WotC Being Sued by Gale Force Nine

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Main issue is the Korean and French translations were offensively bad?

I suppose something we can't say much about unless you had the actual translation proofs.
 
Séadna said:
Main issue is the Korean and French translations were offensively bad?

I suppose something we can't say much about unless you had the actual translation proofs.
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Wouldn't surprise me at all if WotC were essentially entirely correct here. Translation is not well paid work, unless you're working directly for the EU or possibly other big governments and organizations. Most translators work freelance, there's often a middleman translation bureau, which obviously takes part of the money, and the translator isn't paid per hour but per word. This has the obvious incentivizing effect of making people work fast rather than well.
 
Interesting. The mechanism here was once again refusing to provide approvals.

Although this seems to have the further wrinkle of WotC claiming breach of contract but not actually filing for breach of contract, and instead just saying they're not going to approve things any longer.

Like with Dragonlance, this is framed as a case of WotC wanting out of a business agreement, but having no actual mechanism in the contract to legitimately get out of it, therefore just stonewalling.

It will be interesting if we get any more news about this. Probably lots of same things going on here as were going on with W&H and involving the same people.
 
Gabriel said:
Interesting. The mechanism here was once again refusing to provide approvals.

Although this seems to have the further wrinkle of WotC claiming breach of contract but not actually filing for breach of contract, and instead just saying they're not going to approve things any longer.

Like with Dragonlance, this is framed as a case of WotC wanting out of a business agreement, but having no actual mechanism in the contract to legitimately get out of it, therefore just stonewalling.

It will be interesting if we get any more news about this. Probably lots of same things going on here as were going on with W&H and involving the same people.
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Yeah seems like the same thing. “We’re just not going to approve anything else.”
 
I work in video game publishing and I remember on a project I wasn't working on, my coworker had contracted a translation company to handle a few languages we couldn't do internally (We can do english, french, german, japanese, chinese internally).

Part of it was a database of enemies. The Bat (you know, a flying bat) was translated like a baseball bat in Russian. It is HARD to find good translators honestly.
 
EmperorNorton said:
I work in video game publishing and I remember on a project I wasn't working on, my coworker had contracted a translation company to handle a few languages we couldn't do internally (We can do english, french, german, japanese, chinese internally).

Part of it was a database of enemies. The Bat (you know, a flying bat) was translated like a baseball bat in Russian. It is HARD to find good translators honestly.
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How could you make a mistake like that? Using software and having just enough language knowledge to make a sentence sound reasonably correct?
 
CRKrueger said:
How could you make a mistake like that? Using software and having just enough language knowledge to make a sentence sound reasonably correct?
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Like I wrote earlier. The faster you work, the more money you make. And you’re not getting rich doing this, you’re getting by. If you work fast enough.
 
CRKrueger said:
How could you make a mistake like that? Using software and having just enough language knowledge to make a sentence sound reasonably correct?
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Video game translation is another beast entirely because you are often translating things in databases and if you are working fast you might forget what part of the database you are working in.

So like he might have been going fast and thought he was working in the weapons database. Also, he might have just not been very good at russian anyway.
 
EmperorNorton said:
Video game translation is another beast entirely because you are often translating things in databases and if you are working fast you might forget what part of the database you are working in.

So like he might have been going fast and thought he was working in the weapons database. Also, he might have just not been very good at russian anyway.
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If you’re not getting native speakers to translate you’ve already failed. You always get a native speaker.
 
raniE said:
If you’re not getting native speakers to translate you’ve already failed. You always get a native speaker.
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Eh, it can go both ways. Sometimes a native speaker isn't good enough in the language you are translating FROM either. One of my coworkers is French. I'd still trust him to do a Japanese OR English Translation more than a lot of native speakers.
 
Gabriel said:
It will be interesting if we get any more news about this. Probably lots of same things going on here as were going on with W&H and involving the same people.
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Although one significant difference here is that we aren't talking about individual creators, Gale Force Nine are likely to have way more resources to pour into this. They're not a small indie company these days and dealing with licensing is what they specialise in.
 
EmperorNorton said:
Eh, it can go both ways. Sometimes a native speaker isn't good enough in the language you are translating FROM either. One of my coworkers is French. I'd still trust him to do a Japanese OR English Translation more than a lot of native speakers.
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Obviously you need someone skilled in both the source and target languages. Unfortunately way too many people don’t think translation is skilled work and you can just get someone who is pretty good with both languages. That’s why translation work is so undervalued and one of the big reasons why despite my masters is in translation I don’t work in the field anymore. Pretty much every translation bureau I’ve talked to would not contract someone for a job who wasn’t a native speaker of the target language though.
 
raniE said:
Pretty much every translation bureau I’ve talked to would not contract someone for a job who wasn’t a native speaker of the target language though.
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One of my previous coworkers was an English guy who had lived in Japan literally longer than he lived in England, whose wife was Japanese. Who never spoke English at home. He literally only spoke English when the person he was talking to couldn't understand Japanese (generally only when talking to his parents back home, or to the few people from work like me who were working remotely from outside the country).

Every person in the JP office told me his Japanese was 100% perfect. A few said his Japanese was better than theirs. When he wrote in English for marketing materials I always had to come in to edit it though. His English had atrophied from lack of use. I still remember an article he wrote up that I had to call him to even figure out what one sentence meant it was so unintelligible.

"Native speakers" aren't universally better.
 
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EmperorNorton said:
One of my previous coworkers was an English guy who had lived in Japan literally longer than he lived in England, whose wife was Japanese. Who never spoke English at home. He literally only spoke English when the person he was talking to couldn't understand Japanese (generally only when talking to his parents back home, or to the few people from work like me who were working remotely from outside the country).

Every person in the JP office told me his Japanese was 100% perfect. A few said his Japanese was better than theirs. When he wrote in English for marketing materials I always had to come in to edit it though. His English had atrophied from lack of use. I still remember one sentence in an article he wrote up that I had to call him to even figure out what one sentence meant it was so unintelligible.

"Native speakers" aren't universally better.
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No, just in 99% of cases or more. And again, translation is skilled work, where you want someone who is a native speaker, and obviously someone who has not had the language atrophy, as well as skilled in the source language but also proficient in the craft of translation itself. Knowing both the source and target languages very well is not the only qualification, it’s the starting point.
 
Also, I think there is a thing of like, yes it is skilled work, but putting a lot of money into it for certain stuff doesn't make financial sense.

Yes if you are translating diplomatic documents are something like that, you want to pay for top quality.

But from the perspective of doing game translating from JP to Russian... Honestly it is hard to afford that. We make about 1/5th for each sale to Russia on Steam as we do to the US or JP (Steam does regional pricing. A game that is $60 in the US would be around $12 in Russia). And we also don't get an incredible amount of sales from the region.

(At this point we've just stopped doing translations to some languages just because it isn't worth doing. For bigger products fans will make fan translations anyway, which we politely ignore the existence of if it breaks EULA).

There are more reasons that translation doesn't pay a lot other than "people don't want to pay for it".
 
raniE said:
No, just in 99% of cases or more. And again, translation is skilled work, where you want someone who is a native speaker, and obviously someone who has not had the language atrophy, as well as skilled in the source language but also proficient in the craft of translation itself. Knowing both the source and target languages very well is not the only qualification, it’s the starting point.
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You'll know better than me, but in the EU it's typically the case that you need to have Common European Framework (CEFR) qualification at level C1 or C2 in the language you are translating from and be native in the language you are translating into right?
 
EmperorNorton said:
Also, I think there is a thing of like, yes it is skilled work, but putting a lot of money into it for certain stuff doesn't make financial sense.
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This makes a lot more sense. I don't know anyone who says translation is unskilled work BUT paying top dollar for it isn't always realistic or practical. In my field we look for "good enough" and expediency in translation rather than looking for the most talented person out there. Then again we aren't producing media for public consumption, either.
 
:ooh: Oh no!


:hmmm: Anyway...

On one episode of "Forged in Fire" where the contestants were asked to make some Japanese weapon, one of them decided to google-translate "Forged in Fire" in kanji and engrave that on the blade - the words said "faked in fire".
 
Brock Savage said:
This makes a lot more sense. I don't know anyone who says translation is unskilled work BUT paying top dollar for it isn't always realistic or practical. In my field we look for "good enough" and expediency in translation rather than looking for the most talented person out there. Then again we aren't producing media for public consumption, either.
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Media for public consumption is the least well paid. You want to make money you want some sort of technical translation job or to be doing work for a big org like the EU.
 
Séadna said:
You'll know better than me, but in the EU it's typically the case that you need to have Common European Framework (CEFR) qualification at level C1 or C2 in the language you are translating from and be native in the language you are translating into right?
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You only really need qualifications if you’re doing legal stuff, but translation bureaus will look at what you’ve got to determine if they’ll contract out to you.
 
arjunstc said:
On one episode of "Forged in Fire" where the contestants were asked to make some Japanese weapon, one of them decided to google-translate "Forged in Fire" in kanji and engrave that on the blade - the words said "faked in fire".
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Heh. I've learned not to use poetic language in Google Translate - keep it as mundane, literal and simple-vocab as I can. And translate back into English to see if my phrase keeps its meaning across languages.
 
Endless Flight said:
www.geeknative.com

Gale Force Nine files court complaint against Wizards of the Coast

The US District Court for the Western District of Washington is currently processing a docket filed by Gale Force Nine against Wizards of the Coast.
www.geeknative.com www.geeknative.com

Another breach of contract suit. Who’s running the show over there and what’s going on?
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Someone on another site had an interesting theory- this doesn't have so much to do with the games themselves, as regaining the IPs for transition to live-action. There's been talk of taking the IPs and doing other things (movies, TV shows, etc) with them that are more profitable. You can score those deals a lot easier if you have all of the rights. That kind of money is worth the possible litigation and the settlements from the current people that have those rights tied up.

It's an interesting take, and would make this not seem just idiotic.
 
Brock Savage said:
Wow that seems counter-intuitive to me but I admit complete ignorance of how that business sector works.
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If someone translates bay wrong in an rpg someone laughs. If someone translates a safety procedure for an industrial machine wrong someone dies. Plus there’s just more people willing to pay there. There and in for instance translating new EU law to all member languages.
 
Séadna said:
Main issue is the Korean and French translations were offensively bad?

I suppose something we can't say much about unless you had the actual translation proofs.
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If you dig in, the timeline is (according to GF9 anyway):

1. WotC approves those translations.
2. WotC wants to renegotiate the GF9 license so that it ends a year early.
3. GF9 negotiates, but doesn't agree to end the license early.
4. WotC immediately stops providing final approval for products under the agreement.
5. WotC retroactively decides they shouldn't have approved the translations and it's now grounds for terminating the license early.

Maybe the translations actually are "offensively bad," but the timeline seems more than suggestive. Particularly when combined with the Weis & Hickman lawsuit that similarly asserts that WotC has been attempting to avoid terminating licensing agreements by just refusing to participate in the approval process for those licenses.
 
raniE said:
If someone translates bay wrong in an rpg someone laughs.
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When I was thinking of media for public consumption what immediately came to mind were things like advertising, packaging, and film.
 
Brock Savage said:
When I was think of media for public consumption I was thinking more along the lines of corporate advertising and film.
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Ah right. To be honest translating advertising is not work I myself or anyone I know, or knew back then at least, has done. Advertising is often crafted special for the target culture in order to best increase sales so it didn't seem as common as one might expect.
 
raniE said:
Ah right. To be honest translating advertising is not work I myself or anyone I know, or knew back then at least, has done. Advertising is often crafted special for the target culture in order to best increase sales so it didn't seem as common as one might expect.
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We've very rarely translated marketing material, so from someone who does marketing in a business that targets multiple languages, I think you are on target here.

I tend to write most of our English language copy, and one of the JP team does most of the Japanese language copy. We are often working from the same base knowledge of the product, and we talk about our overall plans with each other, but they are written separately and nothing is translated.

EDIT: (there is one exception which is things like dev interviews, which are marketing material but obviously have to be directly translated if we want to use them. We have internal translators though that can handle that since it is almost always JP to EN, and I do final editing checks on them just to make sure).
 
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OOF.
All is not well at the Tower of the Coastal Sorcerers.

Without more solid information, we are left with speculation. Based on what I am seeing, someone at WoTC wants out of all or most of their pre-existing licensing deals involving the Dungeons and Dragons IP and has decided that refusing to provide approvals is the ideal loophole to allow them to do this without paying termination fees.

Time will tell if this holds up in court.

As for why, I can think of one of 2 possibilities. Either WoTC are suffering from severe mismanagement and trying to right the ship before Hasbro realizes what's happening, OR after the management shakeup at WoTC the new boss wants to burn down everything the old boss built as a petty power play.
 
chuckdee said:
Someone on another site had an interesting theory- this doesn't have so much to do with the games themselves, as regaining the IPs for transition to live-action. There's been talk of taking the IPs and doing other things (movies, TV shows, etc) with them that are more profitable. You can score those deals a lot easier if you have all of the rights. That kind of money is worth the possible litigation and the settlements from the current people that have those rights tied up.

It's an interesting take, and would make this not seem just idiotic.
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I think Chuckdee is on to something.

So much of the RPG-forum-sphere commentary on this subject is from the direction of this being WotC incompetence and generally tying it all into the culture war shit the pundits like to rail about. There are constant comments about "Hasbro tightening the leash."

What if this IS Hasbro tightening the leash? What if these aren't just the flailings of a new incompetent team that has just grabbed the reigns of power, but those people acting under the direction of the main company which installed them in those roles?

A quick Google search shows that Hasbro made over 500 million in profit for 2019. The whole Gale Force Nine thing is barely more than a rounding error to them. The 10 million Dragonlance suit is basically "Happy Meal Money."

This would sort of explain why WotC would treat W&H like Palladium freelancers. And the goal would be getting out of all long term obligations towards some goal.

Another thing worth mentioning is that companies do this sort of thing when they're getting ready to sell. We've seen Hasbro divest WotC of Avalon Hill. Could they be getting ready to pull other brands away? D&D? Magic?
 
Given the reported success of D&D 5E, I don't expect they're looking to divest. This kind of 'pull back' was happening in the run-up to 4E as well, so with the 50th Anniversary on the way, and the opportunities that brings for a unified marketing front (as well as to bring the game more in line with current expectations of their perceived target market), I expect they're trying to bring everything under one roof for another Big Push.
 
And no way are they selling Magic the Gathering. That is WotCs moneymaker. D&D is a side-show, Hasbro bought WotC for Magic.
 
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