Something annoying about videogames
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Vlambeer's Rami Ismail speaks on language in videogames, and the way Arabic is commonly misportrayed in the medium.
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Something annoying about videogames
- 2. step ٠
- 3. i want to show you something annoying
- 5. step ١
- 7. الم mla
- 8. ب b
- 9. با ?
- 10. با b a
- 11. با با
- 12. با the sound of a sheep
- 13. بابا a baby might say this
- 16. ت t
- 18. تاب ?
- 19. تاب a key on your keyboard
- 20. ث th
- 21. بات what was this again?
- 22. باث shower
- 23. ن n
- 24. ان name
- 25. ناثان name
- 26. و w, uu, o
- 28. بوب name
- 30. بوتان C4H10
- 31. ف f
- 32. فان ?
- 33. فونا ?
- 34. فوتو ?
- 35. د d
- 37. ر r
- 38. دور ???
- 39. درافت air
- 41. م m
- 42. ـمــمممـ m m m m
- 43. مدام milady
- 44. دراما tv-show
- 45. فلم medium
- 46. موم ?
- 47. ق q
- 48. ـكـكـككـ k
- 50. بالنك white
- 53. رامي ?
- 55. step ٢
- 56. باب •••, door
- 57. باب b’ab, door
- 61. قلم ***, pen
- 62. بيت ***, house
- 66. step ٣
- 70. قندف q d n f
- 71. فندق f n d q
- 73. …
- 74. !!! ١٠٠مليون
- 76. فاكدات
Editor's Notes
- Step 0.
- There’s something annoying about videogames that I want to talk about.
- But to get there, I’ll have to teach you something new. To be precise, I’ll have to teach you some Arabic. So sit back and let’s do this.
- Step 1.
- This group of characters spells alef-lam-meem, or A-L-M, a combination of letters without known meaning that is used frequently at the start of Quranic verses. Nobody knows what they mean.
- Here are the glyphs again, with the correct letter under the correct Arabic glyph.
- This is the bā’, the second letter of the alphabet after the aleph. It’s pronounced like a shorter version of the English letter ‘b’.
- So what does this say in English letters?
- If you guessed ‘A B’, you got the letters right: these are indeed the characters aleph and bā’. The correct response, however, is ‘B A’. Arabic is read from right-to-left, instead of left-to-right. In this presentation, all Arabic will be written from right-to-left, while the English translations will be from left-to-right. Therefore, these Arabic glyphs read ‘ba’.
- Another thing: Arabic is a cursive script. That means the characters in a word are connected. There are some exceptions to this, which I’ll mention later, but for now, let’s agree that the top glyphs say ‘b a’, while the bottom one says ‘ba’.
- We’re going to try and teach you some characters by using Arabic glyphs to write English words. As an example, this is the sound a sheep makes: ‘ba’.
- Can you pronounce this?
- ‘Baba’ was the correct answer. How about this one?
- If you said ‘Abba’, you got it right. How about this one? Note that the ‘aleph’ isn’t connected to the ‘Lam’ character after it. That’s because the ‘aleph’ cannot be connected to the character after it.
- ‘Ball’ was the correct answer. Let’s introduce a new character. This is the tā’, pronounced as ’t’.
- Let’s try some more words.
- The correct answer was ‘Pat’. How about this one?
- Here’s a hint in case you need it.
- The correct answer was ‘Tab’. Let’s try adding yet another character. This is the thā’, pronounced as ‘th’ in the word ‘the’.
- Do you remember this word from before?
- So what if we replace the ’t’ with a ‘th’?
- We get ‘Bath’. Let’s introduce another letter. This is the nūn, pronounced ’n’. Note that it looks a lot like the ‘b’, but the dot is above the shape, rather than beneath it.
- What’s this name, then?
- ‘Ann’, indeed. How about this one?
- If you said ‘Nathan’, congrats. That was a rough one. Let’s introduce a rough character. This is the wāw, and it’s pronounced as either ‘w’, a long ‘u’ sound, or the letter ‘o’. It’s pretty versatile.
- So what’s this word, then? Remember, dot above is ’n’, dot below is ‘b’.
- That was ‘bon’! Now how about this name?
- That was ‘Bob’. What organisation is this?
- That was ‘NATO’. How about this element?
- ‘Butane’ was the correct answer. Let’s introduce the fā’, pronounced as a ‘f’.
- What’s this word, then?
- That was ‘fan’. And this word?
- ‘Fauna’. This one then?
- ‘Photo’. Let’s introduce a new character again. This is the dāl, pronounced ‘d’. Let’s try some words.
- What famous sci-fi book is this?
- ‘Dune’ was the right answer. This is the rā’, and it’s pronounced as ‘r’. It’s very similar in shape to the previous character, the dāl, but the rā’ extends underneath the baseline, while the dāl does not.
- Let’s see if you can figure out this word, then.
- ‘Door’ would be correct. How about this slightly harder word?
- If you had ‘draft’, that’s very impressive. How about this “word”?
- ‘Dudebro’ was the correct word there. Let’s introduce a new character. This is the mīm, pronounced as ‘m’. We saw it back at the start of the presentation, in aleph-lam-meem. There’s something special about this character, though.
- These are all the different shapes the mīm can have. From left to right, it’s the mīm written separately, connected only forward (ie. the start of a word), connected both ways (ie. the middle of a word) and connected only to the previous character (ie. the end of a word). Some Arabic characters can vary wildly in shape depending on whether they’re connected to other characters. These glyphs are all the letter mīm, and they’re all pronounced ‘m’.
- In other words, the first and last character in this word are the mīm. What other word for ‘milady’ is written here?
- That was the word ‘madam’. How about this word?
- ‘Drama’. This one is slightly hard. Remember, the ‘aleph’ cannot be connected forward, so the second letter in this word is not the ‘aleph’.
- That was ‘f-l-m’, or film. Rough one, wasn’t it? How about this word?
- ‘Mom’. Let’s introduce the qāf, pronounced ‘q’. There’s another character in the alphabet that’s really similar.
- That similar character is the kāf, pronounced ‘k’. These are the shapes of the kāf, from left to right separate, start of word, middle of word and end of word.
- What’s this word then?
- ‘K-l-k’, click. How about this word? The second character is sort of cheating, it’s how you write a subsequent ‘lam’ and ‘aleph’. That لا glyph is literally called ‘lam-aleph’.
- ‘Blank’. This is the letter yā’. It’s pronounced as y, i or ay. Note how it’s similar in shape to the tā’, but the dots are underneath instead of above.
- Which European city is this, then?
- ‘Madrid’. What does this word say?
- That was my name, ‘Rami’! OK, let’s take a quick break. This is the entire Arabic alphabet, with the letter you now know in green. That didn’t take too long to learn half of the alphabet, did it? Well done.
- Let’s move on to step 2. Even though I’ve taught you characters, you haven’t actually read a single Arabic word yet. Except for ‘drama’, that’s actually the Arabic word for ‘drama’, too. In this part of the presentation, I’ll give you an Arabic word and the English translation, and your challenge is to pronounce the word.
- How would you pronounce the Arabic word for door?
- “B’ab” is door.
- How about this word, for ‘my mother’?
- “Am’y” is my mother.
- To change possession of a word, we change the suffix of the word. This is the same word as before, but now it’s “your mother” instead of mine.
- “am’k” was the correct pronounciation. How about this word, for pen?
- ‘Qlm’. That’s some pretty ‘chique’ Arabic. As an Egyptian, I’d say something closer to ‘Alam’. There are an enormous number of dialects of Arabic. How about this word for house, then?
- “bi’t” is house.
- Let’s try this four-letter word for hotel.
- “Fnd’q” is the correct answer. It means hotel in Arabic.
- Let’s move on to step three. Let’s see an image from a popular video game, and tell me what it says in Arabic.
- There we go. What does the building say?
- It’s all wrong! First of all, the letters are disconnected. They are the characters ‘q, d, n, f’. Maybe we should try and connect them.
- Qdnf, sadly, doesn’t really mean anything in this context. Did they really just put gibberish on a giant set piece in a video game?
- Let’s look again. Q, d, n, f. Do you see the problem yet?
- It’s written left-to-right! If we reverse the order of the characters, we get f, n, d, q.
- “fnd’q”, the word we learned before, which means hotel!
- …
- Here’s a game that reportedly spent the above budget on making sure that you can shoot Arabs in the face in hyper-realistic fashion, but they couldn’t bother to spend some time and money on making sure to get the language right. One hundred million dollars to make sure you can kill my people, and nobody took the effort to make sure the text on this enormous set piece was right.
- It took me at worst thirty minutes to show you how wrong the text right there was. This isn’t just a translation error, it is gross disrespect towards an entire culture to spend tens of millions of dollars but not have the courtesy to have someone review the writing. And this game isn’t a lone example - pretty much every single game with Arabic in it gets the writing order or the cursive script wrong. That’s not even mentioning the terrible voice acting, or the fact that pretty much any non-Latin alphabet gets this treatment.
- Thanks for learning a bit of Arabic with me. If you liked this presentation, please do follow me at @tha_rami on Twitter.