The Boardgame Project: Qwixx

One of the most interesting concepts I’ve come across when it comes to translation and copywriting is that of “distance”, namely between speaker and receiver, which can often be enforced through grammar and/or register and takes into account the different, presumed social standings of the parties involved. 

For example, an authority writing to the public is going to use different language to communicate their message than a recipe blogger to their followers. Not only that, but the norms surrounding “distance” and what is expected for any given context changes depending on the culture you’re in as different cultures will prefer more or less distance in the same situations.

※If you want to read more on this, I recommend looking up Ira Torresi and her work on Translating Promotional and Advertising Texts.

A lot of the time, I find German to cling to a certain level of grammatical distance: polite-form you (Sie), long sentences which raise the register, fairly unemotional text which conforms to written-language norms. In a world with the internet and increased access to self-publishing, though, I also notice this to be shifting quite considerably. A lot of blogs (similar to my own style) tend to write in a way that is a lot more like spoken German, with simpler and shorter sentence structures and more familiar language.

Of course, the medium plays a large part in what level of distance is opted for. In the case of these instructions (and all those I’ve currently read and drafted), there has been clear avoidance of saying “you”, either in polite or familiar (du) form. Instead, “the player” with accompanying “they”/”their” pronouns have been opted for. Other than that, the language tends to be easy to follow (for younger audiences) and relatively neutral in register.

The issue then is whether I should reflect that in the English. Generally speaking, English (especially modern English) tends to prefer a lack of distance. “You” is a lot more frequent, being direct and informal tends to be more the norm. You don’t often see third-person “one” so much anymore outside of academic or non-fiction texts (in my own experience, at least) and similar to Germany, we’re also writing a lot more in accordance with spoken norms. This is also why you’ll find me writing with contractions a lot—including in this translation—despite the fact that I can hear my secondary-school English teacher screaming in my head every time I do.

That being said, a lot of boardgames I have in English tend to like this third-person “player” with a neutral register as well (not that this is something I noticed before going and looking for it) and so I decided to keep it. Although it doesn’t feel unnatural to read because of this, I still had to consciously avoid drifting into using “you” and “your” and reducing the distance. Maybe that’s just me.