Translated the alphabet used in STRAY
https://imgur.com/a/edxEpIc
NOTE: Mild Spoilers for STRAY. This album contains the chapter headings, so while it’s not super-spoilery, it’s still going to reveal some details if you haven’t played it to that point yet!
My kid and I have been enjoying Stray thoroughly since it came out, and one of the things we both found fascinating is the language of the society in the game- you see it everywhere, in neon signs, in graffiti, and it really adds to the depth and mystery of this universe.
Both my kid and I are language geeks, me being a narrator and them just enjoying languages in general, so after I casually mentioned that I thought the in-game alphabet for the robots was probably an Aurabesh (Star Wars)-like letter-for-letter replacement of a Latin alphabet, we went to town on trying to figure it out. They mentioned they realized it was a replacement cipher when they saw the opening screen for the “Dead City” chapter.
Turns out that we were… mostly right. But not 100%. There IS an alphabet that’s consistent. It’s in the first image you see in this album. However, while we did find a lot of signs that were simply English, there were some that were Latin, and we think there might be a few in French (which would make sense, given that the developers are French).
But it gets a bit weirder. There’s a bunch of symbols we simply don’t understand because we don’t have a good key for them. We started off with this one by taking screenshots of the chapter headings, which were subtitled in English, using those to get a few characters, then figuring out other characters from context. We’ve got nearly the entire alphabet solved now, but there’s some signs with words using characters that don’t have any correspondence at all to the ones we’ve deciphered.
However, nearly all of these are in the “dead” parts of the city, where there’s signs in English, which could mean these are in Chinese or some language we don’t understand, or maybe they’re intended to be an earlier version of the language the robots in the city now use.
There’s also some “cursive”-like versions of many letters which are more difficult to understand, so some of the signs are much harder to translate. There’s even some where they mash ideograms together to combine them, which is also interesting.
So here’s the alphabet key, along with a few images we’ve provided some captions for. Our working theory is that many of the posters are written in Latin (including some Lorem Ipsum!), then translated to the robot alphabet, but it’s possible they’re in other languages also. Because many of the textures have “damage” on them, it’s frequently difficult to parse all the words, and it’s also often hard to tell where spaces go.
But we figure if we put this out there, others can come along and improve on and add to it!
NB: The alphabet key is not totally complete; the letters X and Z are missing, as we still aren’t certain of those ones. (Updated: Z and X are found, and image key updated!) Also, there’s some variations on some letters, and it’s possible we made some mistakes. But it works for translating many of the signs and posters. For the translations we used Google Translate, which is probably awful, but better than nothing.
NB Also: The chapter headings sometimes differed from the subtitle in yellow. Where it does, the deciphered text is in white. Where it does not, there’s no white text.
If anyone can offer more accurate translations of the Latin passages, please do!
