The second last Developer Friday! Paolo is our totally mad Italian translator, who took care of, of course, our Italian localization!
- Who are you and what did you do on "The Ball"? Hiya, folks! This is Paolo R. Giaiero, I'm a specialist of Indoeuropean and Afrasian linguistics, Sanskrit, Arabic and other middle-eastern modern and dead languages. In my spare time I play drums and practice Japanese martial arts. Recently I did the Italian translation of the awesome new cult-game Zeno Clash, of the award-winning Eufloria (a.k.a. Dyson) and of the beautiful, hand-drawn Mesoamerican action-rpg Aztaka. Now, amongst other projects, I'm the one-man-team behind the localization of The Ball (ITA) too, and I was also one of its beta testers!
- When and how did you join the team? I contacted Sjoerd De Jong soon after the UDK Demo came out. One evening, while I was mucking around the Net, I stumbled on a website that was babbling about a crazy game, namely: The Ball. "Let's find out what the heck this thingie is!" - I said to myself. I tried it and... Zap!... Love at first sight! I thought that both the design and the gameplay were really great and therefore that The Ball deserved a fine localization! So... here I am! This has been my modus operandi so far!
- How did you start out with translating? By chance I guess! I think it all started exactly on the 21st of April 2009. The day before I had seen a Zeno Clash ad on my Steam account: it looked good, and since I'm a greedy scrooge I pre-ordered it to get a discount even on a low priced game. Go figure. I enjoyed every bit of it but I thought it was also a pity that the game wasn't available in my own language. I wrote to the ACE Team guys and they entrusted me its localization. That experience has been truly amazing and I decided to go on with this path!
- What has been the most challenging thing you have done on the game? Now, seriously, I always try to be creative in my translations, whenever possible I use synonyms and circumlocutions a-plenty to avoid any repetition! Italian (like the other Romance languages, thanks to their ancient Greek and Latin heritage) has a huge lexicon to work with, and I spent a lot of time to find the best way to fit together what you are watching on the screen with what you are reading.
- What do you like the most about the game? I really think that video games are the10th Art. Nowadays independent developers are the only ones trying something new in the medium; The Ball makes no exception and it's truly a must-have. I won't spoil too much, but you'll soon find out that The Ball is a kinda character on its own, and it does much more than simply rolling on the floor. People who enjoyed Portal and the Companion Cube will know what I mean.