Word Blur

Pakusane · 2024

Editing and playtesting, German edition

The original game Word Blur has been around for a while. All players are given a random assortment of magnetic tokens, each with a single word on them. You then draw a card that asks you to describe some sort of scenario or event using only your tokens. The results are usually quite funny. It’s a lightweight party game or filler. Given the premise, a version of the game in another language should be fairly easy to produce. Right? As it turned out, however, simply translating all the components and calling it a day was not the smartest way to approach this (you don't say). English is very versatile when it comes to switching over the roles words fulfil in a given syntax structure: ‘arm’, for example, can be a noun or a verb, just like that, no modification required. A classically trained translator’s brain, however, will already be trying to figure out which of the two it is: ‘der Arm’ or ‘bewaffnen’? So, make two tokens? Or choose one? Then you also have differences in meaning based on letter case: ‘Arm’ is a noun and refers to an appendage with a hand on its end, ‘arm’ is an adjective that means poor. As if that wasn’t enough of a headache, decisions about whether to include plural forms or conjugated verb forms arose, while efforts were also undertaken to use gender-inclusive German (where grammatical gender affects the spelling of almost everything). We managed to produce a workable edition of the tokens in the end. All in all, just reimplenting the game from scratch as a German edition would have made more sense, which is pretty much what we did with the scenario cards. History, common expressions, cultural heritage all factor in to whether a question would be considered relevant. Also, the German rulebook (which neither the translator nor me ever got to see or work on) apparently ended up being none too useful.