If everything works out, the update with the German translation of Monster Girl Therapy will be released on July 20th—just about a week from today! =)
And since translation is a COMPLEX art riddled with fascinating little rabbit holes, today’s blog post is going to be a bit more unstructured than usual.
A long list of names for monster girls, places, and concepts, mixed with random thoughts and anecdotes about translation, as well as brand-new German insults
May contain character spoilers here and there! Also, none of this is final.
I’m a huge fan of free translations (and even localizations, if they make sense!), and this game has practically no direct ties to English-speaking cultures anyway. So there’s no reason to cling to the “original”—a free translation it is!
My names follow one simple rule: anything linguistically inspired by other cultures (like “Equitania Equinox” or “S’Sinbal”), as well as anything that works well in German (like the “Madame”), stays the same. Everything else gets Germanized!
Shaliva becomes “Sabbrine,” a portmanteau of “sabbern” (salivate) and the girl-next-door-name Sabrina. My alternative was “Aschlick,” (from “Schlick”/”slick” and Ashley) but someone kindly pointed out that it has a very… uh… ANAL ring to it, even in English! Which genuinely hadn’t occurred to me?! Other ideas included “Schelima” (“Schleim”/”slime”, but it sounds vaguely Arabic), “Speileen” (“speien” means barfing, which is just too much!), or “Speichelle” (“Speichel” is literally saliva, but it also means “spoke,” so this could honestly be a fine bicycle girl).
The metropolis of “Sliwhelbud” is now “Kriechlingen” (from “crawl” or “creep”), which has this cutesy hyper-German feel while still capturing the right vibe.
Shaliva loves to say “bro,” and finding German equivalents turned out to be surprisingly tricky! “Alter”, “Dicker”, “Lan” (variations in the vein of “dude” or “mate”), as well as the brothers “Bruder” and “Brudi” all carry their own baggage—sometimes regional, sometimes cultural (especially with ties to migration), sometimes they’re just… too different! And using “bro” outright sounds VERY American. In the end I took a step back and simply dropped it in most places. Sometimes the more neutral “Mann!” (“man”, duh!) still works, and every now and then an “Alter, Mann!” fits the bill after all.
Cat was a PROBLEM. Calling someone “Katze” just doesn’t work as a nickname in German, and I really didn’t want to go with things like “Minki” (think “Mittens”), or even worse, “Muschi” (“pussy” … but also an old-timey name for a cat!). So I focused on the fact that the protagonist has zero respect for Cat’s many names. In German, he just says “Die da”, short for “Die da Flüstert” (literally “That one”, but the full name instead invokes “The One Who Whispers”)! Does it sound great? Oh no, it sounds AWFUL—but somehow that’s exactly what makes it work, because it perfectly reflects his attitude. The other names are less tied into dialogue, so I had a lot more fun with them: “Schließt-den-Schleier” (“Closes-the-Veil”), “Der letzte Bruder” (“The Last Brother”, incidentally playing around with gender a bit!) and of course “Katze, die den Nebel sieht” (“The Cat Who Sees the Mist”)!
“The Eldest” becomes “Die Älteste” in the feminine, which introduces a nice bit of gender trouble as well… or rather, a more fixed gender, because German simply doesn’t offer an elegant equivalent for the wonderfully practical “they.” (There are plenty of neopronouns, but none of those are even close to reaching the mainstream. Either way, they would’ve been a pretty bold choice for a subversive game that doesn’t want to repel more conservative players.)
The “Grove of the Bygone” becomes the “Ahnenhain” (“Ancestral Grove”), even if it doesn’t quite carry the same poetic vibe. I think for a brief moment, I felt the pain that translators of D&D and Magic: The Gathering probably experience every single day.
The “Brass-Plated Polis” is a reference to the mythological City of Brass, but I also wanted to preserve that slightly Greeky-Romany colonial vibe that’s woven into Equitania’s part. So in German, it’s “Die Polis der Tausend Messingkuppeln” (“The Polis of a Thousand Brass Domes”), which nicely shows how adding one extra word can open up a surprising amount of creative space.
S’Sinbal bears the title “of the Tangled Knots,” which refers both to her labyrinth and to her rather neurodivergent personality. In German, she becomes the “Zelotin der Zwirbelwege” (“Zealot of the Twisting Paths”), even though there’s absolutely nothing in the English version that hints at her being a zealot. To be honest, the alliteration was what came first here—but then again, it’s not like “zealot” really contradicts anything either. Is our snake girl religious? Nope. But her civilization is heavily themed around religion, and the title could just as easily describe her role in the game rather than her personality.
Lash is an interesting case, and first I want to state just HOW much I’ve come to love her English name! It packs several fitting meanings into one word (“lash” as in a whip, as in “lashing out”, and as in “eyelashes”—perfect for a succubus!), while also sounding punchy, aggressive, and memorable. That is almost impossible to recreate, so I made a fairly radical decision: Lash the Loveless is now “die Gierige Geißel” (“The Greedy Scourge”), which completely changes the first impression! The whip association is still there, but instead of sounding punchy and aggressive, she now feels much more like a grumpy old witch. (Gerda! Gisela! Or, of course, Gundel Gaukelei, the German version of Magica De Spell, whose fascinating translation history almost mirrors this one—which was NOT intentional.) Throughout the game, the protagonist occasionally calls her “Frau Geißel” (“Mrs. Scourge”), as if he was apologizing to a terrifying old schoolteacher. It’s a completely different vibe, but honestly, I think it fits surprisingly well!
Speech quirks matter, and not all of them can be translated directly. Almost the entire cast tends to use the conversational past tense (think present perfect, but different) because Monster Girl Therapy is just a very casual game, linguistically. Cat is the exception: I deliberately gave her a more literary past tense (think simple past, but different) to emphasize her distance from what’s considered “normal”. Shaliva drops letters off her verbs (think “I’m goin’ home” instead of “I’m going home”), and at a specific point, the Madame switches from an old-fashioned fantasy-style form of address to a much more personal one. She was actually the most fun to translate! Lash’s insults are now more weirdly inventive than in English (“Peniskopf!”/”penis-head!”), because German just sounds awkwardly vulgar if you stick to straightforward insults like “Arschloch”/”asshole” or “”Wichskopf”/”Goonhead.” And PLEASE don’t ask what I did with S’Sinbal… except that she uses a ton of Anglicisms, because honestly, her whole way of speaking is INCREDIBLY English, or rather, American. I really hope she still lands the same way.
Tiny little words like “well,” “yep,” “hm,” “tch,” “alright,” “nice,” and even the plain old “yes” are THE DEVIL. German tends to simply leave a lot of them out, but good grief…
I could go on for pages about individual jokes and puns that demanded more or less creative solutions (foxy! bug! portcullis! Basically every other sentence Shaliva says!), but I’d rather let you discover those for yourselves. I’ve teased quite a few of them over on my Discord as well, in case anyone’s interested in smaller updates and chatting directly. Here’s the link! =]
And now, a few more insults for Lash that may or may not have made it into the game: Inkontinente Weißwurst. (Incontinent Weißwurst.) Spuckspachtel. (Spit-spatula.) Schamloser Hodengriff. (Shameless crotch-grabber.) Lechzgeiler Gesichtslauch! (Horny leek-face!)
To wrap things up, here’s a bit of translation advice that I have to remind myself of every now and then: especially in weeb circles, “superfans” love to complain—at length—about every tiny detail of a translation. But at least in a free translation, the main goal is NOT to make every term resemble the old one as closely as possible. The real question is whether the translated text works as a whole in its new language, while still fitting the original medium well enough.
With that in mind, I really hope the “Monstermädchentherapie” works just as well in German. The title of the game, however, is staying exactly the same! :D