Sea (be it) literal

When I wrote Leaving the Glowsheep in English, I gave most of the characters English names. I even called the MC Al (which could be short for Alice or Alexander or something else: I didn't want to bother deciding which gender that character should have so that's also why they don't get referred to by other pronouns than "I" and "you"). But when translating into Danish and Spanish, English names don't work perfectly well: Al means "to the" in Spanish and "all of" in Danish, so I probably want to go with longer names and have some names that don't sound out-of-place if you're reading the story in a language other than English.

One thing I got suggested to do was to use Hebrew, Greek or Latin names. And yes, names like Daniel and Laura should work. But for each name that does work, I find several that don't. Here are some that do seem to work in Danish, Spanish and English: Daniel, Laura, David, Irene.

And here are some that don't: Mary (Marie, María), Christian (Kristian, Cristian, and let's not forget that in English it's actually a word), Christopher (Kristofer, Cristóbal), Sophie (Sofie, Sofía), Anna (Anne, Ana; though you could use the English name in Danish, but in Spanish it would look foreign with two n's), Lewis (Louis, Luis). Notice the spelling often changes.

The spelling thing got me thinking about which letters are most problematic, and they seem to be c (changes into k in Danish) and ph (changes into f in Danish and Spanish). And chr turns into kr in Danish. But how about ch without r? Well, Charlie seems to work in Danish, but not in Spanish.

Another thing Spanish does sometimes is adding accents on some letters. I guess most people wouldn't care about adding or removing those when translating character names, but I kinda want the names to be the same in all three languages, even down to the accents.

And sometimes the changes aren't even spelling changes. Adam and Eve are called Adán and Eva in Spanish. (And I almost wrote "y" instead of "and", because I tend to do that between Spanish words, I guess being good at a language can have drawbacks).

For the last couple of years I've sometimes made simple video games for game jams. And as a languages person, I've also sometimes written text for them in more than one language. And for the upcoming Winter Visual Novel Jam, I figured I should make something in all three.

It wouldn't be my first visual novel. I already made a VN for the Spooktoober VN jam, and I do want to polish some rough edges on it, especially on the audio side of things. But I figured I can iron those issues out at a low pace while I start writing a sequel... except I'm not quite sure "sequel" is the right word here. It takes place in the same fictional country but several centuries later and the characters aren't the same although they might be the same species.

My previous VN, Leaving the Glowsheep, involves a character escaping from a mysterious necromancer who rides a dragon. And the "sequel" takes place in what seems to be the present, but in the same fictional country. Exactly how much of that country's history and culture the player sees might depend on some choices.

The idea is that the MC's parents will be busy during the winter holidays, so they send the MC to a singing school school, or maybe the parents misspelled "singing" and enrolled their child into a completely different thing... Yeah, a misspelled word doesn't make it easy to translate, but I think I'll manage.

As for what I plan to change in LtG:

* Add sound effects (I already recorded some)

* Add VA for more characters

* Add an indoor background for the inn.

* Add a more interesting menu UI (thinking of making locations on the background clickable to let the MC go there)

* Translate text

* Maybe add some accessibility options beyond what is there by default.

As for the one I'm starting to write, I have to figure out which language to write it in first and translate into the other two from.

English doesn't have no double negatives. Well, of course it does have some double negatives, but teachers don't really like when their pupils use them. Spanish does have them, and you have to use them. I've never heard them in Danish, so I think they're not used in that language (maybe by non-native speakers or something, with languages you can't be completely sure about anything, but it can't be as common as in English).

But all of these languages have something that feels just as strange as double negatives: negative questions. An example of a negative question is "isn't the horse fast?" And when someone asks that question you better don't answer "no, it is" or "yes, it isn't". So it's asking one question and expecting the answer to the opposite question. French has two different yes-words to answer those questions unambiguously: oui and ouais, and so does Danish: ja and jo. So oui and ja are the "yes" in "yes, it isn't", ouais and jo are the "yes" in "yes, it is". Actually, you don't really say "ja" or "oui" when answering a negative question, you use "non" or "næ" (the Danish no-word for positive questions is "nej"). But Danish does use "næ" in other contexts as well, and it also has "niks". Quite a few no-words. Næ is more of a don't-care no, niks is more of a "nope". Spanish has one word for "yes" and one word for "no", so in that language you'll have to use other means to express what you're negating. Which may explain why Spanish is the language where I've heard the question "why not" asked most times.

Each language I speak affects how I speak and write in that language and also how I speak and write in other languages. If a word means different things in different languages, I often use it less than native speakers of the languages I use it in. Why? Because they decept people.

Then there's the issue that I learnt to reed and write in Denmark, but I learnt to write cursive in Spain. And when I tried to read some text in Danish written in cursive, it turned out it was quite hard for me to read because Danish cursive is different from Spanish cursive. And then I saw what American cursive looks like: lots of diagonal lines (and in art, diagonal lines can be used to show that something is unstable or dangerous) where Spanish uses vertical ones, each letter leaning over the next one like it's trying to crush it. And just like art trying to convey instability, there's plenty of asymmetry, even in the letter f. In Spanish cursive, f has a diagonal asymmetry, but in English cursive, instead of a loop upwards and one downwards, there's a loop upwards and something similar downwards, but that similar thing isn't quite a loop, and it places too much weight on the right side of the letter. And instead of dotting the i's, they put acute accents on them, or something that looks like that. In Spanish, that would make it a different character.

I don't really use cursive much anymore, but I keep putting a horizontal crossbar on the letter q, as a way of showing that I went to school in Spain. And I always make sure my æ doesn't look like a French TPHR*ET, I don't like having two letters share the same appearance.

Here is a poem in Spanish. I didn't take the photograph in daylight, but it should be possible to see the crossed q on the last readable line.

When you say something to somenone that speaks more than one language, try to make it clear which language you're speaking. Otherwise you may make us think of situations like the one I'll describe here.

It was early in the morning. Earlier than usual. I was going to school as always, but this was a day where we were going on a trip far enough away that we had to get to the school earlier. We had to take a bus and I lived in the other end of the city. And then someone said "ven".

He was standing with a cigarette in one of his hands. I'm pretty sure it was his right hand. It was still dark, and I don't remember exactly what he looked like. It's always quite a few years ago. And I'm obviously not drawing hem exactly the way I remember him, as I don't think he'd like me to write about this, let alone try to draw him. So the guy on the picture doesn't necessarily look like him.

[Edit: I guess I should mention that this drawing isn't really meant to show the person in a way that would let people recognize him.]

In Danish, ven means "friend". In Spanish it means "come". Now I had to guess which language he was speaking. I was in Spain, so Spanish was the obvious language to guess it was. But before I could answer, he said it again: "Ven". This time I answered: "¿Por qué?" (that means "why" in Spanish), and he just repeated it question. And I could blame myself of getting closer to him, as I was still walking towards the school, and he was in the same direction. I answered again, asking the same question. And then he just said "No te voy a robar", which meant "I'm not going to steal you" or I'm not going to rob you or something along those lines. Robar is the verb Spaniards use about stealing, but it's used in more situations than the English verb "steal". It's also robbing or burling. And he wasn't even saying what he was planning to do. Only what we was not. Now there happened to be some construction work on the rode I was on, and suddenly I had a fence (from the construction work) on the left and a building on the right. To get towards the school I had to go forwards, but this stranger was blocking the path. He reached for me, and I looked at the cigarette in his hand. He wasn't going to robar me, but what was he going to do? Burn me with that cigarette in the hand that was getting dangerously close to me? I walked backwards, just in time to avoid it. And I kept walking backwards until I got to the start of the fence, then I walked around him on the other side of the fence. This was where the cars would have been had there been any. But there were none at this time, even though it was a pretty busy rode in the daytime. And the stranger didn't follow me. He said something that, if I remember it right (I do remember the meaning, but I don't remember if it was this exact wording) was "vale, si no quieres venir no vengas" ("okay, if you don't want to come, don't come" or "okay, if you don't want to, don't come", I always find that if I here something in a scary situation, it's much harder to translate later).

I got to the school and took the bus. But my classmates could somehow see I was worried about something, and I knew, there were some of them that would make fun of me if I told them what had happened that morning. And some that would say it had been wrong of me to even have got as close to him as I had. But when we returned to the school by bus, I just hoped I wouldn't see him on the way home, and I was considering to take another path home just to be sure. And then a parent of one of my classmates (who obviously didn't know about it) offered to give me a lift, and I thought that way I could avoid seeing the stranger on the way home. So I accepted, and the car left me just outside my home.

In the last couple of days, I’ve been trying out Typey type. For those who don’t know, it’s a website to practice steno (machine shorthand). So far, I haven’t managed to write faster than on qwerty, but I wanted to share what I like and don't like about it so far. I managed to steno 50 WPM some times, but they were rare enough that I’m not really counting those, but even if I did write 50 WPM on average, it’d just be the speed I type at on qwerty, so I’m still faster on qwerty than on steno. I seem to steno at about 30 WPM. It's basically a typing practice where you start with simple words, and then you get to write other words as you go to through the different lessons which deal with different rules, though the rules aren't explained in detail on the site itself, but there are other places where one can learn about them. You could of course also figure them out by intuition, since the site does show how to write each word the first time you run into it as long as it's in the "discover" mode. And it shouldn't show new words in the other modes (it's possible to get them by changing lessons while in practice mode though).

Screenshot of the results of a drill: it says finished and shows a speed of 29 WPM and an accuracy of 83.9 percent. Below it says "faster than hunt and peck typists and has buttons for taking another lesson or restarting the current one. In the right side, partially cut text shows words I misstroked: one such word is readable: I wrote "stops" instead of "tops".

In case you're wondering, you do have to correct mistakes when you make them, but they may appear on the list of misstrokes anyway.

Here are some things I like about the site:

It teaches rules almost one by one, and at the end it has some texts to practice.

It tells me what I'm faster than (faster than handwriting, than Morse code, and so on) so I want to get faster and see what you get compared to next.

It tells me what I did wrong (though sometimes I make mistakes it doesn't detect, or see a mistake in one word as being in the next word).

It let's me use my own briefs (if I want to write "you can" as WH-BG, I can do so, and it's counted as correct as long as I have it in my dictionary).

It can give me hints, which almost always work.

I get statistics so I can see which words I've bes practiced more.

And here are some things I didn't like that much:

If I get some extra letters at the end of a word, it thinks those letters are a mistake in the next word. Also, once I've written a word correctly it won't let me delete that word, which can get in the way of multi-word briefs.

It doesn't happen often, but you can get word boundary issues in drills, as it picks random words and there is a chance it'll give you a pair like "pick nick" (I don't think I got that one, but I did get something along those lines, and Plover thought I was writing a two-syllable word.

The text field isn't automatically focused, so I have to click on it every time I want to start a drill or practice or anything. Even when I've just pressed "restart lesson, it still has me click in the text field before I can actually start writing.

Its hints seem to be for a specific version of Plover, which has one strokes for "sur" and "corp" mapped to what my version uses for "Sur" and "Corp.", so in order to avoid issues with capitalization I had to add some entries to my personal dictionary. I could probably just have written those words letter-by-letter.

Hi again, the timing may not be the best but I’ll talk about titles anyway. And about what people call themselves and others. In many a situation, you might as well just use a name, maybe the full name, but the just that. But in some places, it might be more common to include a title such as Mr., Ms. or Mrs. before the name. But why is it that you see those titles more often in Spanish and English than in Danish. Because people there didn’t know who was a Ms. and who was a Mrs., and then it was easier to just avoid titles altogether.

In Spain, I once talked to someone who didn’t like how I’d written her name. She wanted me to write “ Drs. Ms.” before her name. In that order. Because that’s how you write academic texts in Spain.

Of course, Spanish texts can be weird at times. I once saw what a Spanish will looks like: It starts with something along the lines of “I, Mr. Fulano Méndez Sánchez, notary public, married and of legal age” and then it uses a verb in the first person singular. I can see the point of including the gender of the person whose will it is. But that of the notary public should be irrelevant. And I guess you have to be married to get that job. but if you are married, you ought to be old enough, right? Well, legal texts can be a little crazy. Now I wonder if doctors have their title in their wills.

I’d try to avoid skipping titles in interpretations, but if I am in a hurry and it’s obvious what the person is, I may skip Mr., Ms. or Mrs. and just assume people can see what it person in front of them is. Especially if it’s Danish I’m interpreting into.