IGAM4ER COMPETITION

TRANSLATION

IN THE DUNGEON

An RPG game based on linguistic skills

Tukumbo/Tom Durand – D3 INALCO/Sedyl

Donjons de Naheulbeuk ; image found in www.bedetheque.com

The translator, at the center of a heroic-fantasy

team

You have been chosen by your talents of translator to bring some cohesion in a heroic-fantasy team

Your mission : to infiltrate a dungeon to find the treasure

The problem : you have been misinformed ! You don't know the languages used by the members of the team. Well, you will have to learn with the help of your linguistic skills...

Image found in thehopelessgamer.blogspot.fr

The story

By coordinating all team members and using all of their abilities

Not by clicking, but by saying it

Interacting with characters, creatures, skills, weapons, space...

Creating his own inventories of nouns, verbs and other grammatical categories

Dungeon Siege game ; image found in www.baldursgateworld.fr

How to play?

I) Vocative: how to apostrophe someone

II) Imperative: how to give orders, with which verbs

III) How to express and define the object

VI) The lifes of your partners depend of your traduction!

V) The manner: skeletons resist to arrows, an axe is a good choice. But will you use a preposition or a postposition?

IV) You want the dwarf to attack a particular enemy, use adjectives. What it the canonic order?

Celtic cross ; image found in www.wikipedia.org

"Warrior dwarf, attack the skeleton sorcerer with your

axe!"

The company will have to prepare itself before to fight

In the village, you will find a blacksmith and a healer : useful to enrich your glossary !

And, of course, a pub, to make relations, maybe to find secondary missions or to hire mercenaries.

Bonus : you could hear songs of your partners or of other clients!

The universe

To test your linguistic skills: the library and the translation room

In the library, you could search grammatical words as “because” or “then” to better build your sentences

In the translation room, you will be able to work with a companion to translate some verbs and other abstract processes, like « attack », « defend », « be prudent » by using schematic illustrations Image found in lecoinducervanties.wordpress.com

Image of Morrowind found in blogs.wefrag.com

In the Village

You will move forward into a place full of horrific monsters

Besides, you will have to manage the tiredness of the compagny, the supplies or the difficulties of the ground

Each of these situations will test your knowledge : it would be better to advise the others to rest few times, not to eat like a dwarf or to climb with precaution this wall

Image of Rome 2 Total War found in gaming.stackexchange.com

Image of Warhammer quest found in ipadou.com

In the Dungeon

Benefits of the gameTRANSLATION IN THE DUNGEON can be considered as a pedagogical tool to form to linguistic methods and skills, particularly to :

The relativity of grammatical structuresThe identification by comparisonA potential object of researchA great corpus created by speakers of different mother tongues

Especially for typologists and didacticiansTRANSLATION IN THE DUNGEON is a ludic game teaching endangered languages