Dmytro Kuzmenko, Ukrainian Translator

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

My name is Dmytro Kuzmenko, I’m a freelance localizer and translator, and also an artist. I’ve worked mostly as translator of film and TV subtitles but since 2016 I’ve completely switched to videogames localization. Whenever I have had free time and inspiration I translated indie games I liked. I prefer games with beautiful art and story (these are quite rare), so I’ve noticed Forgotton Anne and thought it should have Ukrainian localization. It has quite big amount of text, so I asked for help two of my fellow translators— Leonid Khlivnyuk and Serhii Raboshchuk.

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

We’ve used Crowdin for translation. Forgotton Anne localization files have quite a complex structure, so we needed to convert it manually to simpler key-value spreadsheets. Then we created glossaries and started to work. Crowdin is a very useful system for collaborative game localization.

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

The main challenge was translating meaningful names and to keep track of character’s gender, because in Ukrainian language verbs and adjectives have gender that correlates with noun or proper name. Other problem was English “you” that can be plural or singular, and even singular can be informal or formal. These are usual problems with any English to Ukrainian videogame localization. It was very helpful that you have a glossary with gender and age info about every character.