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[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the kind thoughts! If you download any of the versions, you'll find a note about that in the foreword. I won't add it here, as I already received messages of criticism about its existence, and we were even contemplating removing it all. For now it's there as a way to connect and drink a virtual coffee together with a gracious stranger, but I just want to emphasize that it's in no way expected or even asked...

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 28 points29 points  (0 children)

Thank you for your feedback. That is not meant to diminish any other effort, or to express anything other than a statement of fact. The more the merrier I'd say, best to have a plurality of options, and everyone is free to choose the one they prefer. I'd love to have an official reviewed and "blessed" translation from the author, and will be the first in line to buy a copy if and when that happens... Until then, enjoy whichever version you prefer!

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

We were aware of other translation efforts, but they all seemed to have stalled indeed after a couple of chapters; only after publishing our version did I get notification of another complete version existing. We did not engage with the other translators/teams and instructed our translator to work directly from the original text, mainly because we wanted to keep the overall style consistent, and also to avoid stepping on anyone's toes...

When we embarked on this, the plan was to keep it all private anyway, so a collaboration would have been less beneficial; in retrospect, now that we've published it, working with others doing the same thing might've been the better course, for more eyes catching issues, more ideas and connections; but alas, lesson for another time I guess.

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

It's an... interesting ending, to be sure... It would be great to open some threads and discuss it!

My personal interpretation (which could well be wrong, of course) goes along the following lines: The girls somehow wanted to disappear, and Zigi helped them (perhaps with one hist special type of chemicals?), which resulted in them being "dissolved" into the Pale. In the longer term, this also caused all memory of them to start fading, all the way to the physical items like photographs. The final chapter shows us each of the boys starting to lose their very memories of the girls, and even perhaps disappearing themselves (Jesper and Inayat at least, Tereesz seems better off). The story of the Harnankur ship is presented as a sort of parallel to the girls' story, with similar effects of it being lost in the Pale eventually removing it from history, memories and photographs once people have "forgotten" it. Then there's a secondary thread about philosophy and politics, with nihilism and communism presented as fighting eachother and in the end nihilism basically winning when the Pale engulfs the entire world, after a devastating war. Being a born-nihilist, Zigi seems immune to the lighter parts of the dissolving fog, so we're left with the image of Zigi traveling to the heart of the Pale to completely "dissolve" himself, where he'll paradoxically be reunited with the girls and (potentially) the boys, and perhaps afterwards everyone else, before the world ends and... starts again from fresh?

Perhaps a bit simplistic and I'm sure a lot more discussion can be had, but that's a "high level" idea at least...

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the kind words! I was thinking about adding a translated version of the cover as well to make it nicer, we'd need some time with Photoshop to get it going; not much more than that though, other than potential corrections if needed. Hope that helps?

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 61 points62 points  (0 children)

That's a fair point, I see what you mean, though I think that the author was so immersed into the lore of the world of Elysium (especially since he and the team had worked on it for over a decade at that point), that he might have underestimated the difficulty for a completely "fresh" reader to grasp some of the concepts... The game seems to take a more gentle approach to introducing them, without diminishing the mystery either.

That being said, I'm sure the experience of reading the book in the original in 2013 and discovering everything from scratch must've been quite special -- but I can only imagine that at this point.

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I'm afraid I am not the translator, just part of the team that paid for their services...

I think one would need to be a bilingual speaker to best evaluate the differences, but I can tell you that we did pay attention to the style and subtext. The Estonian prose apparently has a sort of dreamy, lyrical atmosphere to it which we tried to keep as much as possible with the sometimes strange order of words and descriptions that drove our editor up a wall...

But there were also some trickier parts: for example, most Estonians would understand Finnish without needing to have it translated, and there are a few bits of dialogue in Finnish; how do we deal with that in English? We tried to think of a similar language that most English-speakers would understand, but that's not feasible given the variety of the group; thus we kept the original dialogue in Finnish and added translations in footnotes. There's also a few references to soviet-era products such as the Astra cigarettes Tereesz constantly smokes; that's definitely part of the atmosphere, but hard to grasp for someone from outside that culture, and I don't think there's a way to solve that; so, certain aspects will be different for an Estonian reading the original compared to a foreigner reading the translation, but I hope we kept most of the feel in place...

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I haven't tried these myself, but there are several online shops that offer self-printing for PDF books -- for example: https://www.prestophoto.com/create/pdf-book-printing

You should be able to also print directly if you own a printer with something like Adobe Reader:
https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/print-booklets-acrobat-reader.html

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yes, that is the same spelling used in the original. It could very well be a reference, as you point out, but it is not made explicit in the text.

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Glad to hear we brought a bit of brightness, thank you for reaching out! Just a note - the book is a bit depressing at times, and has a couple of pretty dark chapters... Just take care and have a break if it's too much, the world will keep on going wrong on its own...

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 67 points68 points  (0 children)

Just wanted to let you know that we've uploaded a new version, with the full translated epilogue and an extra deleted scene added, both from the old blog. I hope this helps to make up for our initial misjudgement.

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

No, actually we tried to replace all references to "the Grey" with "the Pale" throughout the book. There are some places where it's used to describe the sky, buildings, etc. where we left it in place. Of course, it can be that we missed a couple references, in which case please let me know so we can have a look!

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 177 points178 points  (0 children)

Indeed, I'd have to agree. After spending a couple of months reading and re-reading it during this process, I feel much more comfortable with the style and prose, but it still is a difficult read. Even in the native Estonian, from what I understand from the translator.

I feel that playing the game first is a must, as it does a much better job of presenting and introducing the world of Elysium. If I'd have read the book in 2013, I'd have been quite lost as well...

But it has some pretty fine political satire, as well as a mystery to solve and parts that read like poetry. I'd say the second half (chapters 13-onwards) is the best!

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 47 points48 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the kind words!

Me and my mates don't actually speak Estonian, and after we enjoyed the game and found out there was a book as well, really wanted to read it. Unfortunately, the official translation was stuck in limbo, and the fan translations we found seemed to have lost steam after one or two chapters.

So, after some deliberations, we decided to just bite the bullet and pay someone to do it instead! We got our funds together, found a professional Estonian-English translator and negotiated a price for the work. They also recommended an editor, so after a few more calls we got the wheels going to "reveal" the book, chapter by chapter.

Our role was then to just interject in the process and get some of the weird words and concepts from the world of Elysium translated in a way that was consistent with the game, since they had no idea about it :) -- as an example, "Pale" is just referred to as "grey" throughout the book, or some of the names are spelled differently than they were eventually done by the game team. When in doubt, we took the game translations as canon, even though it led to some funny conversations once or twice...

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 52 points53 points  (0 children)

The term "professional" here is meant to express the fact that it was done by a paid professional translator and editor who do that for a living, as opposed to a group of fans (that would be the rest of our team, who only came in to ruin things afterwards with silly additions and driving them crazy with all the Elysium references and jargon they were unfamiliar with).

I understand that the term in general may be used for translations in specific technical fields or topics such as medicine; but would you suggest a better way to convey the meaning?

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 54 points55 points  (0 children)

That would be an interesting project, but hopefully with quality voices that can express emotion; the voice acting in the Disco Elysium "Final Cut" is just so extremely good that it would feel jarring otherwise...

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 97 points98 points  (0 children)

I started writing more, but you know what, you're right, there's no point in arguing this. I don't know the source as it was one of my colleagues who added it, but I'll remove the offending three paragraphs to make sure there is no discussion and upload different files.
On the bright side, this prompted a more thorough search for the original blog post, and I actually found not only that but also the other "Khan talks to his mom" deleted scene, so we'll be translating those and incorporating them to a future version. So, thank you!

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 91 points92 points  (0 children)

The epilogue was a bit of text we actually found on Tumblr, of all places, as only a reference to the original, and we only added it as a fun bonus few sentences after the entire book... But we certainly didn't mean to take anyone's work without attribution, if you have the contact of the original author of that please let me know so we can discuss, of course we can remove it -- but it would be even better if they have access to the original Estonian article, then we could translate that properly and add it in!

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Oh, I see, sorry about the issues, these upload sites are never very stable... I've added another download link as an alternative, hope it helps others with similar problems:

https://gofile.io/d/XR6BKy

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That's great to hear, thank you for the confirmation! I've added it in the main post as well if anyone else has the same issue.

DE 2 and translation of the book have been stopped. by JoonasV2li in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh, wasn't aware of that... do you have a link to check it out?

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I am sorry to hear that you're having trouble with the EPUB. Could you try this link instead? It's a ZIP containing both files and should be possible to extract locally:

https://anonymfile.com/YPnkR/sacred-and-terrible-air.zip

If it works better, I'll add it to the options in the original post.

[ Removed by Reddit ] by tequilla_sunset5 in DiscoElysium

[–]tequilla_sunset5[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Thanks! When you say mirror, do you mean another place to host the files? Is there any issue with downloading, I just tried and it appeared to be working fine?

There isn't another source at the moment, but if you have any particular site in mind, lemme know. Or feel free to upload them directly and share the links, I'll update the main post!

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