Seo-Mi Ha, Korean Translator

Tell us a bit about who you are, your background, and how you came to work on translating Forgotton Anne?

My name is Seo-Mi Ha, a localization specialist at Mayflower Entertainment. I am in charge of localization into Korean to share what we think are great games with the Korean audience. I've been interested in video games since primary school and specialized in English at university so I thought it would be great to put my linguistic potential into translation. We found out about Forgotton Anne at BitSummit 2018. One of my colleagues played the demo version at the show and thought it was a great game that we should bring to the Korean audience.

There is a lot of text to translate in Forgotton Anne. How did you approach the task?

We played through the entire game in English to have a better understanding of the game first. For a game such as Forgotton Anne, with a lot of text, it was not the best idea to jump right into the translation without any prior information. Without prior information it is easy to change a certain term or a character dialogue style down the road; backtracking to fix such modification adds to the work time and it is always easy to miss something.

What are some of the specific challenges you faced bringing Forgotton Anne into your native language?

Puns. It was not easy to find a good pun that did not change the meaning and the tone of the original English text but still fit as a good pun in Korean. Also, the names of Forgotlings. Many Forgotlings are named after the original object they are and directly translating them into Korean was not always the best way. So it was not easy to decide which character names should stay as they were and which should be translated.

Were there any word or terms that proved particularly awkward or humorous to translate?