How translators performed the herculean task of localizing the most incomprehensibly British videogame of all time into German, Portuguese and Traditional Chinese: 'What on Earth are these characters even talking about?'

“Peans! Not quite peas, not quite beans, but something special in between". So exclaims one of the first voices you hear in Thank Goodness You’re Here, a gloriously silly romp through the fictional yet explicitly British—and explicitly very northern— town of Barnsworth. It’s made me laugh out loud more than any game in recent memory—but when the credits rolled and I saw translation teams listed for nine different languages, my mind boggled.

This is a game that revs at 300 puns a minute, with jokes that lean on sheer mouthfeel (“Porky Knobbers: That Wet Crunch”) or come so battered in Britishness that you’d think an international audience would struggle to get their chip forks in. There’s a slow-building multi-hour gag that results in a character exclaiming "Lady Diiiihhh", rhyming with free, for Christ’s sake. How would a translator approach that?

Thank goodness! We asked them.

If you haven’t played, you can quickly grok the vibe from the impeccable trailer below. You’re a travelling sales-lemon who winds up helping an unhinged town with various odd jobs, including finding bakery keys so people can enjoy their morning pasties and descending to the meat dimension to escape a fallen piece of ham.

With the invaluable help of Anne Thiecke, localization project manager at Local Heroes, I managed to get responses from seven of the localisation teams, from next-door France all the way to China.

So, was TGYH the hardest project they’ve ever worked on? “Oh, absolutely”, said Russian translator Mikhail Shvyriaev. “Despite years of experience, seeing the localization kit for the first time felt like a cold shower: ‘What on Earth are these characters even talking about, and why does it make no sense?’”.

Brazilian Portugese translator Thierry Banhete had a similar take: “The entire narrative walked the line between ‘Oh, I get it, that’s funny!’ and ‘why is this even here?’”, leading to headaches over how much to change without “turning it into a different game”.

We’ll dig into those challenges, but first: a celebration of international pun-genuity. I’ll start with the Germans, who I’m going to cheekily assert had a slightly easier time thanks to their language’s indulgent disposition towards compound words. Those Peans became “Borbsen” (a portmanteau of the German words for beans and peas, “Bohne” und “Erbsen”), which translator Christian Hoffmann assures me sounds equally silly. Meanwhile a counterfeit watering can—a watering can’t—went from a Gießkanne to a Gießkeine: a water-nothing.

That’s perfect, but also undeniably convenient—the Chinese translators, understandably, had to get more creative. Simplified Chinese translator Xiaoxiao Qu dealt with a snail-related ‘shell-shocked’ onslaught with her own “glyphic pun” playing on the Chinese proverb "祸不单行": “misfortunes never come singly”, drawing on the similarity between 祸 (misfortune, calamity) and 蜗 (snails).

The traditional Chinese translators had to get similarly inventive with “never give an owl a towel”, a line spoken by an owl, which is literally just an animal saying a weird thing that rhymes. Not to worry: in traditional Chinese, ‘owl’ is formed from the characters for cat, head and eagle “貓 頭 鷹”—but, said Sean Chen, “貓 also means ‘to hit’”, so he changed the joke to: “不要貓貓頭鷹的頭: do not hit cat-head owl’s head”.

“When people get that the first 貓 is a verb and it duplicates with the first character of owl, then remember the speaker is an owl, I think that’s when they burst into laughter!”, said Chen.

Goodness gracious

Many of the teams pointed to the finale as particularly difficult, where the entire town joins an increasingly frenzied song that piles task after task on the beleaguered lemon protagonist—and unworkable rhyme after rhyme on the translators. Chloé Pellegrini described her French version as more “transcreation than translation”, something I think Xiaoxiao Qu might agree with, after somehow managing to convert the song into “traditional seven-character rhymed poems”.

Rhymes and puns only pose part of the problem, though: there are also endless references to British history and culture that, by default, sail over the heads of an international audience. I lost it at that Lady Diiihhh punchline, while my American partner looked on mystified. Were the translators ever tempted to change any of those references?

Categorically not, for the most part. Brazilian Portuguese translator Thierry Banhete said they made “an informed decision” not to tamper: “Since the entire package of TGYH was meant to represent British culture, we felt shoehorning a handful of references to our own culture would do nothing for the experience”. Instead, Banhete said, “we opted to drag the uninformed Portuguese-speaking gamers deeper into this uncanny ‘elseworld’, hoping they might laugh, even if only nervously.”

As Danila Syrtsov, team lead for the Russian translation, put it: “localization is always a game of compromises, but the cornerstone of our work should always be the original text and creators’ vision.” Hoffmann concurred, pointing out that British culture can be funny even when you don’t have the context. “Every New Year’s Eve, most Germans watch a British sketch called “Dinner for One” and laugh their butts off”, he said, “even though they have no idea what Mulligatawny soup is.”

I think the translators would all agree, though, that it’s best to play the hand you’re dealt. Especially, in the case of German translator Nele Katzwinke, when you’re holding a card that lets you swap in a joke about a tomato that’s “drier than Megg’s fruitcake” with a reference to a german pastry your grandma used to bake — a pastry named after the private parts of a nun. I hope her nonnenfötzchen was moister than Megg’s plums.

Ahem. Back to China, where Xiaoxiao Qu did pop in a jingle that’s traditionally used in intros for “crosstalk (Xiangsheng)” skits, a fast-paced form of Chinese comedy that dates back to the 1800’s. “Barnsworth reminds me of Tangshan”, Qu said, “an industrial town once bustling thanks to the mines, and one of China’s greatest crosstalk comedians speaks in a Tangshan dialect.”

Interestingly, Qu mentioned that “English humour (with reference to politics, culture, food, etc.) has gained an audience of considerable scale in China”. It’s not mainstream, she said, but the population is so huge that international media can still find a sizable audience, and “Chinese people who are fond of English comedy are generally more likely to be intrigued by foreign indie titles like TGYH, so I tried my best to retain the cultural references.”

Regardless, “a mining town somehow transcends”, Qu said — a theme that several of the translators spoke to. Chloé Pellegrini brought up how “the north of France has the same kind of towns as Barnsworth, so all the mine/asbestos/pub culture is not brand new to French players”, while Danila Syrtsov (Russian) said he recognised the “small, factory-centric towns” he group up in. “Me and other such people remember our own goofy neighbours and friends”, he said, alongside local shops with “no less weird names and taglines. We share a lot of similar memories, allowing us to connect with this love letter to Yorkshire on a somewhat same-ish level.”

Perhaps that’s part of why some of the teams said they’ve had a harder time working on different games. Surreal nonsense coated in northern slang might be obtuse, but so is fantasy nonsense of the kind you’ll see in Total War: Warhammer 3, with dialogue that riffs off “ancient English” where the words “don’t even mean anything in Chinese”, as Sean Chen complained. Hoffmann (German, keep up) told me the most difficult project he’s worked on “from a cultural perspective” was actually The Thaumaturge, set in early 1900’s Warsaw with a melting pot of Polish, Russian, Jewish and German stories.

I think Hoffmann best summed up TGYH’s surprising degree of international appeal: “TGYH works great in other languages, because it’s like a good custard pie. The crust consists of making fun of life in a small town, which almost anyone can relate to. The filling is a custard of slapstick, innuendos, and purely visual gags that work in every language as well. The British references are the whipped cream on top: a tasty bonus, but not necessarily needed to enjoy the pie. A pie in the face is funny in every language.”

Other languages, of course, have their own opportunities to play with mouthfeel, with a good translator able to find expressions that reflect the same spirit as the original. Take French translator Cyriaque Le Menn’s take on the innately funny “dingleweed”, a flower that spreads its seed when you touch it. Le Menn changed that to “‘giclette sauvage’ (wild squirter): a simple, innocent word, that in this context instantly feels gross and I love it.”

I started by mentioning how difficult many of the localisation teams found TGYH to translate, but it would be remiss to wrap up without highlighting how keen they all were to stress how big a difference support from the developer made. “It could have been an absolute nightmare” said Banhete’s (Brazilian Portuguese), ”but the dev team supplied us with visual references and, crucially, a breakdown of the humour style they were going for, so we knew where to aim, even if sometimes we didn’t quite get why we were aiming there to begin with.”

Translators don’t always get the chance to actually play the games they’re working on, with Hoffman bemoaning how they’re sometimes just sent “an Excel file with an export of the texts, sometimes even without speaker information, in the worst case even with dialogs in a random order.”

That was far from the case here, according to Anne Thiecke, who managed the localisation project as a whole. “We were truly blessed to have such a great line of communication for this title, as some large publishers will sometimes leave the translation teams guessing for their best interpretation. All in all, it was a lovely project to work on, and telling our translation teams to ‘just keep slapping everything’ whenever they got stuck has to be one of the highlights from my career!.”

Mikhail Shvyriaev might have felt like he was being blasted by a cold shower at first, but playing the game gave him the context he needed to realise that “how and when characters say things is just as integral as what they actually say.”

It’s worth mentioning, though, that I was sad but not surprised to learn that the localisation only extended to subtitles and menus, with it being prohibitively labour intensive to re-work all the art assets jammed into Barnsworth’s streets. “Signs, graffiti, logos, etc. are all still in English” said European Spanish translator Pedro Cortázar, though that’s “a bit of a relief”, considering some of the visual gags would be “utterly untranslatable”.

One of my favourite gags in the whole game is actually in the form of graffiti, with somebody peeing the word “ludonarrative” on a wall - making those in the know spontaneously form “ludonarrative pissonance” in their heads. It’s an immaculate joke, but yep, utterly untranslatable seems fair.

For every joke like that, though, there are a dozen that can be massaged into shape by a skilled translator, as demonstrated by the puns here, and the many others I tragically haven’t had the space to include. Barnsworth might be British as a bulldog, but thank goodness everyone gets to visit.