be different. That we have the ability to create good things, pleasant things. That manuals can be easily readable, that games can sound great, that books can be awesome to read. It becomes harder to trust the market, harder to believe in quality, easier to say that this is normal, this is how things just are.

And if you speak English natively, well… You’re at a huge advantage. A lot of stuff is created by your people, for you. For countries like mine, that are small enough to import a lot, nearly everything is translated. I want you to imagine almost all movies subbed, every appliance made elsewhere (with menus needing translated and all), every app in a foreign language. And everybody who can cut costs will try to.

Let the worlds pull.

Let reality stretch at every seam.

I do not stand upon the bridge.

I hold it.

There was never only a tunnel between worlds.

There were people—

straining, stumbling, choosing each other

Over and over again.

***

I finally finished Hero Pose™️ Ravio! Yippee!

Special thanks to everyone who helped me brainstorm the flowers for Hyrule and Lorule!

Art process and inspirations here: