Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #645: Languages

Episode Date: June 14, 2019

Magic is printed in eleven languages. In this podcast, I talk about how that came to be and how making a game printed in so many languages impacts game design.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. And I had a mail package from my daughter at college. Okay, so today's topic was something recommended for my blog. I'm going to talk about the languages of magic. So magic is printed in many different languages. And I'm going to talk all about it. Now the interesting challenge of today's podcast is,

well I definitely know more than most of you know about us printing in other languages. Now, the interesting challenge of today's podcast is, well, I definitely know more than most of you know about us printing in other languages. It is not my area of expertise, so we're going to see if I can get a whole podcast out of that. I think I can, but we'll see. Obviously, if you guys are hearing this, then I did, but so whenever I attempt this, I don't know whether it'll fail or not, but if you guys are hearing it, it means I didn't fail. So hopefully you're hearing this because I would like to have this. It's a good topic.

Okay, so let's start with a trivia question, which is, how many languages is Magic the Gathering printed in currently? And the answer, I'll give you a second to answer. Okay, the answer is 11. 11 languages. Can you name all 11 languages? Well, I will. Obviously, it's printed in English. That's the easy one. It's printed in Chinese, but two different versions of Chinese. Chinese simplified and Chinese traditional. I don't know a lot about Chinese, but it's just there's different ways that you can write the language. French, German, Italian, Japanese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. So those are the 11 languages.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about the history of us getting into other languages and explain some stories about how we make cards in other languages and just generally talk about what it's like to make a product that's made in so many different languages. Okay, so let's start with the history of other languages. Okay, so go way back to 1993. The game starts. It is printed in English. So the original Magic Alpha, you know, limited edition, only exists in English. So if you remember the story of Magic is, when it first starts, it's mostly on the West Coast.

Wizards of the Coast is based on the West Coast, and Peter does, Peter Atkinson, the original CEO of Wizards, does a drive up and down the West Coast to sort of sell the product. And most of the early part of Magic was sold on the West Coast. But very quickly, it becomes this popular thing, it makes a splash at Gen Con and quickly spreads from West Coast to East Coast. It spreads across the country.

Well, it's not long that it starts spreading beyond that. Now, the tricky thing, so the way that magic works is, at least at the time, was we had one printer. The printer was in Belgium and we printed in English but other countries came to us, and they were

interested in also producing magic. Now, there are a couple challenges to other countries. One was, we needed distribution in those countries. You know, most of the people we dealt with were American distributors, and so they didn't have any reach in any country outside of America. So it required us to deal with some other distributors and such. And so it required us. So really what we did in the early days is we had to find a company to work with. And we would find a company native to that country, someone who could distribute the product. And a secondary that meant that, look, if we wanted to be in other countries, well, not all those other countries spoke English

we needed to start printing magic into other languages so at the time Wizards had a department called International run by a man named John Jordan for those that want really obscure trivia and the idea was that they were trying to expand magic. And expanding magic, you know, obviously meant having to go into other languages. But the idea was, well, how many languages do we need to be in?

So the first person that we struck a deal with was Italy. It was a distributor in Italy. I don't know all the names of the distributors. So I'm just going to talk about the countries and languages. I apologize. Like I said, this is not my area of expertise, so I don't have all the names necessarily. But the first person we dealt with was

a distributor in Italy. They had seen the game. I'm not sure whether they had come to Gen Con or whether they had seen it at Essen. Essen's the biggest game convention in Europe. Yeah, a game convention in Europe. Yeah, a game convention.

And so they wanted to print. So also we got early bites from France and from Germany. Germany, for those who don't know, is the home of Essen. Germany per capita, like, game playing is just really, really big in Germany. Game playing in Germany is kind of like the movies in the U.S., which is like, everybody plays games. It's just very much part of the culture. If you're aware of board games, how there's a lot of German board games, it's just because there's a very robust board game market in Germany.

And so there's just a lot of games made for the German market, many of which now have come over to the U.S. market. But anyway, the earliest bytes, the very first byte we got was Italian, and then shortly thereafter we got French and German. So I think the first thing to come out in other languages, I believe, was revised. So if you guys remember, it was limited edition, that's alpha and beta, then unlimited edition, that was alpha and beta, then unlimited edition, that was alpha and beta but in white border rather than black border, and then revised

was third edition. So the French, German, and Italian were the three languages that showed up in revised. And then Italian went back and they, Italy was the first place. Italian was the first place where we printed the first Magic expansions. Not a core set, but the first Magic expansions ever printed in Italian. I'm sorry, ever printed, but printed in Italian. The Dark, I think, got released first. And then Legends got released. So Legends exists in English and Italian.

That's the dark. Those are the only two languages those are in. Once you get to Revised, then you get English, French, German, and Italian. So we'll get there in a second. So the interesting thing about... Because Italy was really pumped to get Magic in it. And so they actually went backwards.

Revised came up, and then they went back, and they printed The Dark, and then went back, I believe, and printed... And then they printed Legends. Legends came out after The Dark, I believe, in Italian. The other thing to mention is, this was not... These products early on did not come out at the same time.

Now, whenever we print something, even if it's another language, it comes out all at the same time. We have one worldwide release date. At the time, that wasn't true. So when I say revised was in French, German, and Italian, it was put out at different times. It wasn't as if there was one release in all three languages. Each language is the first thing they put out, but they were staggered. Like I said, I think Italian came out first. I'm not sure between French and German, which it came out second. One of them came out second. The

other one came out third. And Italian, because it got the jump, also ended up being in the dark and ended up being in Legends. The interesting thing in the U.S. market is Italian Legends came out a bit later. And Legends at the time, for those that know the history, Legends came and went super fast. The story I always tell is I was into Magic at the time. I went to the store where I bought my Magic. I waited in line in the morning for it to open. I bought, I think I bought two boxes of legends, then went home, opened them up, then went right back to the store and bought a third box of legends, opened it up, then went back to the store again and bought a fourth box of legends, which I think I didn't open up. I saved. And I believe that the store owner, the person I dealt with, had gotten really, really into Magic.

And he bought so much that it actually lasted for a couple days. There's actually a very funny, there's a post that I made on the Usenet way back when, when the store owner, he really believed in Magic and bought a lot. But he bought enough that his local store had not bought all his legends. And so I actually posted a post on the youth net, the early version of the internet, basically, and said, hey, if you're looking for legends and you can't find any, I have a store that will sell them to you.

And I gave them information. Anyway, you can still find that. Someone dug that up not too long ago. It was on Reddit. Anyway, so Italian came out, then French and German came out. Once Ice Age came out, Ice Age added Portuguese and Spanish. Now, once again, we're still saying mostly in Europe. Remember, we were printing the cards in Belgium at Carta Mundi.

And so it wasn't hard to get the cards to Europe. They were actually printed in Europe. So we were able to then get them. I believe still all the early printing was still done at Carta Mundi. But once we had other languages, that added another wrinkle into the mix, which is we needed to get translation. So in the early days, I think the way it worked originally was we would deal with a company that would be the distributor for that market.

And then I think in the early days, the distributors provided the translators, I think is how it worked. We later brought them in-house, and now they worked for Wizards. Like, there was a period where they didn't work for Wizards, they worked for the company that printed the cards in their language. But now we take care of all the languages, so that got brought in-house many years ago. So, well, let me finish walking through the history of the release of languages, and then I'll talk about how do we make a card into the languages. I'll get to that.

Okay. So revised at French, German, Italian, Ice Age had French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Uh, fourth edition is when we added in, um, Chinese, traditional Korean and Japanese, I believe. traditional Korean and Japanese, I believe. So we tend to like introducing new languages in the core set because we needed an introductory product. Oh, I forgot.

Let me finish this thought. I'll get back. We like starting in a core set because we want an introductory product to get people into the game. And we felt like a core set was the best way to do that. So we tend to introduce, we tend to introduce new languages in the core set.

For example, revised, I mean, sorry, French, German, Italian get introduced in revised, third edition. Chinese, traditional, and Korean and Japanese. Oh, Portuguese and Spanish

were unique and they got introduced in Ice Age, which I think that's the only languages that weren't introduced in a core set. Fourth edition introduced Japanese, Chinese traditional and Korean. Fifth edition introduced Chinese simplified. And ninth edition introduced Russian.

So Russian was actually the last language of the current languages to be added. And that got added in 9th edition. In fact, the interesting thing about that was that there was not a lot of 9th edition made in Russian. And so that is actually, 9th edition Russian cards are actually pretty rare. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about what it takes to print in other languages. And there's two major issues at hand. One is the translation and one is the printing. So we'll talk about each of those things.

Okay, so R&D will work on a set. We'll get it designed. We'll go through vision design, set design, play design. And eventually, the last thing that R&D does when it touches it is the editing. So editing needs to make a finalized card list so that they can pass it along to our graphics department to start making the cards, to start laying out the cards. But as soon as editing hands off the cards,

it needs to go to editing. I'm sorry, as soon as editing hands off the cards, it needs to go to the translators because there's work to be done. They have to translate into another language. And the way it works is we provide a lot of information. Part of editing's job is there's a bunch of things that need to get provided

for editing to do their job. Some of which are pretty straightforward. The car text and rules text and stuff. But some things are a little more subtle. There's some presentation stuff that gets explained. For example, all the characters have to be gendered

or explain what their gender is because in some of the romantic languages, for example, the language would vary whether or not a character is male or female, for example. So for all the legendary characters, what editing's job is to make sure that each thing

gets explained. There's a bunch of things that when you translate, you have to understand. And then the way it works is, you know, we will give the files to the translators. The translators will have a certain amount of time to look over them. If they have questions, they can ask questions. Usually each translator has, there's a translation department that funnels all this. But each set, each language essentially has its own translator. Some languages I think that are big enough might have more than one

translator, or some might rotate between translators, so different translators are working on different sets. I don't know how long it takes to translate a normal-sized Magic set, but it can take a while. And part of it to remember is that in English we spend a lot of time on the templating. And so the translations

not only have to worry about what things are called because they have to also figure out how the templating will work in their language. And the reason templ template is important is there's a lot of functional, like how the cards work depends a lot on it. For international play, for competitive international play,

all cards are, by the rules, work as they're printed in English. Just so there's, the thing we didn't want is, oh, well, I better get this language version of it because it's slightly different in its wording and that lets me use the cards slightly differently. So in competitive play,

all cards match the functionality of their English version. But anyway, there's a lot that goes into... You have to translate names, you have to translate flavor text, you have to translate rules text. There's a lot that goes into you have to translate names you have to translate flavor text you have to translate rules text um there's a lot that goes into it some um some translators will it's interesting um one of the things that we have said to them with with flavor text is they have some ability to be flexible flavor text um sometimes depending on the set and how important like the flavor text. Sometimes, depending on the set and how important, like the flavor text

is story related. They tend to keep those. But sometimes we make things that are more open-ended. And the translators have the right, if they feel their market wouldn't understand the reference because it's something that's more sometimes they will change it up a little bit. I do know back

in the day when we printed Corset cards that had quotes from officials from real public domain sources. Sometimes other languages would swap it in for books from native in their own language. We would quote Shakespeare and they would quote somebody from an author that was native in the language they were translating to. Now, most sets nowadays get translated, but not everything gets translated to every language.

Certain markets are just bigger. And so, like I said, there's two parts about language. So one is translation. So we have to work with them to make sure that they are translated. Another problem, by the way, is a few problems that translation runs into. One of the biggest problems is that English is a very robust language, meaning that there are a lot of synonyms, and other languages sometimes aren't quite as robust.

The biggest problem we've run into has to do with the dead. English happens to have a lot of words for a thing that is dead or undead. Other languages, some of them have much fewer. And so, you know, when we start saying, oh, it's a lich, it's a zombie, it's a ghoul, you know, there's a lot of different ways to describe something. Some of the other languages have trouble of, they have less words to play around with, but they still have the issue of trying not to repeat names. And a common problem that'll run in is, A, either they'll want to name something, but the obvious name is a name they've used on a different card, or they want to name something,

but the concept that, you know, the nuance of the word we're using isn't something in that language, and so it requires a little, you know, one of the things that's fun is if you take language, if you take some of the cards and take what they're translating and then translate them back, you know, there was

a joke for a while that one of the ways we can make new magic cards was translate them to other languages, then translate them back. Like one of the classics was Millstone in Italian translated to Magic Stone Machine, which we thought was an awesome name. We always joked about making a Magic card called Magic Stone Machine. Anyway, so there's a lot of... Translation is a very complex thing. I've never done the translation. And I, once again, this is one of those topics where I know more secondhand.

But one of the real challenges of making the product is that there is, magic is not necessarily the easiest thing to translate, especially with the templating. We tend to get translators that play magic. I think in the early days, we had some translators that didn't play magic, and that resulted in some weird translations. And so I think our translators all play magic now. I know back in the day, there were some classic examples

where some of our translators were so strong that they would give notes sometimes. And that we would correct things in English because we're like, oh, that's a really good point. Yeah, let's clarify that. And we would change stuff. And this is long, long ago. But anyway, so the other issue has to do with a production issue, which is when we choose to make something, there's a financial decision to be made, which is what is the smallest number of cards we can print that the product becomes viable to sell.

And with the large set, we print a lot of cards in the Magic's main expansion, so all of those really can get, you know, usually can get translated to all the languages. But you start getting to supplemental sets and things that are a bit smaller, and some of those just don't financially make sense to print in more than,

well, to print in all the languages. So, for example, if the whole print runs of a certain size, we know the percentage that each language is. Some languages literally just can't support it. It's not financially viable to print in that small a number. The other thing is we have some rules about how many of a particular card exists.

We don't want any one unique card being too rare from a collector standpoint. And there are some languages where the rate at which they print in would be too little. I know this problem pops up sometimes for premium, promotional, and alternate versions of cards where the main set gets printed in high enough rarity that it's okay, but if we start doing something that gets printed in a low percentage within enough rarity that it's okay, but if we start doing something that gets printed in a low percentage within that rarity, it's not.

So some of the times, some languages, the premium cards, for example, aren't in their native language but are in English. Because if we print it in the right percentages in that language, it just wouldn't be enough cards. It would be, it's not cost-effective to print, and it causes rarity issues with the cards. There's just not enough of the card out there. So we have to be very careful of that. And so one of the big things, like, there was a big list online.

I didn't copy it all down. But if you go and look, it's interesting to see that what languages, different things can vary quite a bit. Even today, there are some products, for example, Unstable and the Unsets have only ever printed in English. There's a lot of wordplay. There's a lot of things that get kind of tricky to put into other languages. So that product is printed in English. to put into other languages. So that product is printed in English.

Where we have other products, like sometimes we have products that are printed just in, you know, English and French and German and Italian and Japanese. You know, it depends on where things are. The other interesting thing about languages is once we print it in a language, any other country that has that language is

free to use it. In fact, for example, Portuguese, the country in which the most Portuguese cards are sold is not Portugal, but Brazil, for example. You know, South America mostly is Spanish and Portuguese cards. And so that's a big portion of the Spanish and Portuguese cards are And so that's a big portion of the Spanish and Portuguese cards are sold in South America. Now, there's been discussions

about one of the questions of how do you decide when a new language gets printed has a lot to do with demand. How many cards can we sell? How many cards can we print? And is that enough that it can be

self-sufficient in that, is it a big enough print run? And we keep talking about other languages to go into. Part of it has to do with density and stuff, and part of it has to do with just other factors. But it is something we keep looking at.

Like I said, we've not added a new language since Russian, and that was a while ago. So we do not add new languages all that often now. Okay, so let me ask another trivia question. Okay, how many different languages have Magic Cards been printed in? Now, I told you that we normally print in 11 languages. So the little trick here is, so the correct answer is 16. And the answer is, for a while, for pre-releases, we printed them in other languages.

So, for example, we printed in Latin, in Classic Greek, in Sanskrit, in Arabic, and in Hebrew. So for pre-release cards, we've done different things at different times and one of the gimmicks for a little while was printing them in other languages and we printed them in languages that Magic had never been printed in so there are, those five languages have all Magic cards, they're a promo card but have a card

then the other tricky one is how many Magic cards have been printed in a language or how many different languages have magic cards have been printed in the language, um, or how many different languages have a magic card been printed in? Uh, and that gets one extra one, 17, uh, technically. Uh, there's a card in, um, on the hinge called Adinle Igpe, um, and that is Ladin Pig in Latin, in Pigladin. The card makes you talk in Pigladin. And so the name was written in Pigladin.

In fact, I think the whole card might be right. I think the whole card is written in Pigladin. I'm not sure how you want to call Pigladin as a language, but it is technically a language, sort of. I mean, it's a variant of English, I guess. So, like I said, there is talk about, I mean, from time to time comes up the idea of another language, but it really requires us getting a new market, and like I said, that doesn't happen often. There have been a few languages, like I know Korean, we started and stopped a couple times.

Like, we started printing in Korean, then for a while we stopped printing in Korean. And I think Korean is one of those languages, I think Korean has the smallest print run, I think, of languages we do. And that is one of the sets that, for example, for a while, Korean only printed large sets, it didn't print small sets.

I'm not quite sure how the Korean's done right now, but, you know, it really, what languages we handle, there's a lot of, it depends a lot on the individual market, and so on a case-by-case study, depending on what the set is, will vary on the languages. Another issue that's popped up in translation is translation errors. There's a market that really enjoys collecting what we call misprints. And translation errors are considered

a translation... Sorry, are considered a misprint. Now, there are a bunch of different translation issues that we've seen. The most common is where the translation was just a little bit off in the rules text. And so the card, as printed in its native language, roughly works different than it does.

There's been, I would actually put it into two camps. There is just translation, you know, issues where it's the person who translated was missing some nuance of something and so the card as written doesn't quite work. And then there's more traditional misprints where look, we had to print the card again because we're printing in another language, requires reprinting it, the art was wrong

or the power of toughness was wrong or some, as we transition the card over to change it, it just got changed over wrong and so some part of the card like to change it, it just got changed over wrong, and so some part of the card... Like, one of the classic misprints was there's a drudge skeleton. They got printed with the art of a swamp.

And there's been a bunch like that. In fact, a few of the misprints where the art is wrong, they're discouraged from playing them because people can misread them as being a different card than they are also sometimes the translations each of the names is supposed to be unique meaning in English for example we never name a card the same name as another card with the same name

that has been broken a few times in languages where not the same person had done the translation. And as magic has advanced, look, there's a lot of card names where somebody will name something not aware that, oh, wait, in this language many, many years ago, the card got made. Now, they now have some databases and stuff to check against that. So that doesn't happen very often these days, but it did happen in the past. Let's see. I'm almost at work.

Any other sort of comments on languages? Oh, from a design standpoint, it doesn't really impact us too much. We just sort of design the cards in English. The one thing that we are aware of is when we reprint cards, there's stuff like if we're going to reprint a card and we're going to give it new art, we got to be careful, for example, of the gender of the card because certain languages, when they give it a name, if it's a male or female, might affect the word they use for the name. And so if we change the art on it, we need to be conscious of what that is so that the cards aren't wrong

in the translation. The other thing that's been very interesting is when we started printing in other languages, the idea behind it was so we could sell magic in other countries. One of the side effects is it turned out that there's actually a lot of interest in

other language cards. For example, American primarily speaks English, but there was a lot of interest in other language cards in America. Some of it was collectability, just, oh, it's cool, it's another language. The Japanese cards, for example, were very popular in the English market just because they look very, very different from normal cards. And both Chinese and Japanese and Korean, because they're not romantic languages, they don't use the same letters,

just look very different. They use symbols. The language is based on symbols, so it just looks very different. Also, I know that there are a lot of clubs, for example, Spanish clubs or French clubs, people who are learning another language and they like to get the card so they can sort of play magic and use that as a means to help learn the language they're playing in. And so I know there's a bunch of those.

of those. And also, English cards are quite popular. Because the wording of all high-level play is based on the English wording, a lot of players in certain countries will try to play with the English cards so they get familiar with the English cards. So I know some of the top, you know, in every country where the top players like to play with English cards, it's become a thing. But anyway, it's been fun to see and watch, you know, I mean, one of the things that's really, like, I talk to people all the time about magic, and especially when I'm introducing magic with someone who doesn't know it. Like, you know, what do you do for a living?

I make magic. Well, what's that? One of the things I always tell them very early on is how many languages are printed in, because that seems to be a nice shorthand way of talking about the global reach of the game. When you make a game that's printed in 11 languages, that really says, hey, this is a

global game. That is really cool. Over the years, I've collected myself. I try to collect all the Maros and all the various languages that it's been printed in. And there's been various Maros. So I think Maro's been printed in almost every language I've stated today. I think if 9th edition had Maro, then it's in Russian.

I think 9th edition, I think it had Maro. I think off the top of my head. Anyway, so that, my friends, is everything I can think to say about all the other languages we have printed in. I hope that was interesting. Like I said, the challenge here was this is not my area of expertise. So I hope you're happy. I hope I got my 30 minutes. Yeah, I got 30 minutes in.

So that, my friends, is all the stuff I know about all the languages we're printed in. I hope this was interesting to you. And I'm now parked. So we know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.