#All that's without even considering the reverse of translating a spoken language back into a signed language

[hippo-pot]

Btw, re: my opinion that computers are not gonna be able to translate sign languages in our lifetime, it's not that sign languages are necessarily More complicated than spoken/written languages (I truly don't know how you'd measure that but I'd assume they're equally complicated). But video is, in terms of sheer data, much bigger and presumably harder to process than audio. I cannot imagine this happening without *astounding* computational resources which would take far more energy, water, and money than a human interpreter (and, more importantly, wouldn't work as well, at least for the foreseeable future). I assume the computation would happen off site in most cases if it did work, meaning the Internet connection is gonna need to be phenomenal (there is already widespread dissatisfaction with VRS human interpreters used in medical settings because half the time the connection drops). Speech to text, with all the issues it still has, seems like a breeze in comparison to 'understanding' a video.

I also cannot wrap my mind around how a machine would handle depictions. Like, with some practice behind me, my human mind is now able to understand (some) depictions I've never seen before (thank goodness, because there will ALWAYS be new depictions I haven't seen before, bc Deaf people are resourceful and creative), but I don't see how a machine would. That's pure sci fi to me. I also wouldn't expect a machine to do a good job translating stuff it's never heard before in a spoken language (e.g. wordplay, or the way you can sometimes tell the meaning of a new slang word from context, or an uncommon name even), but the thing is I think depiction is a much bigger part of daily life than wordplay is?

[japanese-cryptic-beauty]

Building the inner parser

When I was a kid, probably elementary school age, I tried one day to understand what actually the difference was between English and German. I had had some minor exposure, but for example my mother, always my primary caregiver, didn't really speak it. I tried coming up with English words, but this trial-error approach was almost entirely error. I found it hard to understand in what way English was different. At times it seemed like a badly pronounced German, but I couldn't figure out the difference.

Had I had somebody knowledgeable in my environment, I might have learned early on how many English words of Germanic root origin are in fact one shift of spelling away from German. I had kind of intuited this myself, probably with the uncanny way children pick up languages anyway from exposure.

But more interestingly in hindsight - what else had I been lacking?

How do you learn a language?

Over the course of starting out to learn Japanese I had a few intuitions, nothing groundbreaking or new. Let's just say it shifted my own, personal priorities, what I considered helpful and what I needed to do.

Naturally, through my experience in school, I gravitated towards finding a textbook that would suit me. As I mentioned before, I very quickly rejected Romaji-based books for their focus on business Japanese (I certainly don't dream of working in Japan...) and eventually came up with "Japanese from Zero" - at least it seemed to align with where I wanted to go.

I quickly became dissatisfied with its approach of throwing "Hajimemashite" style sentences at me without explaining anything about what that really means. It left me equally puzzled as the nonsensical "How do you do" exchange in English, partially because they wouldn't go into the grammar and origin of those things in particular, and partially because it sat there like an artifact, an atom, not further broken down for real understanding. It creates an illusion of understanding by throwing common constructs at you, just like a phrase book for a tourist would.

And then came my detour into kanji.

A genius move, obviously.

Exposing yourself

But even before that, I had already decided I would watch lots of anime for simply exposing myself to the language. I consider the ready availability of anime one of the biggest boons for learning Japanese. My English, especially conversant, spoken English (American style) really took off with the availability of multiple language audio on DVD. No longer did I have to buy a separate VHS of a title in English - for extra money, as they often were "imports." I could just buy the regular. And even better, they came with subtitles.

I was a huge Futurama nerd back then, and ironically I owe a big debt of learning how to speak English fluently to imitating and quoting a cartoon, albeit a smart one. Watching it over and over not only improved my English through exposure to actual speakers, it made me puzzle over idioms and cultural intricacies... and made me spot, over time, an enormous amount of translation errors in the German dub, sometimes completely reversing the meaning.

So, I watched a lot of anime this last year, always enabling Japanese audio, of course. Later on I learned this is called immersion. Just as I used my natural interest in available English material, I could watch stuff in original language that I actually found attractive - something which engages me naturally. Nothing worse than making yourself watch something just for learning, really. (To my mind.)

After all, I had noticed regularities in Japanese from watching Sword Art Online, even if they were rather minor ones and partially owed to the lack sonic variety in the Japanese language. And from exposing/immersing myself, I had some intuitive insights over time. I noticed how our inner parser works and what can help it function.

What is a parser?

While computers, deep down are only working on numbers or even bits or minor voltage differences, humans have always needed layers of abstraction to actually make good use of that. Nowadays we talk about "programming languages," but in order for the computer to understand these "languages," they need to be broken down into parts and then translated. The breaking down part is done by something called a parser.

There are many parsers. In the early days of computers "text adventures" were a common genre of games. You would be presented with text describing your situation and you had to type your actions as response. Again, analyzing what you typed fell to something called a parser, and the best text adventures were known for their advanced parsers, "understanding" language like "give banana to three-headed monkey" and pointing out things it didn't understand in a way so that you could improve your instructions accordingly.

This didn't happen in a vacuum, though. Computer science had actually looked to linguistics, or rather its most formal part, for inspiration. It took part of what linguists use to understand language itself, its basic building blocks, and derived lessons for how to make a computer understand what we want it to do.

The first thing that happens when a computer breaks down a "stream of characters" is that it tries to find usable tokens in it. This is, IIRC, called the "lexical stage." And when faced with Japanese, I noticed I would have to develop a similar thing within myself in order to break down spoken Japanese.

What helps and what doesn't

Anime Japanese will repeat certain idioms, phrases, and words endlessly. You cannot miss it. I marvel however at the endless variety that translators resort to when bringing them to English. Certainly not helpful for the learner!

Given how often they appear, certain words like "hontouni" ("really"), "ano..." ("errr..."), "des(u)" (helper verb, often used in constructs like "I am") are impossible to miss. But the rest largely remains an unbroken stream of syllables interspersed with tiny islands of understanding.

Now there are several ways to go from there, and two primarily present themselves. You can try to learn more vocabulary or you could learn more grammar to fill in these gaps.

I opted for vocab first (as part of my Wanikani approach). The main reason was is that each vocab word constitutes one token that you can pick from the stream of syllables. And Japanese aids with this. A lot of vocab is itself not modified but spoken as is in a sentence, especially nouns. Even vocab that is modified, like verbs and adjectives, is modified at the end, so you can at least recognize the stem of the word.

Grammar is, in my opinion, not as useful for this purpose initially. One reason is that a lot of Japanese grammar relies on particles, little helpers made of one or more syllables, that tell you what role a word or part of sentence plays in the whole, like who does what to whom. They're comparatively easy to spot in written Japanese, due to the dreaded kanji. Particles are part of the hiragana that appears between the concepts largely represented by kanji.

But in spoken Japanese, the same sounds like "wa" (topic), "ga" (subject), "mo" (adding another subject), "to" ("and"), "ni", etc, are really hard to spot because these sounds are so common in Japanese words as well. If you can't tell at least the individual words apart - tokenize them - then you have real problems spotting the particles that modify them at the end. And that's where vocab is useful.

Adding in some structure

While Japanese is not as structured and simple as English, understanding the structure can help at some point. English favors us by adhering to a strict "subject verb object" structure for the basic sentence design. Japanese is less forgiving, but at least the verb is at the end of a sentence that has one, and a lot of Japanese sentences are merely that - a verb. Knowing this can help spot verbs.

It's always good to know what the "doing" part is to break a sentence down, after all. To that end, I would say, knowing the conjugations of a verb is more useful initially for building our parser of spoken Japanese than particles.

Being able to spot patterns like "-anai" and "-imasen" helps us identify verbs and its meaningful stems early on, and this breaks the language apart further. Since these constructs naturally repeat over and over they become easy to spot, so I recommend to do the basic verb forms next. And there aren't that many common ones, either.

Think of it as playing a game of elimination. Each word of vocab you actually know eliminates those tokens from the stream if you recognize it. Each verb ending helps you identify one of the tokens that keeps changing in a sentence, but also helps you spotting what is being done and where the sentence likely ends. Combining these two eliminations, over time, will break down the stream of spoken Japanese considerably.

The great weakness of immersion

One big problem is that we don't get the structural information about what is being said on screen when we hear the spoken word. Subtitles in Japanese would certainly help, as we could clearly see the distinction between meaningful concepts (kanji) and grammar and helper constructs (hiragana) while following along. However, we would likely no longer understand the show we're watching, so this has to wait for later. (Also, a quick check tells me that Netflix typically offers Japanese subtitles and Crunchyroll does not. Might be wrong, but that's what it looks like when checking two shows.)

This is where we leave the media immersion and basically go to the typical "teaching grammar" approach. A good website like Bunpro provides plenty of examples that help immerse yourself in a somewhat artificial and (optionally) slowed down stream of Japanese along with the written word. Kind of like the textbook approach, but with audio. I found that Bunpro came naturally to me after all this mixture of immersion and training kanji and hiragana through Wanikani.

It comes as no surprise that a mixture of approaches is needed, but in the end it all goes towards building that parser, I feel. More vocab identifies more tokens. Specific grammar constructs help breaking down the stream further towards its parts. And yes, knowing idioms helps, too, but I still would like to be taught them properly.

Unsurprisingly, for adults Japanese can't be learned through immersion only, especially if you can't bombard a Japanese adult with questions like children do. But it can be a huge help in building that parser and a general feel for the language, its pronunciation, how the written word relates to the spoken word, and for learning the melody and rhythm of Japanese. And each construct you learn will eventually hook into that parser, until one day, you begin to understand more and more of Japanese in realtime.

In hindsight, this process I just described did for me a lot more than school for becoming fluent in spoken English. Just like reading built my understanding and vocab, nothing beats immersion ultimately for learning to first break down and then understand a language reliably when hearing it.

But now I have to get into reading. Because putting the horse before the cart does have some problems to say the least.

[pi-cat000]

FMA:B/BNHA Crossover (2)

Summary: Ed gets stuck in the BNHA world after the end of brotherhood. He starts trying to find a way home and ends up inadvertently working for the league of villains.

Part 1 here

..

..

At one point, the ground level of Ed’s building had probably been a nice-looking shopfront, maybe a flower shop or grocers or something more befitting this weird world…like a tech repair store.  Now, the ground level doubles as apartment space, large windows caked with dust and grime, curtains permanently drawn to hide its occupancy. Heck, if Ed hadn’t been around to fix the glass with alchemy the ground floor would have been pretty much unliveable. Like many buildings in the area, it was a victim of a villain/hero confrontation which always seemed to generate an obscene amount of property damage. Great for leveraging his repair skills in exchange for free accommodation and about nothing else. Not that the people here saw it as much of a problem.

Ed scowls, flipping his OPEN sign to CLOSED, yanking the door shut, locking up as he goes.

Ed doesn’t quite understand the whole thing, and he had had one of the worst track records for property damage when it came to state alchemists. The difference being that he had always returned to reverse as much of the alchemical damage as he could and if he couldn’t Mustang had some other military alchemist/personal waiting in the wings to see to the problem. Rebuilding here was the responsibility of some external agency or other. Ed is a little hazy on how the system was supposed to work, seeing as the military had little to no involvement with anything hero related. Though, considering how the Amestrian military had been in the process of feeding the souls of its citizens to a loosely defined truth God, maybe that was a good thing. Honestly, researching how this place ran its bureaucracy was low on his priority list.

“Hey! Ed! You’re out early? Off somewhere interesting?”  

“Did you see the guy who just came through here,” he asks, eyeing his fellow apartment-liver who seemed to have nothing better to do than loiter outside and yell at people on the street. The greasy-haired man is puffing smoke near the corner of the building with his two equally scruffy friends. They all have a physical abnormally, a lizard tail, claws, bulging eyes, that remind him uncomfortably of chimeras despite knowing it was a result of more quirk bullshit.

The guy blows smoke in his direction, “Big, tall dude? Pretty suspicious looking with the hood and all. I saw him go in. Didn’t see him leave …funny that.”

“Yeah…funny…” Ed mutters, “Did you recognise him?”

“I might have.”

Ed huffs, rolling his eyes and continues down the road. He would leave bribing his neighbours for possible information as a last resort.

He passes the vacant lot holding a near identical half-collapsed block, followed by another nicer looking building, then another, before they gave way to shops and smaller structures. That was something he was still getting used to…the sheer scale of the city. Even Central had barely been a quarter of this city’s size. Luckily, his destination isn’t too far so he doesn’t have to worry about getting lost.  

The building he arrives at is taller than the rest and full of office space. The main lift is out of order so Ed trudges up three flights of stairs to the top floor, stomping into the empty reception/waiting area only hesitating for a second before slamming his hand onto the bell sitting atop the front desk.

There is a muffled voice, “I’m coming. I’m coming. No need for that racket!”

The door behind the desk swings open.

“Edward?”

“Hey, old man,” he gives a small wave, “It’s been a few weeks.”

The man, tall, well-built, cropped brown hair, stares at Ed.

“Yeah it’s been a few weeks! You need to check your phone and answer your messages every now and then. You’re giving me grey hairs. More grey hairs!”

“Right…my phone….” He forgot he had it when not using it to help with navigation. Also, messaging was a pain. He had picked up the local spoken language fast enough out of necessity, but his reading and writing were still a work in progress. Lucky for him, this reality had a few languages similar enough to Amestrian that if he really wanted to read something he could get a translation. It still made written communication tricky.

“I'll try and check it more often," he placates, "I’m here for some information about a job I was offered and seeing you know a bunch of the local businesses I thought I would drop by.”

“Information?” Masao Uraraka lets out a long breath, “And there I went thinking that you were going to take me up on my apprenticeship offer.”

Ed shoves his hands into his pockets, shrugging. The older man grunts, “Well come on through. You’re lucky you caught me in the office. I’m usually on-site supervising about this time. But, can’t do much of that until those idiots at HC Construction.co get the go-ahead from their insurance company.”

Ed slips past and into a dimly lit office space which is surprisingly well organised. Across the wall is a collage of family photos, depicting a woman and young girl at various stages of growth.

“…that’s not your problem though. How have you been kid? Hope you haven’t been in too many fights.”

“Hey,” he objects, “Some idiots need a good punch,” and then adds a little less aggressively, “But no. No fights. I’ve been researching quirks....”

“Quirks. That’s different? Weren't you studying chemistry or something?”

Ed shrugs again, unwilling to divulge much else. Uraraka tended to be nosey out of some misguided notion that he could help Ed ‘get back on his feet’ after whatever tragic backstory he had cooked up for him.

“You’re still living at Old Man Watanabe’s right? He not pulling anything is he? Old coot always tries to weasel more out of his deals.”  

Ed can’t help but agree,  “He’s been trying to get me to re-wire the whole building. Nothing I can’t deal with.”

Of course, this just sets Uraraka off on a round of angry muttering, “Is that right? I can have a talk with him. I’ve told him that he needs an electrician and a proper plumber. He owes me a few favours so I can… ”

“It’s fine,” Ed quickly interrupts. Uraraka had his own problems and family to look after. The guy reminded him of Hughes in that he cared way too much. “One grumpy landlord isn’t worth worrying about.”

Uraraka visibly deflates, “Yes, well, most kids your age shouldn’t be worried about that sort of stuff at all. You should be finishing up your schooling, getting your Japanese up to scratch and studying for college entrance exams. You remind me of my daughter. Stubborn.” He pulls a framed photo from his desk, pointing it at Ed, shaking it for emphasis, “She wants to be a Hero you know. A HERO! Can you believe it! My cute little girl, getting into fights with villains.”

Ed clears his throat awkwardly. Yeah, this guy was definitely this world’s weird version of Hughes. If Hughes had worked in construction and had, you know, not died. This isn’t the first time he has had a picture of Ochako, Uraraka’s daughter, shoved in his face.

“About that information?” He cautiously interrupts and gets another sigh.

“Yes, yes. You kids are always so impatient. What’s this job then? What idiot is going around hiring 16-year-olds.”

“Actually, the guy that came in just mentioned some construction work,” Ed rubs his neck, now slightly subconscious, realising he doesn’t have a whole lot to go on, “he didn’t give me a lot of details, just left this.” Ed pulls out the envelope placing it on the desk next to the assortment of framed photographs and scribbly kid drawings.

With a raised brow, Uraraka pulls it towards him, peering in. The man’s eyes widen and he closes the envelope, frowning, “This supposed to be a down payment in advance of a job, or is it for material costs? Because it’s a bit much for a down payment and nowhere near enough for materials. Not if it’s for anything serious. What sort of work is it? You know I can’t lend you equipment without a licence…but I’ll help you source anything that you…”

“No,” Ed rushes to interrupt, “the guy said it was a sign of goodwill. I take it that’s not a normal thing people do in the, ah, construction business?”

“No. It definitely is not,” Uraraka now looks concerned, “there would usually be a contract for services before any sort of payment. Especially, if you’re going to be working as an independent contractor.”

So that just confirmed what he already knew. Ed continues, “So you haven’t heard about people asking around for under the table construction work then?”

“No. I can ask a few of my freelancers if they’ve had similar offers but I deal above the board with licenced workers only, so it’s unlikely they’ll have heard anything.”

“Yeah, I figured.” He glares at the envelope.

“What did he look like? This man that came in?”

“Oh, he was tall, made of dark purple smoke and had a teleportation quirk…I think. He also asked about my quirk and its limits.”

“I’ll keep an ear out.”  Uraraka promises and frowns at Ed, “I hope you’re not considering this offer.”

Ed grunts noncommittally and gets a look of disapproval that reminds him so much of Hughes its almost painful. He tries not to feel disappointed at the lack of answers because coming to Uraraka had always been a long shot. ‘You’re sad, lonely and the only conversations you’ve had this last week were yelling matches with your landlord and neighbours. Uraraka is a nice man. Of course, you would come to him for advice.’ A voice that sounds suspiciously like Al chimes in. ‘I don’t want him to worry. I’m not staying here long. What’s he going to think when I suddenly disappear,’ he snaps back and immediately feels foolish.

Maybe the isolation is getting to him a bit.

“If it's money you need that I’m more than happy to help you get licenced and certified…” Uraraka continues to talk oblivious to the fact that Ed is barely paying attention.

He doesn’t want to settle down and get a popper job or finish off his schooling or talk to youth services or whatever other things Uraraka had brought up in the few months they had known each other. That would be admitting defeat. Also, he had no ID or history and he was pretty sure you needed both to work any legitimate jobs.

“I can handle myself,” he says out loud.

“Yes, you’re worryingly self-sufficient but there is a difference between unlicensed quirk use and aiding and abetting criminals. No self-respecting, above board, organisation hires a kid to do construction work and throws a bunch of money at them.”

“I know.”

Yeah, he knows Tall-Dark-and-Mysterious was probably a criminal of this reality. He knows he is probably getting himself into something dicey and illegal but he needs to follow whatever lead he can to get back home. Finding a quirk with either the ability to transport him between realities or one with the power equivalent to a few thousand souls was his last hope of ever hearing Al's, the real Al’s, voice again.

The older man rubs his forehead, visibly exasperated, “But you’re going to ignore me. Stubborn brat.”

[libermachinae]

Fault Lines Under the Living Room

Part IV: Touch - Chapter 11: Ripple

Also on AO3 Summary: They’ve only just arrived at their destination when things start to go wrong. Word Count: 2193

---

“Picking up some light readings,” Drift reported. “Limited tech, similar to Vitrious. You getting anything?”

“Just a massive, concentrated energy spike a few degrees northeast,” Rodimus said. “Recent exposure, Cybertronian markers.”

“When’s the last time you took that rig in for a tune-up?”

Ratchet hated having to repeat himself, but either Drift was incapable of recognizing the severity of his ship’s disrepair (unlikely) or he was being even more obstinate than normal. Exchanging their vessels’ specs had revealed the truly horrific condition the ship was in: fuel efficiency half of what it should have been, unreliable pressure seals, thrusters that should not have made it into the air, let alone off a planet. That he had survived transit was a—not a miracle, an insult to probability and reasonable calculation of—

Rodimus put a hand on his shoulder and tried to think calm thoughts. Drift had survived. It didn’t make sense, and maybe the luck would run out now that it had been acknowledged, but—

Ratchet halfheartedly swatted at his hand, more like a firm pat.

No wonder you liked him so much. Morale officer doesn’t suit you. He failed to dislodge Rodimus’ hand and didn’t bother trying again.

“Haven’t had the time.” The sound of flipping switches was followed by a hard smack from Drift’s end, rounded out by imprecise grumbling. Drift’s report had lacked any details on the state of his ship’s user interface, but the variety of language he had spoken to it with, impressive even by Ratchet’s standards, gave the sense that it was functioning at about the same level as everything else: barely.

“Still think it’s an outpost?” Rodimus asked.

“Lot of things it could be,” Drift said, voice accompanied by a few more mechanical noises. “We’d need more info to say for sure. Or a visual.”

Rodimus considered the readouts in front of him. There were more he hadn’t read out, but only because he didn’t know how. Ratchet translated what he could, but they were trying to keep his focus on piloting which meant Rodimus couldn’t spend too long wondering about the more mystifying aspects of his screen. Was that box in the top corner a map, or a graph? He didn’t know, and he had to look away before it overtook their other priorities.

“There are also stockpiles, energon plants, and decoys out there,” Drift went on. “Traps, if you’re really unlucky. Whole lot of empty shacks; lot of boltholes won’t have anyone living in them most of the time.”

“On the move a lot?” Rodimus asked.

“Sure. Only one in a dozen stellar systems will have a planet good for energon harvesting, and then there’s having to be vigilant about competition and enforcers. Sometimes needs will change or new opportunities will open up, and a crew will split up to deal with it.” He sounded annoyed at that, briefly breaking from his researcher-describing-mysterious-outgroup tone.

“Couple Decepticons on holiday accidentally give you the slip?” Rodimus asked, just to keep him there.

“More like an entire platoon,” Drift said, rising to it so quickly that they could only assume he’d been waiting for someone to complain about this to. “I tracked them to their covert thermal operation on a smelter of a planet, got all the way in, only to discover the one mech they’d left behind was their communications specialist—it was a mess. But, that’s the past now.” And just as quickly, the wall was back up. “If our intel’s good and Grit’s got a byte of sense, there should be someone here. Just no idea how many.”

“Sounds like there’s a good chance we’ll get this thing cleaned up quick,” Ratchet said. “So long as we stick together.”

Drift’s Hm’d agreement was more than either had expected. Maybe they were making progress.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Good to go,” Rodimus said, adjusting the items on his screen to focus on the ship’s status. “Defense and surveillance up, and we’re at about descent altitude. Just give us a head’s up when you start improvising, so we can get out of your way.”

He was not supposed to say that. He shot over a grin in response to Ratchet’s disapproval; what point was there in denying the inevitable?

Practicing being a good friend, remember? That means saying no to stupid ideas.

It also means being there to catch him instead of holding him back.

It was the kind of argument that couldn’t be solved with a few pointed thoughts or memories, the kind that they did not have time for now, as the visual feed showed Drift’s ship starting its descent. They set it aside in their own ways: Ratchet simply stopped thinking about it, while Rodimus let himself run through the myriad arguments he would have made simultaneously before reconnecting himself to the present. A moment later and they were ready, Ratchet punching in the commands to follow Drift down.

The planet’s cloudless atmosphere gave them a clear view of the terrain below, its massive, dramatic rock formations contoured by deep shadows. North of them, the average surface elevation increased and smoothed out into tall hills, but where they were going the difference between peaks and valleys created a network of shelves and tunnels that would be perfect to hide a secret base in. And stealth did seem to be one goal of whoever had set up shop down there: besides the sloppy energy output, there were no obvious signs of cyberforming on the planet’s surface. Rodimus was about to suggest that only those who came looking for Cybertronians would ever notice they were here, when a glint in one of the visual feeds caught his attention. He brought the feed to his station and zoomed in. Metal?

The word hit his vocoder as Ratchet shoved them into a dive.

“Turret!”

The energy beam was hot enough to ripple the air around it. Even though Ratchet got them turned away fast enough, the whole shuttle shuddered from the near-miss. Crates and containers rattled in their restraints, and Rodimus was too busy keeping up with Ratchet to think about the sounds of crashing down in the hold. They should have been at a safe distance to avoid detection; how had they been pinpointed so quickly?

“Pull up! Get out of here!” Drift shouted.

No time to wonder about it right now.

“Can’t,” Rodimus said while Ratchet wrestled with the controls. “I’ve got visual; they’re charging up for the next shot. Reversing momentum would have us hovering like an auto-skeet.” If the console would stop bombarding him with warnings, he might have been able to make better estimates about their next move, but a ship this size wasn’t designed to be flown by just two bots with half a processor each. Ratchet was demanding so much of their attention that even reading the words on the screen demanded resources they didn’t have, so he scrubbed the whole thing until all that was left was the visual feed, the twinkle that shone just before the storm. “Diving. Keep on our tail.”

“No, that’s—fine. Aim for cover.”

Ratchet switched off the reverse thrusters and the ship plummeted out of its gentle descent. The entire world rocked nauseatingly as the discordant visual feeds broadcast the tilting horizon and rising ground, and they startled as the second blast singed the air behind them, the crackle of Drift’s failing comms suite not enough to prevent their sparks from clenching down in panic. The rear cameras recovered from the overexposure, and there was the speeder, intact and keeping pace.

“What now?” Drift demanded.

“Evasive maneuvers,” Rodimus said, following the ticker tape of Ratchet’s intentions. “Triple Thunderclash!”

Ratchet twisted hard on the controls and sent the ship spiraling. Rodimus would have been flung across the bridge had they not been secured, but even then struggled to maintain focus as they were thrashed around, over and over. He couldn’t see Drift anymore, or the distant turret: everything was swirls of color, broken up for only a split second as the third blast went wide and passed them by.

Ratchet drew back and pulled them out of the spiral, then hastily steered them aside as the recovered visual feeds revealed an oncoming peak. Landing thrusters were engaged; slightly dazed, Rodimus picked out a promising valley for Ratchet to maneuver them into. Drift reappeared in the rear feed, keeping his distance in case they had to dart again. Not that there would be much room for it, as the canyon walls rose up and enveloped them.

Ratchet brought the shuttle to rest on a wide shelf and sat back, optics dim. The constant, pounding beat of his focus dispersed, and he sunk into pillowy relief, buoyed by Rodimus’ burst of Wow we made its and What kind of gun was thats and I’m alive Ratchet’s alive Drift’s alives. It had been hard, keeping that iron grip on himself while Ratchet put in the work of keeping them alive, but—

“Wouldn’t have seen that shot coming without you,” Ratchet said. Rodimus looked away as he flushed, warm with appreciation and embarrassment; sincerity was an intimacy he was never quite prepared for. He was grateful when Drift’s speeder landed alongside them.

“Everybody intact in there?” Ratchet asked. He thought Rodimus’ embarrassment was amusing, frag him, but was willing to set it aside out of concern for their friend. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t find a way to exploit it later, but for now, Rodimus was safe.

“We made it,” Drift said. “That was more more like a Double Thunderclash.”

“Ratchet was between Thunderclashes and I had to make a best guess.” Rodimus tried to mime the path of the two ships with his hands, twisting his arms as far as his joints would allow. “It’s a Triple Thunderclash because it’s three times cooler than a thing Clash did in some fight,” he explained, since he felt Ratchet wondering.

“Battle of Ambustus Major?” Ratchet asked. Rodimus shrugged and tried not to pout when Ratchet immediately brought up an old vid file of the maneuver.

“Is the ship stable here?” Drift asked, reminding them they were here with a purpose. In the aftermath of such a close call, it was natural to want to ease back for a moment, but Rodimus couldn’t fault Drift for wanting to stay on track. The stakes weren’t any lower just because they’d made it to the surface intact.

“Should be,” Ratchet said, leaning over so he didn’t have to keep relying on Rodimus to funnel through the ship’s readings. “Holding steady for now. We’d probably need to conduct a physical survey to be sure, but I’m not seeing anything troubling from here.” Ratchet wasn’t sure of the composition of this planet, but the lack of dust in the atmosphere suggested it was made of a lot of hard, compact stone, hopefully strong enough to support a spacefaring vessel. They just had to hope that whatever geologic event had formed this shelf hadn’t terribly weakened the wall it was anchored to.

“Good,” Drift said. “The good news from all this is that the turret gives us an idea of where they have their main base; it’d be a waste of fuel to have to drive back and forth a long way. Once I’ve scouted it out and located Grit, you can come in.”

“Okay, and one more time with a plan we’ll actually follow?” Ratchet’s edge emboldened Rodimus. If it had been just him out here, he might have let Drift make all the decisions out of guilt, but the strong presence beside his mind pulsed with gentle encouragement.

Drift sighed.

“Right. Give me a minute.”

Ratchet gave Rodimus a thumbs up. Progress.

Rodimus got up from the captain’s seat and walked to the bow of the bridge, where the narrow viewshield gave him a closer peek onto the planet. The impression he got: rocks. Though the surface was painted mainly by dull shades of brown, down here they started taking on more color, hints of red and green only noticeable against the stark homogeny of everything else.

Why had the Decepticons chosen this planet? Were there fuel reservoirs buried too far below the surface to show up on orbital scanners? How would they have known to come looking for them? If not, if this was just a backwater hideaway, why the powerful defense system? Who was hiding here? And for how long? He itched to pop the hatch open and start exploring, but Ratchet’s presence kept him in place. This world, with its unknown Cybertronian population, confronted them with a new variety of complexity and danger. Though they could be rash in their decision to help Drift, they couldn’t risk being stupid about it.

Ratchet gently nudged him away from that kind of thinking. No one here was stupid. Everyone was trying to do the right thing for the people of Vitrious, the universe at large, and each other.

Rodimus cast a small, grateful smile over his shoulder.

“Okay.” The comms came back to life with Drift’s voice. “I still think this is a bad idea. But I’ve got something.”

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

Witches, Chapter 23: a long overdue reunion, and reckoning. 

[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

[Witches Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

----

Phoenix wakes with his phone buzzing beneath his pillow like someone is calling and letting it ring to eternity, but when he brings it, still vibrating, into sight, there is only a location printed on the small screen. He punches the keyboard to text back K and rolls out of bed. How does texting the fae work anyway, he wonders. He’s wondered it for years and never asked. Does the text float up in her mind visually, or does she hear his voice in her head? And what voice would she hear if it was someone else texting from his phone? His or theirs? 

As he blinks to ease the heaviness of sleep from his eyes, the red lights of his bedside clock tell him it’s not even 5:30. 

Damn it all, Maya.

She’s left him with no indication of what this is about, how long it will be - if he’ll have time to make it back here before work to change into his suit. After a few seconds more thought he puts on jeans and a t-shirt, in case she shoves him in a lake, and if he’s late to the office then he’s late. He leaves a note for Trucy on the table so she’s not surprised when she gets up for school, and he slips out of the apartment into the dark Los Angeles morning, with no idea what awaits him. 

It could be a conversation about Thalassa. After he saw her he called Pearl and told her everything that had happened that he thought could help, and she promised that she would tell Maya everything. And then he told Pearl plenty more that he knew wasn’t related to magic much at all. He has no one else to talk to about Thalassa, no human he can ask for advice. Maybe the reverse is creating a serious problem, too - that Thalassa has no one at all, besides Phoenix, and she doesn’t want to divulge too much in case it leads him to do something reckless. Is “therapist specialized in magic people” too niche of an occupation to make a living out of? Even if it’s not, the only person he has to float that idea by is Athena, and - like hell he would. That’s a can of worms he isn’t unpacking. 

It’s been a week since then. Maya could’ve called him if she had thoughts on Thalassa - or more than likely, relayed a message to Pearl to get back to Phoenix. He’s spoken more with them in these past eleven months than they had for the last five years, but it’s always Phoenix reaching out with a new quandary that goes through one of the others. For Maya to reach back, stretch her hand out across the gulf - he’d expect it to take more than this. 

Unless she’s figured something out. And even then she could have called.

Or she’s figured something out and wants to push him in a lake. No one ever said she’s not capable of holding two thoughts in her head at the same time.

The years have not been kind to Gourd Lake. It was a nice park in the springs and summers, when the trees flowered and the grass covered the ground in full, and even when the winters turned the lakeside sparse and gray, there were enough people who passed through to give it some sort of life. But it collected its share of incidents, all after Larry broke the seal and released an actual lake monster in the course of trying to set up a hot dog stand, and some time after the (phony!) president of Zheng Fa was nearly assassinated there, the cold, unlucky heart of the lake pooled outward, and whether people consciously decided it had too much of a reputation or made the decision without really knowing why, they started to find other places for summer picnics.

It was always a gross lake that no one would go swimming in, anyway. Far too much mud and weeds.

Around the lake it gets chilly sooner in the year than other parts of the city, and the still morning air turns crisp as Phoenix walks up the main path, through the trees whose leaves yellow and flutter down onto the patchy grass below. Nature overtook the old boathouse years ago, and no one ever tried to repossess the boats for other things; Gourd Lake is now a BYOB (bring your own boat) lake, and algae and rot and nesting wild geese laid claim to Yanni Yogi’s fleet. Trucy says the rumor at school is that said boathouse is a certifiably haunted structure and that her classmates dare each other all the time to break in and never do, as afraid of the geese as they are of ghosts.

If those investigation days with Maya, both of them stressed to hell and Edgeworth’s life on the line, hadn’t carved the full map of Gourd Lake in his mind, he wouldn’t know where to push through the bushes to find the old boathouse. The woods had almost a life of their own the way they swallowed it up so thoroughly, almost like the park itself wanted to erase it. He bats aside branches and knocks leaves from them, and after wading into the thicket finds a bit of a thin path where the foliage hasn’t been trampled down but has moved aside, as though of its own accord. Like the branches are all tied back with invisible strings. 

With the boathouse in view, he starts to notice frost on the ground, as patchy as the withering grass. All of the colors of the woods seem desaturated and muted, overlaid by a brown filter - everything except a few scattered flowers caught up in the bushes like someone carelessly plucked them from a bouquet and tossed them to land wherever. He recognizes these flowers; couldn’t for the life of him name them, but their thin red petals and spindly spidery red thin - whatever they are that pop up from the center of the flower, are pretty distinct. His grandparents told him that they were flowers that back in Japan meant death. They had them at their funerals, and even if they weren’t all that, they’re, well - Maya’s flower. The ones that show up in a ring when she shows up, unbidden by everyone but herself.

(He’s not sure what to think about the “death” connotation, especially when the fae of the Winter Court came to LA by way of Japan, too.)

And there she is, sitting cross-legged on the dock that is collapsed half into the lake. Paying no mind to the edge of her long ivory-colored skirt trailing into the lake, or the ends of her sash slipping through the gaps in the dock, she holds her hands stretched out in front of her, palms flat over the water about a foot above the surface. Her hair is a billowing, insubstantial cloud of smoke around her head; six orbs like pearls float around her face, the arc of the two sets of three meeting in the center at her magatama that pulses with a soft rainbow of light. The water freezes in a thin sheet of ice that cracks apart and melts and refreezes beneath her hands and the sharp white claws at her fingertips. Her mouth, moving silently, has the shape of any human’s mouth, a normal one, until she lets out an audible scream of frustration. All of her red eyes snapp open bright against her pastel purple skin, and her mouth splits across her face in a wide slash of teeth. The ice breaks apart for the last time and the water goes still; Maya’s hair coalesces into a sheet of inky black, tumbling back down around her shoulders, solid and subject again to gravity.

“What were you trying to do?” Phoenix asks, standing at the water’s edge where the dock meets the shore, unsure if the old wood will also take his weight. 

“Maybe it’s the water,” Maya mumbles, reaching into one of her sleeves and producing a small scroll which she unravels and passes her hand over the scribblings on it. The mixture of English and Japanese and some other symbols that Phoenix can’t ascribe to any known language changes beneath her fingers into new sloppy marks. Even her magical writing can’t fix her atrocious handwriting. “Because the way it translates could either be a specific kind of water that isn’t named because it was assumed everyone would know it, or water, general, any…” She drums her claws on the scroll and more words and characters appear in the margins around what was already written. 

“Maya?” he asks, again, now considering that she’s ignoring him on purpose.

“There’s this new spell I’m trying - new old spell, it’s absolutely ancient and that’s why I’m having issues with what the components are.” She shuffles the scroll back into a roll and slides it back up her sleeve. “The language it’s written in is imprecise so at this point I have to experiment and hope that it doesn’t go catastrophically wrong.”

“Is this spell what you called me out here to talk about?” Phoenix asks. “Or just something you’re working on while you waited for me, which is why we’re—” He gestures around at the lake, at the boathouse, at the boats half sunken into the murky brown water. He’s not sure this location is haunted-haunted the way people generally refer to such - there’s no ghost, a floating white translucent figure, in the boathouse, but there are ghosts, memories with cold teeth, all around them. 

He doesn’t really want to be out here. He can hear it in the breeze: don’t forget DL-6. 

She pops up onto her feet in one quick motion, swinging her skirt out of the water; the cloth has no muddy stain like it should. The purple drains from her skin, her mouth shrinking, and her extra eyes close up and the two that remain gain whites and dark centers. “Hi, Nick, long time no see!” she says, and the cheery chirp of her voice doesn’t sound right. Sarcasm sours every word. “I’m doing all right! How are you? See, isn’t it nice to take the time to catch up with someone you haven’t talked to ages, rather than just trying to get right down to the point as though we’re merely business associates and not friends? That’s pretty rude, don’t you think?”

“Hi, Maya,” he says, and if he does ask her how she is now, she’s just going to go in for another round of mocking. The only good choice would have been, as she says, starting with the friendly greeting. But she also woke him up hours early and dragged him all the way out here, and being terse is somewhat justified. Isn’t it?

“I realized something, the other day, when Pearly caught me up on what’s going on with your siren.” Maya clasps her hands behind her back, turning away from Phoenix to look out over the water. “Memories are, in no small part, connected to the mitamah, which is why our changed child in question has the trouble that she does. Time, distance, whatever, that part isn’t super important right now. I mean, this isn’t actually about her, what I’m working on right now. I’ll get back to her. But this is important - Nick this is a revelation!” She spins around, robes and hair all swirling wide, red excitement beaming through her dark eyes. “I finally understand! I was looking in the wrong places - I kept trying to understand ghosts, like Sis, or if there was - necromancy, such a thing, or a way to channel and commune with the dead - but it wasn’t ever really about that! It’s not - it’s not an active conversation like I thought it must have been. It’s about memory!”

“What is?” Phoenix asks. He has honestly never quite understood how it works, when they talk about studying and learning new magic. He pictures like a vast library full of very ancient archival texts, but that has always seemed too accessible, for a society as hierarchal and stratified as the fae. Knowledge is power, and anyone else gaining power is greater odds of a knife in the back. And for all Maya is willing to go on and on like this about what she’s learned, she never ends up saying how. 

“What my mother did! During the DL-6 investigation!”

The breeze skims across the surface of the water, sending ripples to the shore where they break against the old wooden boats. 

Phoenix steps out onto the dock. Ice clings to the edges of it, over the algae. The question has puzzled them for years: the official police reports, the ones Redd White leaked, said that the fae that helped them “spoke” with the victim to gain insight that Yanni Yogi was the killer. But Phoenix and Maya can’t even speak with Mia - well, she can’t speak with them - and contacting the human dead is far beyond any magic any of them have ever known. It had seemed one last part of the case would never be solved.

“I haven’t been able to duplicate it.” Maya covers her mouth with her hand. Her fingers still have claws. “But there’s a spell, a very old bit of magic, that can call up the last memories of a dead person, human or fae. That must be what my mother did! She must have known this, and known what the key was - water is the important physical component, but—”

“You don’t know what kind,” Phoenix says, recalling her earlier mutterings. 

“Right. I’ve tried ocean water, water from the falls in the mountains, water from the cave under Mount Mitama which is technically ocean water - none of it worked. I came out here to see if water with some sort of connection to the victim was the answer - it was Gourd Lake, or fill a bowl up with tap water and go sit in the courthouse elevator.”

“I’m sure the courthouse has seen weirder,” Phoenix says, “but it’s probably better that you didn’t.”

Maya joins him on the part of the dock that still stands above the lake and she sits leaning up against the boathouse, patting the spot next to her. He still doubts its stability, but if he keeps standing, he’s that much more liable to be pushed into the lake, and after weighing those odds, he sits down next to her. For a moment they’re both sitting cross-legged on the office floor, leaning up against the couch that’s piled high with case notes and takeout containers, formulating a trial plan as the television spouts some news neither of them pay attention to.

“This is magic ancient enough that it would have come with us from the Summer Court when we left,” Maya explains. “Which could be another reason I’m having trouble with it. The water might be from their waterfalls, or something special - it raises the question of how my mother knew, it’ll be something else to look into once we find the Summer Court.”

“There’s no records about where they’re located?” Phoenix asks.

“It’s active erasure - they didn’t allow us to know. There’s - from the seat of the Winter Court, I can sense the Vernal and Autumn Courts, if we” - she gestures between Phoenix and herself - “didn’t already know by family history where they’re at, but there’s just a bit fat block shutting us away from the Summer Court. And if I were to start pushing up against that wall, they’ll respond in kind - I’ll do it, of course, but I’m waiting for the solstice when we’re strongest and they’re weakest to try.”

“I guess, with the Winter Court being the Winter Court’s own worst enemies, I should have expected that you’d be on bad terms with the others.”

“Fae are fae’s worst enemies.” Maya brushes her hair back behind her shoulder. “And I kind of - um, intentionally obfuscate the history, when I say we left the Summer Court. It was a lot more like an exile. My branch of the family went to war for the throne and lost and there’s a legend that when we were thrown out we lost the ability to use certain kinds of magic but I’ve got no idea what those might be or if that part of the tale got twisted after all this time. I’m sure we could figure out all the nuances of what to do with mitamahs if we had more than me and my two cousins who are trying anything more than just grabbing it with brute force to be stronger.” She picks at a loose splinter on the dock. “Speaking of powers and exile, by the way, we must have seriously underestimated how powerful Magnifi was, all this time.”

“What do you mean?” Phoenix asks. “When did you find this out?”

Maya waves a hand dismissively. “A while ago, but you haven’t been in touch. It occurred to me, with the way the siren is still alive and walking around - having your soul taken doesn’t just make you immortal. Your heart stops working, you’re still stuck. When she was shot, someone had to heal her - Magnifi would have had to heal her, patch her up just enough. But healing magic is - Pearly barely knows a little, and she’s the best of us at it. It’s hard. And Magnifi should’ve lost most of his power on exile, but no, he could just…” She makes another dismissive hand gesture. 

“He healed her and then just - sent her away?” Phoenix asks. Maya shrugs. Maybe once he realized her memory was unstable, he decided that her death as blackmail was more valuable than her life. “Could having hold of her soul have given him enough strength to do that sort of thing? The healing, the—”

“Could be. Then there’s the little pocket dimension he had set up for the Gramarye hideaway - that’s another real tricky thing. And then, your daughter, he bound a wisp to her for her to be able to control, gave her a blessing - a blessing to the siren, too, because I can’t imagine he would’ve thought Truth was useful before they entered the human world, sure it sometimes helps when someone’s hiding something but only sometimes - anyway. Good thing he’s been dead as long as we’ve known of him, else us underestimating him could’ve gone badly.”

And now he’s just another man causing problems for them long after his death.

“It was real brave of your daughter to reject her family’s legacy of so much hurt,” Maya adds, “but it’s unfortunate that it’s made this all so much more difficult.”

“What do you mean?” She’s never not jumped between different thoughts like this, but with so much to catch up on, it’s harder to follow than ever.

“Ownership of that mitamah should’ve gone to her. I mean, that was how it was supposed to work - Magnifi’s power gets passed down to chosen successors, that’s the plan. And if your little magician had accepted it - not to say she should have, just had she - then that soul would belong to her and she could do what she wanted with it, like give it back. Instead she rejected it, and Magnifi has no other heir by the legal standard he chose to set an heir by, so we’re left with - a mitamah is always supposed to have an owner.”

“But it’s just floating loose?”

“Exactly. And that’s why none of us know how to put it back. If someone owned it, they could set that term to give it back, but no one owns it and it isn’t naturally returning, either.”

He’s going to do his damndest to keep Trucy from learning this particular fact. She doesn’t need to feel worse about her family, doesn’t need to know that turning away from its legacy of pain still ends up continuing another kind of pain. “You’ve been busy, huh. Getting all this figured out.”

It’s treacherous ground he approaches, that yawning chasm of eight years between them. How much did she learn in that time, only to wait until now to catch him up on it? Even just what she must have discovered in the past year—

“I’ve wondered all this time why my mother helped the police with their investigation of DL-6,” Maya says, her eyes vacant and her claws tearing up new splinters from the dock. “Simply assuming that she was nearest to their summons never felt like an answer. I knew whatever she did was magic beyond my wildest imaginings, and she used it in the course of a human’s murder investigation. What could the police have offered her?” A small slice of wood snaps. She tosses it into the water where it floats in the midst of a tangle of reeds and matted fallen leaves. “She knew him, beforehand, Gregory Edgeworth. I found that out, asking around - the office that still uses his name, you know.”

“Mr Shields?” Phoenix asks, too confused about why Maya is going down this path to protest it. Ray’s never said, exactly, that he’s had close brushes with the fae before, but even if Phoenix didn’t have the Sight it would be obvious by the way he acts when the topic comes up.

“He mentioned - and I realized that was my mother. I know her only well enough to recognize her ghost.” Maya spits the last sentence like it’s a bitter taste, and when she pulls her hand away from the dock to rest it in her lap, the deep scratches of her claws in the old wood show her agitation. “And now when I’ve realized about what kind of magic she used, when I started trying it myself” - she gestures out at the water, and a faint trail of frost follows along the surface after the movement of her hand - “that left me another big question about that entire affair. What did she see, that the answer she gave to the police was, Yanni Yogi is the killer.”

Phoenix wishes he had even a clue where she’s taking this conversation.

Maya holds her hand up and starts ticking off the facts of the case on her fingers as she speaks. “Lawyer and bailiff were arguing and because of that, the son throws a gun. It makes impact with the ground and misfires. Gunshot, scream, he passes out. The other two must have moments later, else Yogi could have testified to who really committed the murder, or my mother viewing Gregory’s last moments would have seen von Karma. Is there really no difference between watching a man fall unconscious through his eyes, and watching him die, that she could have thought that first gunshot killed him? Wouldn’t she have known the scream was not his?”

Maya’s hands sink back into her lap. “She did not know any objective truth of the crime. She should not have been able to lay blame.”

“But she did,” Phoenix says.

“What were her words? Did she tell them it ‘most likely’ would have been Yogi? The police could have figured that for themselves - would they have accepted a vague answer from her? Or did she speak with certainty because she refused to entertain the idea that the son had killed his father?”

Maya’s mother left the Court long before DL-6 happened; her abandonment of her daughters was a refusal to play the Court’s game that time and again saw parent pit against child for a sliver more of power and status. She refused to consider the prospect of having to kill her daughters. (And Mia, down the line, forfeit the throne to her sister rather than worry that she might try to take it by force, rather than consider killing her now to prevent it and keep it for herself.) 

There in the human realm, with a crime scene photograph and a dead man, did Maya’s mother again reject that concept, that possibility of patricide? Was it to save someone else’s son from that fate the way she tried to spare her daughters?

(Maya hadn’t thought much of her mother until she realized that, unlike most fae parents, her mother truly loved her, and then she like Mia wanted to find her, and then it was too late.)

“As she knew Gregory Edgeworth prior, she must have known how he loved his son,” Maya says. Phoenix’s throat tightens. He remembers - well, he remembers very little, is the tragedy. He better remembers von Karma’s steamroller objections, the furious wounded scream of a man finally beaten, the photograph of the  inside of the elevator. “And I keep thinking, when I wonder what the police offered her, I am not sure that they did. Offer anything, I mean. I think she did this for - I think she must have respected him enough, or—”

She shakes her head, clears her throat, and it sounds rather like a growl. “She used magic that no one else in the Winter Court could have dreamed of. However she learned it, whenever she did, magic that powerful you don’t do on a whim. What’s equal payment for that? What could the cops have bargained with? Dignity doesn’t fetch a high price these days - they lost that on their own, my mother was involved in why, certainly, but not to blame - and the LAPD has never quite had a good name that they could sell.” She frowns, her eyes flashing. “And all they had was professional pride at stake, and people do nasty shit for that, but none of them are gonna be personally selling their souls or names for it, right?”

Manfred von Karma, Matt Engarde, Blaise Debeste, Kristoph Gavin - all monsters for their pride, to uphold their names and reputations, but none of them sold their souls for it. Maya’s right. Someone seeking out the fae for a matter they have little emotional investment in will draw a much firmer line than the frantic and desperate with personal problems they hope magic can solve, the kind of person who gets tangled in lopsided bargains and dangerous debts.

“So why would she do it?” Maya presses a contemplative finger to her mouth. 

It seems only like supposition, that Maya is building a case on, a theory that there wasn’t an offer, or a good offer, made. That her mother wasn’t the kind to help for the sake of helping. (Mia saved Phoenix’s life but he could help her convict Dahlia in return. Mia was already a lawyer then. Before Elise became Elise, the artist, what was she? How did she care for humans?) But the fae know things and Maya, sometimes, knows things she doesn’t know how. This is her mother, the last queen, and maybe it’s more than supposition. Maybe she knows and doesn’t know she knows. 

“But if it was me,” she continues, “when would I do that, for chump change? If it was you - you asking me, or you were the one that died - if I knew that magic, and it was you, then I would. So I think, why my mother ever got involved in DL-6, like I said, it was about Gregory Edgeworth. That she must have respected him enough, or loved him enough, that she would—” Maya sighs. She leans her chin on her hand. “I think damned doomed defense attorneys just have a draw for my family, whether to befriend them or become them.”

Or be the one who damns them, but besides Dahlia, Maya’s formula fits. And even if he presumes that she has given thought to this again because of the relevance of the memory matter, there’s still a reason she’s telling him this, and now. Of course he’d like to know, and she’d know that: they can never fully lay DL-6 truly to rest. It will always matter to them. But that can’t be all she’s thinking, because even with Maya it’s never just the surface level. There’s a moral to the story buried in its timing, or simply in that last sentence. 

“Hey, Nick,” she says, her voice softer and less confident than before. “You remember when you were arrested for my sis’ murder, and that got me out of jail - and you told me you knew who did it, and you told me who. And I could’ve done anything that night you spend in jail. I knew what monster had killed my sister and tried to blame me and then blame you when you were the only person in the world on my side. I could have killed him. I really thought about it.” Maya pulls her knees in close to herself. “I really wanted to. But it wasn’t what Sis would’ve done. She could’ve killed him for everything she knew he did, but instead she spent years trying to bring him to justice through human courts. And if I killed him, then your name would never be cleared.”

Has that honestly ever occurred to him? He didn’t know Maya well enough to worry what she would do; and then once he did know her, he didn’t look back. Not to that. Not to ever notice it was weird that all she did, knowing the identity of the man putting them through hell, was go home to Mia’s office and put together the last pieces of the case, that list of names, on Phoenix’s behalf, because Mia wrote a note that asked her to. 

“You told me you didn’t want me to,” Maya says, staring at her hands, fingers hooked together in front of her knees hugged up to her chest. “You said you wanted to know why he did it. I wouldn’t have killed Kristoph Gavin, not as long as you live and have a name that needed clearing. I’m fae, not a monster! All you had to do was trust me! That would’ve been easier than binding and banishing me to stay away!” She doesn’t stand up but she unfolds herself so that she is kneeling on the dock, her hands balled up in the fabric of her robes in her lap. 

“I kept everyone out of it,” Phoenix says. It isn’t difficult to meet her eyes, even as smouldering red simmers up from their depths. This is a conversation he’s had before, justification he’s made to others and himself time and again. “It wasn’t just you. I didn’t want Kristoph to feel like he was being investigated like he would if all my friends started coming to him if I told them something was up. I didn’t want to tip my hand too soon.

More threatening than her glittering glare is her silence, because this is Maya, and Maya isn’t silent. He keeps talking even through his awareness that the longer he goes on justifying himself to her uncharacteristically stern face, the higher his chances of saying something regrettable. “And you especially - Kristoph hates the Court. You getting involved at all would just have been ugly.”

(When an orca tried to help her people, with those big teeth of hers, it looked like she was doing more harm. It saved no one, and made a more complicated mess of the truth in the end. But she wanted to help. She was an orca. What else could an orca do to help?)

“And you could think of nowhere else in your life that your friends are welcome - it’s help you investigate or nothing? No room for us otherwise? Not unless we’re usable by you?”

“That’s not at all what this was! And you know it, and you know you’re deliberately misinterpreting it.” This is what he’s been waiting for - the confrontation, the fight, about the years of distance between them. When she left him a message he expected that she was finally tired of him calling her and her family up for favors from a distance, that she was finally ready to indict him for it, and her restraint so far has been surprising. “I was afraid something would happen to you! Like I was afraid for Edgeworth! And I had to figure out how to raise a daughter! And you had a kingdom to rule! To reform its treatment of humans from the ground up, didn’t you tell me you were going to do that? When the hell were you planning time to watch kids’ shows at my office in the midst of all that!” 

She bares her teeth at him but doesn’t make a verbal response more than a hiss. 

“Besides,” he adds, furious but not at her, and rather furious that she’s tricked him into anger, “you can’t blame me for not trusting that you would leave Kristoph alone! You tried to talk me out of looking for the reason why he did what he did! You can’t blame me for thinking that the reason you wanted me to give up was so I would be fine with you killing him!”

“So what was his reason?” she demands. Her teeth have lengthened to points, her second small set of red eyes opening up at the outer corner of her main ones. “How about those locks, Nick, did you break them, did you find out why!” 

He doesn’t even know why the locks were black. “I cleared my name,” he says. “I’m a lawyer again.”

“Yeah, would’ve loved to hear that from you.” Maya jabs a finger that lacks a claw into his chest, the spot where his lapel would be, where his badge would go. 

“I…” He has no good answer to this one. It didn’t sink in, it didn’t sink in, and then he was busy on a case with no other thoughts to spare. He didn’t tell Larry. Edgeworth did. He didn’t tell Maya. Pearl did. And then they knew and there was no point to calling. Right?

She prods him several times more in the same spot, for emphasis, and then she yanks her hand away and furiously rubs at her eyes. Shit, is she crying? Before he can really tell, she is on her feet, staggering clumsily, her claws tearing rifts in the boathouse wall when she steadies her wobbling. Standing with her back to him, the movements of her arms tell him she is still wiping her eyes. Shit, she is crying. “You left me alone!” Her voice rings shrill out through the predawn silence. “You sent me away and left me alone! Like my mother left me! Like Sis did! You were supposed to be different! You could be different! Because you’re human!”

He’s a lawyer. He always tries to have a counterargument. He always tries to have anything to say, anything except the admission of wrongdoing, because that’s an admission that there is something that should be repaid. The fae don’t apologize. Humans don’t apologize to fae. Those become debts.

“Maya…”

“You were the one who wasn’t supposed to go away! You were the one - you’re my friend!” Maya’s hands drop to her sides. When she turns around, her skin is purple again, much harder to tell if her face was starting to redden and go blotchy. “I love Pearly with my whole heart but she’ll never be my friend, not really. She cares too much about our tradition and our hierarchy and thrones to ever look at me as an equal.”

“I know,” Phoenix says, not really to that, but to everything, to the fact that she’s more right than she is wrong and he’s the one who’s made a mess with almost everyone he’s loved in the past eight years. “But times change. We change.” The fae might hate change, strive to stop it from happening, but they still do. “We’ve both got all sorts of other responsibilities. Even if - it was never going to be the same way it was, when it was just the two of us and the office.”

“No,” she agrees, “but the problem wasn’t that we were different. It was that we” - she gestures back and forth between them - “were nothing at all.”

“Yeah. I…” He sighs. “I know I’ve not been a good friend.” He can’t even stick the lately qualifier on it. Eight years is not lately. “Not to you.” Or to Larry either, if he’s already thinking about this. He and Larry both know that they’re each closer to Edgeworth than they are each other. They knew that years ago. Maybe ever since Larry admitted that he was the one who had stolen Edgeworth’s lunch money, and all those years never told Phoenix that.

“You definitely have not.” Even if he said it, her echo of it hurts more than he expected. Maya sighs, equally heavy to his, and she sinks back to the dock next to him, leaning one shoulder against the side of the boathouse. “At least you figured out how to be a good father, Pearly says.”

Maya can’t say, really, because Maya hasn’t seen him, and him and Trucy, enough to know. Whether it’s that she’s thinking about, or something else, she goes quiet for a while, and they watch the sky slowly lighten from the faint but unerring approach of the sun up from beneath the horizon. Yellow autumn leaves fall with the breeze, landing in the water and casting ripples out from the impact. Maya reaches out and snags a leaf from the air, her claws puncturing its fragile surface. 

“I’m sorry,” Phoenix says. It feels like a deeper debt he’s leaving open if he doesn’t say it; she couldn’t collect on silence, but his guilt would still be there and that’s a hell of a thing, guilt. For some things he’s said today, and some things he’s said eight years ago, and for some silence over eight years. 

“I am too,” she says. “That you’re a jerk and that you didn’t trust me and that any of this happened and that we're both too petty to ever try and talk it out since. I kept wanting to hate you and I never could and I just got too tired to be angry.”

He had expected that anger, had wanted to wait for her to reach out, afraid that if he tried, she would be furious with him anew and tear him apart - this lack of yelling this morning was not the expectation. Maybe she’s matured - somehow, as queen in the pettiest, cruelest environment of them all, she’s grown up. Enough that she acknowledged her own failings there too, a little, even if she put the onus more on him. Deserve it as he might.

She catches another leaf and rips it apart and drops the pieces one by one in the lake. “I tried to do a lot of hating of you guys over the years. Sure I was mad at you, but it - it was more than that, considering when it was, you know? Just after - just not that long after…” She clears her throat. “I tried to hate them too, my mother and Sis, for leaving me to the throne, for making me be queen because if not me then it’s Pearly and I can’t make her do that. But I just kept thinking instead that I never knew either of them really. That you got more time with Sis than I did.”

And that time - and still, what would Phoenix do for more time with Mia? Real, actual time to learn from her, to speak to her and hear her voice in return, to share the office with someone more than a ghost. He had more time with her than Maya and now it still feels like nothing at all. 

“There’s something I wanted to ask you, because I’ve said everything else, because I kept thinking about her,” Maya says, and the pace of her voice picks up, faster and faster, the frantic way of someone who expects to be rejected in what they are saying. “And you don’t need to answer me now, you can think about it and get back to me, and whatever questions you have we can figure out, but—” She inhales sharply. “But um, whenever you die - whenever that’s gonna be, in another hundred years or whatever—”

What’s a human lifespan, anyway, and why would she have bothered to figure it out in the decade she’s been friends with humans. Maya’s relationship with the passage of time is like Edgeworth’s with money: barely an inkling that they, and not the rest of the world, are the odd ones out. I said a month, and it’s been two days; what do you mean you thought it’s been more than a month already? - What do you mean, a private jet?

“—Whenever that happens, can I have your heart?”

Phoenix knew that whatever she was asking was going to be bad, messy, ugly, and a bit terrifying, when the question started with “whenever you die”, but somehow this exceeds his worst expectations. He pictures her holding it bloody in her claws, or maybe, less messy but no less morbid, the Mary Shelley route, with a calcified heart instead. (Iris read Frankenstein in one of her literature courses, and thought the story of Shelley keeping the supposed remains of her dead husband’s heart was as romantic as anything could be. Phoenix had not agreed, exactly, though he also hadn’t argued, exactly, either; his aversion to the gothic horror of carrying around a loved one’s heart had wilted in the face of his infatuation and the giddy glee that she might like him enough to want a memento of him if something happened. Ironically back when his heart was still soft enough that it would burn up on a pyre, not like he is now, a hard rock that could survive the flames.)

“What?” he asks. “My heart?” 

“I mean,” she says, quickly, hurrying to get the words out but weirdly casual all the whole, “I’m not gonna ask you for your soul. Even if that’s where your memories are and memories are be the best way to know Sis - that’s your soul. I can’t just take that.”

Now there’s a statement that he would never expect one of the fae to make. Maya, always surprising him. 

“You’d just be worried that I’d make a mess with it after your death and end up bringing you back because your soul’s still kicking around,” she adds. “But your heart - all the feelings in there, even separated from memories, those still - you don’t ever truly forget some things. Some people.” Thalassa might disagree. Then again - Thalassa, devoid of memory, separated from her children, taking Machi under her wing and making him an inseparable part of herself, mothering an orphan even if she didn’t remember she was a mother herself. Kay, no idea at all who she was, but concerned enough about Edgeworth’s well-being that she would gladly be arrested if it caused less trouble for him. Phoenix himself, defending Maggey, not knowing he was a lawyer but still knowing that if he didn’t help her than no one else would do it right.

So then maybe Maya’s correct enough. “And I could figure enough out from your heart,” she continues. “And it wouldn’t - if you’re gone, you not having it wouldn’t be an issue, and I can’t cause trouble with it. There’s a reason that we never make deals with people asking them to sell their hearts.”

“There’s no power in that?” 

“Nah. I’ve never figured out what you would do with someone else’s heart, besides sentimentality. Y’know, like this thing I’m doing. Or will be, if you…” She looks down at her hands. “You don’t have to answer me now. Just think about it. And maybe help me workshop how to pitch this same idea, but about my mother, to Laurice without it sounding so weird.”

“I think it’s going to be very hard to make this sound less weird.” He forgets, sometimes, that he knew Mia just about as well as Maya did, but he’s never forgotten that Maya never knew her mother at all - she met her as a stranger, saw her die as a stranger, and learned the truth days later. He thinks about it when he thinks about Thalassa, and how Trucy has no memory of her, and god damn if he’s going to let her die a stranger to her daughter.

“Then we’ll just have to take some time to work at it,” Maya says. She glances sideways at him, from the corner of her eyes, a mischievous glint alight in them and a grin on her face. “Like, over breakfast?” She had begun to push herself up onto her feet, but she stops while waiting for an answer and stays squatting there, her hands on the ground in front of her to keep her balance, staring at him. She looks like she’s ready to pounce.

She’ll eat until his wallet is flat, she’ll eat until she drives him into credit card debt, and she’ll eat until it’s noon and he has an office to run. He’s got to get back to Apollo and Athena. He—

Maya waits, her smile starting to fall off at the edges. Phoenix can say anything but he knows the truth really is that he didn’t trust her, and could have; he did stop her from getting involved with the Kristoph situation and no matter how she pulled back out of frustration with what he did, he pushed her away too. She could have acted better, but so could he. 

“We are going to have to negotiate a limit to the amount you are allowed to order,” Phoenix says. “I can’t afford for you to order the whole menu.” Her smile blossoms back into full, her glamour holding but not quite, her mouth just a little too wide and teeth too sharp, too excited to contain herself. “The office isn’t exactly brimming with clients lately, and I’ve got a daughter too—”

Maya springs up. “Nick, Nick, come on, you’ve never had that many clients, and you can’t keep using the daughter excuse forever!” She hops over his legs, putting herself between him and the place where the dock meets the shore. “She’s got to be old enough to be getting money herself too, right?”

“She’s sixteen,” Phoenix says, knowing as he does that it’s a meaningless number to her. “So, no, not really, not yet. She’s working on it, been trying to get herself up on stage as a bona fide stage magician, but she’s still trying to find an in.” 

The Gramarye name carries some local power and status - they did stage tricks of their own, in between the real magic and shady deals, or it was more like the shady deals and real magic happened backstage after the stage performances were over. But it’s hard to chance on a sixteen-year-old, so Trucy’s been searching for someone to share the spotlight with her, make her less of a gamble. Someone who isn’t Valant. That ship sailed. 

“She’s reached out to some stage magician who ran with the Gramaryes a long time ago, though he didn’t take the name” - she doesn’t actually remember him herself, but there’s a lot of information still lying around in the Gramarye basement - “so depending on how that goes I might be checking with Pearls or you to vet him additionally and make sure he’s not—”

“Not a monster?” Maya finishes. “Not sold his soul or gone off to be a bastard like the rest of that coven? Yeah, you meet the guy and don’t like what you see, then we’ll talk on that one.” 

Apparently he’s been taking too long to stand up, because Maya grabs him by the forearms and yanks him back up onto his feet. He staggers, but she has a steely grip on him and keeps him upright. She doesn’t release him immediately, but stares at him, and he expects that she’s going to say something else about the Gramaryes and this guy whose stage name Phoenix can’t quite remember but he’d swear it’s literally just Mysterious because that’s just what performers do sometimes, shitty names - but she just stays silent another moment, and then another.

And she lets go of his arms to step forward and throw hers again around his shoulders, pulling him in against her and giving him a forceful snake’s squeeze. In his shock, it takes him a few stunned seconds to bring his arms up. “Missed you, Nick.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I missed you, too.”

[jeroldlockettus]

What Would Be the Best Universal Language? (Earth 2.0 Series)

Around 7,000 languages are spoken on Earth 1.0. (Photo: Quinn Dombrowski/Flickr)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “What Would Be the Best Universal Language? (Earth 2.0 Series).” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

We explore votes for English, Indonesian, and … Esperanto! The search for a common language goes back millennia, but so much still gets lost in translation. Will technology finally solve that?

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

In our previous episode, we talked about living under the ancient curse of the Tower of Babel.

Esther SCHOR: The curse of Babel is an existential condition in which we live every day. We use language to communicate, but we cannot rely on it to make ourselves understood.

We can’t always rely on it because …

John McWHORTER: Well, we have 7,000 languages.

Seven thousand languages? We learned about the many costs associated with this linguistic diversity — financial costs, psychic costs, even war:

Shlomo WEBER: Many people died in the war, which, in fact, easily could have been avoided.

And we learned that linguistic diversity has plenty of benefits too:

Lera BORODITSKY: There are certainly claims about types of thinking that become very hard without language — or become unlikely without language.

Those are some of the things we know about language here on Earth 1.0. But today’s episode is part of our Earth 2.0 series, in which we imagine we could reboot the planet and do some optimizing — or at least some tidying up. So, if we were starting over …

Maria Luisa MACIEIRA [French]: Si on devait tout recommencer à zéro…

Kew PARK [Korean]: … t시 시작한다면…

Isabela CABRAL [Brazilian Portuguese]: Se fossemos começar de novo …

Dhari ALJUTAILI [Arabic]:… أحسن طريقة لكل الناس على الأرض انهم…

CABRAL [Brazilian Portuguese]: para todos na Terra se comunicarem uns com os outros?

PARK [Korean]: 가장 좋은 방법은 무엇일까요?

… what would be the best way for everyone on Earth to be able to communicate with one another?

*      *      *

In the future, human-to-human communication may be so different that it’ll render our mission today moot. Between auto-translation and artificial intelligence and maybe even mind-melding, will anything ever get lost in translation? Maybe; maybe not. But — that’s the future. Let’s talk about language on Earth 2.0 using the tools and knowledge at our disposal today. If we could start from scratch, what would that look like?

Michael GORDIN: If we did this from scratch it would be a very surprising outcome.

That’s Michael Gordin, a historian of science at Princeton.

GORDIN: And who knows how it would work without the path dependency of previous empires, current economic structures, our current modes of transportation and media and communication? It would be very interesting to see how that would shake out.

Okay, let’s start with a couple basic questions. Number one: should we consider — please don’t throw things at me — should we consider having one common language?

BORODITSKY: I would be wary of thinking of common language as the solution to perfect communication …

Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego.

BORODITSKY: … because we already have [a] common language and that doesn’t lead to perfect communication.

McWHORTER: You would need oddly a language that had a lot less in it than many people would expect.

John McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia; he’s also an author and host of the Lexicon Valley podcast.

McWHORTER: You want it to be something that’s maximally easy for all of the world’s language speakers to use. You could have a universal language where tense was largely left to context, as it is in a great many of the world’s normal languages. You certainly wouldn’t have anything like grammatical gender. The vocabulary could be quite rich. That would be fun, but the grammar would be something where you could pick it up in a week.

Stephen J. DUBNER: I’m curious to know the degree to which language generally is utilitarian, like, “I want to pick up that thing,” or transactional, “I want that thing from you.” or romantic, or relationship, or gossip, or lying, and so on. And I’m just curious how a linguist might think about that.

McWHORTER: Language is more than questions, commands, and certainly more than just naked statements. Real language is about communication and charting feelings, telling people new things and that means that a language is a whole lot more than just nouns, verbs, and adjectives. If somebody says, “Oh, she’s totally going to call you,” that “totally” means, “you and I both know that other people think she isn’t going to call, but we have reason to think that she is.” We are full of things like that.

Okay, this leads to question number two: if there were a universal language, should it be a pre-existing one, or an invented one? English, while hardly universal, has of course become a very powerful language.

McWHORTER: What makes this regrettable to many, and quite understandably, is that English was the vehicle of a rapaciously imperial power and now America is the main driver.

So any pre-existing language will come with baggage, with lots of votes for and against. Does this mean we’d be better off inventing a new one? Apparently, some Facebook bots recently gave it a try.

CBS NEWS: According to several reports, Facebook’s artificial intelligence researchers had to shut down two chatbots after they developed a strange English shorthand.

A shorthand that its human creators couldn’t understand. As it happens, the dream of inventing a universal language has long been pursued by scholars, priests, even — as you’ll hear — by an ophthalmologist.

SCHOR: The history of language invention, which goes back millennia, has to do with reversing the curse of Babel.

Esther Schor is a professor of English at Princeton.

SCHOR: In other words, to return the world to a single language of perfect understanding. For some language inventors, this was imagined to be God’s own language and the language of divine truth.

In the 13th century, for instance, Ramon Llull, a Majorcan philosopher with Franciscan ties, sought to create the perfect language for channeling “the Truth,” and converting people to Christianity.

SCHOR: He created a formula for generating propositions from letters and words. He felt that some of them would be propositions to which an infidel would, of necessity, have to consent. But Llull’s truth was not the Truth, or at least it didn’t seem like the truth to the Saracens who eventually murdered him.  

A few centuries later, the German philosopher Leibniz— an admirer of Llull’s, by the way — tried to build a language based on logic.

SCHOR: Leibniz’s idea was to represent propositions by numbers and he would reason by getting the ratio of one proposition to another and calculate an answer. Again, we have the idea of a language of logic without words.

And in the 19th century, a Jewish ophthalmologist named Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof created a language both idealistic and pragmatic.

L. L. Zamenhof, or Doktoro Esperanto, invented Esperanto in 1887. (Photo: Wikimedia)

SCHOR: It’s called Esperanto because that was his pseudonym, Doktoro Esperanto, which means the hopeful one. He brags in this initial pamphlet that you can learn it in an afternoon and that it’s fun. So it was supposed to be easy to learn and easy to pronounce.

Esperanto was derived from various European roots. Zamenhof’s idea was not to have Esperanto displace other languages.

SCHOR: He called it a helping language or an auxiliary language. It would stand next to national languages and be a helping language to make bonds among people who were not like one another.

Zamenhof was a universalist …

SCHOR: But he was also a universalist who understood what it meant to have warm feelings for one’s people. Esperanto was to somehow reconcile those two things — to try to breed in us these feelings of attachment for other people who were really quite unlike us.

The larger goal of Esperanto was nothing less than world peace.

SCHOR: He knew that language could be a wall between ethnicities, but that it could also be a bridge. That was his motivation — to build a language that would be a bridge among ethnicities. He modeled it on the teaching of Hillel. “Do not unto others as you would not have them do unto you.” Hillel was a 1st-century rabbi, so it had a very Jewish cast to it.

This did not help Esperanto’s cause. As Esther Schor told us: “[A]nti-Semitism changed the fortunes of Esperanto when the French demanded that Zamenhof shear away its religious ideology.” Hitler and Stalin would also reject Esperanto. Regardless: if you remove its religious and utopian components, what’s left, Esther Schor says, is a language with some substantial benefits over many other languages, whether existing or invented.

SCHOR: What he wanted was maximal flexibility and simplicity. For one thing, the verbs are all regular in Esperanto. He wanted a language that was egalitarian and neutral. He didn’t want people to be disadvantaged because they weren’t a native speaker. He speaks very movingly about what it’s like to try to speak a language that’s not your own. He talks about his pulse racing and his palms sweating. It’s an experience I’ve had. Perhaps you have had it also.

Ruth KEVESS-COHEN: Esperanto is a lot easier to learn than other languages because it has very regular rules and very regular grammar.

That’s Ruth Kevess-Cohen. She helped develop an online Esperanto course for the language site Duolingo.

KEVESS-COHEN: You find that it’s taking you a lot less time than you thought to learn the language. Here’s a sentence in Esperanto. “Mi estas knabo” — “I am a boy.” There is no “a” in Esperanto. “Knabo” you can see is a noun because it has an ‘o’ at the end. Every noun ends in the letter ‘o,’ every adjective ends in the letter ‘a.’ Every verb in the present ends in ‘as,’ So you already know that “estas” is “am,” “are.” It’s the same. There’s no conjugation of that.

We spoke with Kevess-Cohen at this year’s Esperanto-USA National Congress — or Landa Kongreso, as you say it in Esperanto. Our producer Stephanie Tam spent a couple days there. You’ll hear about that in an upcoming special episode. You may be surprised to learn that Esperanto is still spoken. Esther Schor again:

SCHOR: These days, the most informed estimates I hear are several hundred thousand people speak Esperanto. The strength of Esperanto is not in numbers. The strength of Esperanto is in its continuity over 130 years in 62 countries, from generation to generation, without being passed down from generation to generation.

Still, for all its thoughtfulness and pragmatism, Esperanto never got anywhere close to its intended universal status — what Esperantists refer to as “La Fina Venko,” the “Final Victory.” Why not?

SCHOR: I can answer that by looking at what does look like a universal language in our world, which is English. What looked like a universal language in Zamenhof’s day was French. Both French and English were propelled into the world by commerce and armies, and Esperanto had neither of those.  

GORDIN: In order to keep a language constant enough so that it can function as a global, universal language, the way English is functioning now, you need to have a global communications infrastructure that standardizes dialects and pronunciations.

Michael Gordin again.

GORDIN: You need to have a global entertainment industry that produces books with standard spelling, and a pattern of accents that are considered acceptable, or that mark different classes or regional identities, and that constant reinforcement requires an infrastructure.

It’s something we don’t think about — at least I’d never thought about it — but there’s a lot of upkeep associated with language.

GORDIN: When classical Chinese was being used as a lingua franca for a very broad region — it was used in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam as the language of written communication — a very strict civil-service exam system privileged learning the language to precision. That stabilized that language.  To a certain extent the Anglophone entertainment publication and media industry, as well as the scientific institutions, stabilize a certain kind of global English now.

Gordin points to another factor that would make it hard to install a universal language: the nature of language itself.

GORDIN: The reason why I think you can’t just blanket install and say, “OK, everybody is going to learn Esperanto,” is because people will experiment and mess with the language. They’ll change it.

Which, by the way, is how we got to where we are today.

McWHORTER: Well, we have 7,000 languages.

John McWhorter, from Columbia.

McWHORTER: And language is inherently changeable not because change is swell but because as you use a language over time and you pass it on to new generations, brains tend to start hearing things slightly differently than they were produced and after a while, you start producing them that way. That is as inherent to language as it is inherent for clouds to change their shapes. It isn’t that that happens to some languages and not others. That’s how human speech goes.

DUBNER: All right, so imagine in our thought experiment now that we’ve got Earth 2.0. You’ve got seven, eight billion people. Let’s say we want to give everybody the most prosperity and opportunity and equity that’s possible. We make you the Chief, let’s say, Communications Adviser of Earth 2.0. We give you the task of writing the plan, the blueprint for creating from scratch our new language systems and institutions. What would that blueprint look like?

McWHORTER: I would say that an ideal, in the future, is that everybody in the world can communicate in one language, that people have another language that they use with their ingroup, and that we have as many of those languages as possible. I don’t think that it’s going to be another six thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-nine, ever. But there does need to be one language that everybody uses so that as many people in the world as possible can take advantage of economic benefits, such as they are.

WEBER: I would go with a global language on some higher level …

That’s Shlomo Weber, an economist who studies language.

WEBER: … but still keeping the local language for everybody, because sensibilities of the people [are] a very important thing.

DUBNER: Let’s say this Earth 2.0 experiment, just to be a little more realistic, that we’re still working with the resources we’ve got. In other words, the languages that exist now would still exist. English obviously has a big head start, but it obviously also comes with a lot of baggage, right? People learn English because it’s useful, but English has a history of colonialism and domination and so on. Would picking a language like English just doom it to failure?

WEBER: I don’t know. Most of the languages, maybe except Chinese, have the history of domination too.

DUBNER: Does that mean you’re nominating Chinese because they took the Middle Kingdom route and they never really tried?

WEBER: Definitely would be one of the leading languages. Absolutely. But we could have chosen six or seven. To choose one, it’s a very difficult thing. Of course, the colonial legacy of English is questionable. But it’s true for so many others — the history of Russian language, of Japanese, of French, of German, Turkish empire had also its ups and downs. But given our circumstances … English. A reluctant vote for English.

McWHORTER: I almost wish that there was some reason that everybody had to learn colloquial Indonesian. It’s the only language I’ve ever encountered where you can learn a whole bunch of words and, even though you’re going to sound like an idiot, you can get an awful lot done. You don’t sound nearly as much like an idiot stringing together your Lonely Planet words in many parts of Indonesia. There’s no such thing as the moon being a girl and a boat being a boy. None of those things that make languages hard to learn. Really — almost none! I thought this should be the world’s universal language. Indonesian is one of those languages, like English, which has been learned by so many different people speaking so many different languages that it’s relatively user-friendly as languages go.

DUBNER: You’ve argued that isolation in a language breeds complexity. Considering that English is the least isolated language there is these days — it’s everywhere — does that necessarily mean that it will or is becoming less complex, to make it accessible to newer users all over the world?

McWHORTER: It doesn’t mean that but only because this business of languages being more complex when they’re isolated, and becoming simpler when they’re spoken by a lot of adults, is largely something that happens before widespread literacy. English didn’t become relatively user-friendly because of the Bosnian cabdriver in New York. It happened when Scandinavian Vikings flooded Britain and learned bad old English but were dominant enough that generations started speaking the way they did. That became the language. You and I, right now, are speaking really crappy old English. And we feel fine about it.

DUBNER: Speak for yourself. I feel I’ve been pretty literate today. See, I didn’t use the right word for literate. Literate is written, right? I can’t even think of the right word for what I’m trying to say. What do you call it when I’m being …

McWHORTER: Articulate, I suppose.

DUBNER: Articulate. I couldn’t even come up with that. That’s how bad … I know you’re right. I just proved your point. You know what that was? That was Muphry’s Law. Do you know Muphry’s Law?

McWHORTER: No, what’s that?

DUBNER: Muphry’s law is whenever you try to correct someone’s mistake, you make an additional mistake.

McWHORTER: I didn’t know there was a name for that.

DUBNER: There is because our language is so rich, of course …

MCWHORTER: It is exactly that.

As rich as our language may be, there’s still plenty of room for improvement. Coming up after the break: let’s say we bit the bullet and went with English as our universal language. How could it be made more accessible and equitable?

McWHORTER: Easy, magic wand: something that we must get rid of is linguistic prescriptivism.

And: let’s not overlook how much technology is already changing our communication.

GORDIN: It’s not going to be a Babel fish that you stick in your ear and will translate everything immediately. But it does improve the possibilities of translating roughly between language groups.

  *      *      *

On Earth 2.0, it might be nice if all seven-plus billion of us spoke one shared language — and then, as John McWhorter suggested …

McWHORTER: …  and then people have another language that they use with their ingroup and that we have as many of those languages as possible.

This, McWhorter says, is pretty close to the way a lot of people already communicate.

McWHORTER: If you think about the typical person who speaks Arabic, for example. They almost certainly speak two different languages. There is the Arabic that we would learn in a book, and then there’s Moroccan Arabic, Iraqi Arabic, Sudanese Arabic, Libyan Arabic. Those are completely different languages from Standard Arabic — different basic words, different grammatical constructions. You grow up speaking your Libyan Arabic — that’s mommy’s language. Then, when you go to school, you learn something that often I’ve heard people from these countries also call Arabic and that’s this other language. That happened because of history, because of cultural history in the case of Arabic, the Quran. The religious unity of the nations has a lot to do with it, but ideally nobody would have to go to school to “learn Arabic.” That is going on in many South Asian countries. It’s what a typical African often has to go through. Or if you’re Sicilian, you speak Sicilian. You go to school and you learn Italian.

Okay, fine but then there’s the task of selecting the universal language. Michael Gordin of Princeton:

GORDIN: Even if we picked a universal language that was neutral, politics being what it is — and I doubt this could be engineered away — we’d find ways to particularize the previously general.

McWHORTER: It’d be interesting if there was some sort of academy that were designed to keep people from making it more complicated …

DUBNER: I love that the linguist is coming up with The Academy to Keep Language from Becoming More Complicated. You guys are the ones that have contributed, obviously, to the way we think about language as so complicated.

McWHORTER: See, we contain multitudes.

It might be helpful to look at some of the countries that already use formulas calling for two or three languages.

WEBER: The Indians, actually. In some other countries, in Nigeria, Kazakhstan. They tried to implement this formula.

The economist Shlomo Weber.

WEBER: They tried to combine all these things. Every child has to study his own language, English, and the language of the other part of the country. Everything beautiful. You bring national cohesiveness, you bring efficiency through English, and you still sustain your individual languages, your individual attachments, your identification. But it didn’t work, because the people didn’t accept this formula. Why didn’t [they] accept it? Because their attachment to home language was much stronger than doing anything else.

DUBNER: I thought that Kazakhstan worked better than, let’s say, India or Nigeria. What did Kazakhstan do, or what happened there that made it work better?

WEBER: They have a strong government there. But in the case of Kazakhstan, I think the people were convinced that this is right way to go. In Kazakhstan, with its oil and gas resources, English is very important to be a part of the international community. Of course, [the] Kazakh language is important, it’s their own language, but they also recognize that for [the] cohesiveness of the country, Russian is an important language.

DUBNER: But you’re also suggesting that authoritarianism is handy if you want to get everybody to speak the three languages, yeah? Because democracy is a little sloppier.

WEBER: A little sloppy in this regard, right. Some other advantages, but not that.

To be fair, there are a lot of differences between Kazakhstan and India. India is much larger, much more diverse. Even so, says Michael Gordin …

GORDIN: You have to give people a reason to want to engage with the language. The energy required to learn a language is high enough that you really have to work on the motivation. The constructed languages and the natural languages provide lots of examples of the importance of that.

OK, so how do you get people to engage with a language? As we’ve seen on Earth 1.0, most of the big, legacy languages come with a lot of baggage — cultural baggage at least; more likely, colonialist baggage. So what would happen if we chose English as the new universal language? I mean, with 1.5 billion speakers, it’s already 20 percent of the way there. What would you do to make English truly accessible to everyone, especially non-native speakers?

McWHORTER: Something that we must get rid of is linguistic prescriptivism, and by that, I mean that we live with an idea that some ways of speaking a language are bad, broken, and some ways aren’t. It’s all based on myths. That’s not to say that in a formal situation you can get up and say, “Billy and me went to the store.”

GORDIN: In the 19th century, the standard by which people had to know a language, a foreign language that wasn’t their own — so let’s for the moment pretend like everybody in the world speaks French, English, or German. You had to be really fluent in one of those three but only pretty competent in the others. A much weaker level of fluency. The French person didn’t have to know a lot of English but they had to be able, with a dictionary, to puzzle their way through a scientific article. You could relax the assumption that everything has to be perfect grammar-book English and just allow the publication of rougher English in a variety of forms, without this obsessive copyediting. That would be fairer.

McWHORTER: There are some kinds of English that would be so difficult for anybody else to understand that maybe there would have to be some adjustment. But schematically, the idea that most people in most nations have to learn a form of what they speak that requires effort to master — that’s crummy.

GORDIN: You could imagine subsidizing global English education. Another fair option is to say, “No, we actually really like the highly-readable, clean English.” You could charge slightly higher page fees for native speakers of English that would subsidize copy-editing for non-native speakers of English.

SCHOR: The most important thing would be to provide incentives for linguistic innovation, or for bringing language and the arts together, for bringing language and engineering together. This would have to come from some organization or donors, of course. But that’s as much of an institution as I would like to imagine negotiating language in Earth 2.0.

WEBER: I would like to have peace on this planet and then to approach those things.

DUBNER: What do you think would be a better way for everyone in the world to learn English? I’m especially curious to know, as an economist, what you think is the R.O.I. on an education dollar versus an entertainment dollar. In other words, would it be better just to have all Hollywood movies distributed globally for free? Would that be the best way for people to learn English?

WEBER: It could be the case. Once again, [the] example of India, Bollywood movies have contributed to [the] tremendous development of Hind[i] …The language was not spoken very widely in India, before the development of Bollywood.

DUBNER: Maybe even five years from now a technology like movies will seem very old-fashioned because there may be technology that’s essentially instant and perfect translation from any language to any language, right?

WEBER: Of course, technology will play a part.

GORDIN: Machine translation, I think, will never be perfect. It’s not going to be a Babel fish that you stick in your ear and will translate everything immediately. But it does improve the possibilities of translating roughly between language groups.

“It’s not going to be a Babel fish” — the Babel fish is from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by the way — “that you stick in your ear and will translate everything immediately.” Maybe not — but maybe. A New York startup called Waverly Labs has been working on a Babel fish-like earbud that’ll do live translation. They say they’ve already taken in $5 million in pre-orders. There’s also the rapidly developing Google Translate and Skype Translator. And it’s not just major languages that benefit from the digital revolution.

SCHOR: I don’t think there’s any doubt that technology has been a great boon to Esperanto …

Esther Schor again.

SCHOR … and I know many Esperantists, especially in the United States, who essentially live their Esperantic lives online. Some of them Skype, some of them do it on Facebook. LERNU.net has several hundred thousand registered users and there’s also Duolingo, which in the past two years since its inception, it has signed on about a million people into the Esperanto course, which is really amazing and marvelous.

But overall, the internet is dominated by what John McWhorter calls the big-dude languages, especially English. Google searches in English return roughly four times more results than Arabic searches; 95% of Wikipedia concepts are represented in fewer than six languages. There is of course no guarantee that this march toward English hegemony continues. History shows us that language is inherently mutable. So what can we assume about the future of language?

GORDON: Since we’re not changing the biology of humans, we can assume a couple of things …

Michael Gordin, the historian of science from Princeton.

GORDIN: … that people will learn languages; that they’ll learn them pretty well when they’re kids; and that languages won’t stay stable. If you want a more broadly-communicative, more inclusive infrastructure, you should focus on training children while they’re young and still able to learn multiple different languages and keeping them straight. In the 19th century, in Bohemia, the Czech region of the Habsburg Empire, it was quite common for neighboring peasant villages, one of which was predominantly German-speaking and one of which was predominantly Czech-speaking, to send kids to be educated in the other town. That way the kid would know both languages. Leveraging the way children can soak up languages almost effortlessly, to create a more dense web of people who understand each other’s languages, would improve some aspects of the system.

But here’s the thing. However judiciously we might draw up the best course of language for Earth 2.0, the original blueprint is unlikely to hold. Language evolves, it diverges; it constantly sparks its own offshoots. Consider a recent group of languages that were created from scratch.

Brian KERNIGHAN: Computer languages are very definitely created. And so somebody sits down and says, “this is the way we want to have our language work.”

Brian Kernighan is a computer-science professor at Princeton. He used to work at Bell Labs, the famous incubator of various operating systems and coding languages. Kernighan himself worked on the UNIX o.s. and the languages AWK and AMPL. The first major programming languages were invented in the late 1950s.

KERNIGHAN: The first high-level languages, I would say, would fundamentally be Fortran, COBOL, BASIC, and a language called ALGOL — which was in some sense more an academic exercise.

These languages were built for different tasks:

KERNIGHAN: Like scientific and engineering computation, which was FORTRAN; or business computation, which was COBOL; or even educational computation, if you like, which was BASIC. They’re definitely created for a purpose as opposed to being a natural process. On the other hand, once they’re created, then there’s a pressure for them to evolve.

Just a few years later, in 1961 …

KERNIGHAN: In 1961, a professional journal called Communications of the ACM in their January issue had a cover piece of art, which showed a schematic version of the Tower of Babel. It listed on that probably 200 programming languages. The message was, “Boy, there’s a lot of programming languages.”

Today, there are at least 1,500 programming languages.

KERNIGHAN: Do we need that many languages? Of course not. Do we use that many languages? Actually, no. The repertoire of most journeymen programmers is probably half a dozen to a dozen or something like that.

The parallel between programming languages and natural languages is not perfect, but still striking. A new language costs time, effort, and money to create, to learn, to maintain. Why, then, has there been so much growth?

KERNIGHAN: People are trying to write bigger programs, and they’re trying, often, to address programming problems. That is, taking on tasks that were not part of the original. Therefore the language evolves because the environment in which it lives is changing, the resources that are available for programmers — that is, hardware resources — are changing, and the desires of the people who write programs change as well.

GORDIN: Or an optimist would say developing into varieties of pronunciations and accents display the diversity of who we are.

Michael Gordin, speaking now about natural languages.

GORDIN: That process we’ve seen over world history many times: things fragment, then they coalesce, and then they fragment, and they coalesce again. Part of that has to do with tribal tendencies. Part of it has to do with a love of experimentation, regional loyalty, something that sounds aesthetically interesting. You could end up with something like a guy writing a poem in the late medieval period in the Tuscan dialect, Dante, producing a standard for a language by the act of his particularity.

This kind of change can create chaos. But: it’s also a hallmark of being human — a dissatisfaction with the status quo; a desire to experiment, to build, to adapt to changing circumstances.

BORODITSKY: We’re champions in the animal world at creating our own niches, taking the environment that we’re given, and then radically transforming it to suit our needs.

That’s the cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky.

BORODITSKY: And we do this with language as well.

And what is Boroditsky’s vision for language on Earth 2.0?

BORODITSKY: My emphasis would be on preserving diversity and preserving flexibility — making things really easy to learn and really adaptable to environment — rather than focusing on making something that is exactly the same and common across everyone. I don’t know that we can judge that we now have the best solution, and we should just build it right in. I’d still want people to learn lots of things through cultural transmission and adjust to their environment, the way that we do so well as humans. In some ways, becoming more aware of the relationship that we have with language is the thing that helps communication — more than simply trying to build one system.

It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that just about everyone we’ve heard from in this series on language has been … an academic. They, like all tribes, have their own dialects and sublanguages. Which is often not all that decipherable to the rest of us. I asked Shlomo Weber about this. He’s an economist.

WEBER: At the moment, I’m the director of the New Economic School in Moscow.

DUBNER: I have to tell you. I love academia. I love academics. I love the research you do. But my one big complaint is this: the way that you academics communicate to the rest of us, to the non-academics, is terrible. I understand these are areas of technical expertise but this strikes me as its own little Tower of Babel, where there are academic researchers all over the world doing this amazing and valuable research — which by the way is often funded by us, the taxpayers. And yet, we can’t really participate in it because of the way that you all communicate. I’m curious to know if we can’t solve the language or communication problem globally, if we could at least address this problem.

WEBER: Believe me, Stephen, I agree with you. I am doing my small part. I tried to write in newspapers, I go on television to talk about general things and not using the language. But it comes back to economics. There are incentives, and the incentives are not to go to tell you about this research. There is nothing in my incentive mechanism, what [my] university or community offers me, to go to talk to people who are interested in some simplified version of this research. For this, you really need to grow as an individual and to understand that, indeed, the research is supported by your dollars.

DUBNER: I will say this: honestly, as much as I complain about the gap, I’m grateful for it because I wouldn’t have a job if you guys communicated directly to people. Basically, I am the translator. So keep doing what you’re doing, Shlomo.

WEBER: Thank you. And you, Stephen, keep doing what you’re doing.

Coming up next time …

MACIEIRA [Brazilian Portuguese]: Isso vem no próximo episódio.

IVANOV [Russian]: Это будет в следующем выпуске.

Anisa SILVIANA [Bahasa Indonesia]: Yang akan datang selanjutnya.

Justin CHOW [Mandarin]: 在下一集.

Rendell de KORT [Papiamento]: … sigi proximo.

Larry Summers is a Harvard economics professor but he’s also a former president of Harvard, a former Secretary of the Treasury, and he was the chief White House economist under Obama when the Great Recession hit. What was that like?

SUMMERS: It was a very tense time. We would meet with the President each morning and talk about what was happening.

Summers gives himself and his team a crisis grade:

SUMMERS: While battlefield medicine’s never perfect, I think you’d have to say that the approach we chose was effective.

Summers also sort-of admits a past policy mistake.

SUMMERS: Perhaps, given what happened, you can say it was a mistake.

Summers also reveals — big surprise — that he is not a fan of the current White House.

SUMMERS: It’s the disregard for ascertainable fact and disregard for analysis of the consequences of policy actions.

That’s next time …

MACIEIRA [French]: Ca, ça viendra dans le prochain épisode …

MUSTAK [Bahasa Malaysia]: Episod seterusnya dalam Radio Freakonomics.

SCHOR [Esperanto]: Tiu venas venontfoje ĉe Freakonomics Radio.

Also: look for our upcoming special episode, with producer Stephanie Tam, about modern-day Esperanto. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Greg Rosalsky, Eliza Lambert, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins, and Brian Gutierrez; we had help this week from Sam Bair. Special thanks to our intern Kent McDonald — and to the many listeners who contributed their voices, and their languages, to this episode. The music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, or via e-mail at radio@freakonomics.com.

Kim LE [Vietnamese]: Xin cảm ơn rất nhiều.

Hagit SALTZBERG [Hebrew]: תודה רבה

SILVIANA [Bahasa Indonesia]: Terima kasih.

ALJUTAILI [Arabic]: شكراً جزيلاً

MACIEIRA [Brazilian Portuguese]: Muito obrigada.

Mara DAJVSKIS [Latvian]: Liels paldies.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Lera Boroditsky, associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego.

Michael Gordin, professor of science history at Princeton University.

Brian Kernighan, computer science professor at Princeton University.

Ruth Kevess-Cohen, doctor at Cameron Medical Group.

John McWhorter, associate professor of slavic languages and linguistics at Columbia University, and host of Lexicon Valley at Slate.

Esther Schor, professor of english at Princeton University.

Shlomo Weber, director of the New Economic School.

RESOURCES

Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language by Esther Schor (Metropolitan Books, 2016).

Does Science Need a Global Language?: English and the Future of Research by Scott Montgomery and David Crystal (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

The Evolution of Language by W. Tecumseh Fitch (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants, and the Origins of Language by Dean Falk (Basic Books, 2009).

How Many Languages Do We Need?: The Economics of Linguistic Diversity by Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber (Princeton University Press, 2011).

“How Language Shapes Thought,” by Lera Boroditsky, Scientific American (2011).

“Linguistic Distance: A Quantitative Measure of the Distance Between English and Other Languages,” Barry Chiswick and Paul Miller (2004).

Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English by Michael Gordin (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

The Story of Human Language, Part 1 by  John McWhorter (Teaching Company, 2004).

“What is Universal in Event Perception? Comparing English and Indonesian Speakers,” Lera Boroditsky, Wendy Ham, and Michael Ramscar (2002).

“Why Academics Stink at Writing,” Steven Pinker, The Chronicle Review (September 26, 2014).

EXTRA

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Del Rey, 1995).

The post What Would Be the Best Universal Language? (Earth 2.0 Series) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/best-universal-language/

[symbianosgames]

Localisation 101 - How we can use language to make our games more inclusive.

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Hey Folks! This article will be putting forward the case for more localisation in games, but also how to do it on a budget. Hope you enjoy!

In the game industry, we often discuss how to deal with the various barriers to entry in games - What platforms the game is available on, complexity of controls, difficulty curves, pay models and technical requirements. Particularly in mobile, care and attention is taken to craft the perfect icons, pacing of gameplay to retain interest and pixel perfect UI button positioning to improve the player experience, as any barriers or obstructions can lose the player. One area that can severely hamper player experience that is less discussed is the integration of different languages in games. 

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Last week I released Narcissus on the App Store. Upon launch, the game featured 14 different languages, including the following:

English  French  Spanish Portuguese German Swedish Dutch Polish Italian Russian Arabic Chinese (T) Chinese (S) Japanese

I managed to get this done for my app for free and with around 2 weeks of work.

So why localise in the first place? For one, it increases your audience, but in particular it makes them feel included and accommodated for. Would you feel less inclined to play a game if you couldn't read the instructions or the narrative to give context to the actions of characters? Having to watch films such as Akira or The Illusionist without translations - whilst the mood of the setting and emotions of the characters is recognisable, so much essential information is lost without subtitles/dubbing. 

Here's an example of the complications that can occur across language barriers in the real world; I remember buying a friend a gift in Sweden as a gift for organising the trip, and I spotted a shelf of cheap bottles of vodka that looked like a bargain bucket version of a famous brand. After presenting it to him, he informed me that I'd actually purchased a one litre bottle of vinegar.

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Many people were able to explore this feeling of confusion when playing a previous game of mine, Morse. In the game, your main interactions are via a series of dots and dashes. It is possible to do, but is an awkward process of trial and error. One publisher I approached the game with even suggested the game would be too difficult to sell, as learning a language to play the game would be a too high of a barrier for audiences. Yet, when we put out games without local translations, this is what we expect a number of non-English speaking countries to do. 

So what can we do to help with this? My answer was to translate Narcissus to a bunch of different languages, but you could just stick with a couple to begin with. The first game that I localised, Flotate, I only translated to French and the game itself only needed a handful of words and this meant the festivals it was exhibited at could be enjoyed by its attendees in the local language. 

For sourcing my translations for Narcissus, the major element that enabled me to do this came from being connected with friends from countries throughout the world (From Sweden all the way to Saudi Arabia!). I would personally suggest if you can get at least 2 people for each language; one to translate and the other to check. 

There are other ways of doing this - If you have a forum or thread for your game, putting out a request for translations is an easy trick. I got Russian and German translated for Narcissus via this method. I've often seen on Steam pages threads and workshops to translate the game content. If a fan is willing to take the time to translate your game to their language, it's not a far conclusion to reach that there are others out there who wish for the same.

Even using paid sites are cheaper than you think - I initially looked into the cost of translation and for all of the text in my game 14 languages of localisation it averaged around £50. 

One to absolutely not do (Yet) is translations via automated systems E.g. Google Translate. Whilst they have fantastic capability in translating content (I used it for reading a lot of reviews in international regions), it doesn't factor in elements such as context, such as translations specifically for games or sometimes order of words. It does usually do a good job with singular words, but can make mistakes and in a commercial work that can do more bad than good. If you go down this route, try and find a local speaker to check them with (But if you have that available, why bother with the automated system?)

### The speed bumps of localisation Translating comes with its own collection of issues - One in particular is making sure you have all the words necessary for your game before you localise. I found near the back end of development on Narcissus as I added the third party features I needed extra words (settings, redeem purchase, buy ads). This was followed by the realisation I'd need to reach out to the translators and go through the same checks again for each of the new words in all 14 languages. Not having these extra translations constrained my workflow and I had to create very specific symbols to compensate and avoid the hassle. 

There's also the issue of UI layout - whilst one word may be short in one language, it can be very long in another! This can make designing menus quite difficult - Just look at the variation below!

Regarding the option of icons or symbols instead of words, there's a risk that if your icon is illegible, rather than making it universally compatible for all languages, your interface becomes incompatible with every one of them. Check your menu icon sheet with at least 5-15 people, any that bring up a number of inaccurate answers, replace with more easy to understand alternatives. 

I'll admit that translation can be near impossible with certain types of game without a budget or dedicated team, for example narrative heavy games require expert checking for context, flow and structure. But if you're building an app with just a few select words, it's worth the effort.

One of the advantages of localisation is once you've done it once, you don't need to do the bulk of it again - common phrases like "push button to start" and "level select" are common throughout many games so the most part can be reused, saving future development costs/time. 

Have your translations? Excellent. Now you need a method of putting them in your game. Even if you have the translations you need, localised fonts can be expensive and creating your own for a language you can't read is very hard! Thankfully Google has you covered: Google Noto Fonts. This is a collection of free fonts for all languages as well as variations of each for varying regional styles. This saved a huge amount of cost for the project and is well worth considering. For Narcissus, I had to manually create these as images rather than as type files/fonts, so for other software or game engines this process might be easier.

Super important tip with Arabic - If you're doing Arabic as a language for your game, you need to change the language settings under Preferences -> Type -> Choose Text Engine Options. Switch from East Asian to Middle Eastern and South Asian. This will make sure your text is added in the correct manner; since Arabic copied via the clipboard reverses when pasted (Since Arabic is read from right to left). I cannot describe the frustration for having translated the entire game to Arabic only to find all of it was written backwards (E.g. OLLEH DLROW). Do a sample piece, such as the title of your game or a quick word like Menu and test this with your translator. Games developer Rami Ismail has done some excellent documentation of sloppy translation mistakes in games; even I have some typos to go back over in Narcissus despite my efforts. Remember, an easy way to spot if your text is backwards is if the letters in the word are all disconnected (Most Arabic text flows from one letter to the next). 

**List of most spoken languages worldwide: Estimates via Ethnologue**  Chinese: 1,213 Million Spanish: 329 Million English: 328 Million Arabic: 221 Million Hindi: 182 Million

If you look at the list of the most spoken languages worldwide, English lists third in the tables. If you think about how many people excluded or have the barrier of using a non-native language to interact with your game, it's quite a lot. Even catering for Spanish alone is doubling your app accessibility.

Another thing to consider is 3 of the top 5 languages spoken have an alphabet that is completely different to the English language not only in content but also presentation. Imagine trying to not only translate a language but also decipher the text it's written in, that is a high barrier to entry for many. People might be able to figure out how to navigate your game without understanding the individual words, but the experience of not understanding how to operate an interface is never a comfortable one. 

Inevitably there was a limit to what I could do in the time constraints that I had to submit the App on time, so whilst the game is translated, the App description/storefronts were not (To avoid delays on the final release from submission issues). In future updates, I will be going back through and adding the respective translations. Another thing I'll be looking into for future releases is a method of changing the language based on region downloaded automatically, so rather than having to navigate to the main menu it'll either be instantaneous or an intial screen the pops up on the first playthrough.

For me, localising does appear to have been appreciated, with local press in various languages mentioning the benefit of translated versions in their articles. Narcissus received features on the Apple Store around the world and in turn the extra effort to translate may have influenced more prominent features in countries such as Japan, where it got a front page banner feature. Unfortunately there isn't way to determine its effect outside of comments and reviews mentioning its impact. 

An interesting factor to consider is curators of regional storefronts or press may highlight or promote games that make the extra effort to match their language. There has been an international exhibition that I've submitted games to in the past that have welcomed and even helped translate the game to multiple languages.

On a personal level, localising the game has been incredibly useful as well to my own development, learning a lot of the similarities between different languages, getting the workflow down for future projects and building a database of words for future projects.

By localising our games, we can grow the audiences of our industry even further and lower one more barrier for entry to the realm of games. As with visiting other countries and learning the local dialect, people appreciate the effort to connect and adapt. I urge you to do the same with your own games.

#localisation #language #narcissus #translation #gamedev