It took more than a decade for a surreal RPG to get its final translation

In 2008, Mortis Ghost made a game with his friend, composer Alias Conrad Coldwood. It was a surreal roleplaying game about a baseball player fighting ghosts called Off. He shared it for free on a French-speaking forum, where it garnered a small audience. One player was a French artist who was inspired to make a piece of fan art, which she shared with her then-girlfriend. “I was very intrigued,” says Quinn K, now a writer and game developer. At the time, she was a 15-year-old living in Austria who had no idea how influential Off would be for her, nor she for Off.

After beating the game, K lay awake at night thinking about the ending. “Something had gotten its hooks in me,” she says. Wanting to show it to more friends, she resolved to translate the game from French to English — neither of which were her first language. “I wasn’t the right person for the job,” she says. “I was just the person that did it.”

Fan translation for games is often a tricky process, not just because of linguistics but also technical limitations and potential copyright claims by the original developers. But K knew it was possible to make her version work because there was already a partial translation, and when she contacted Ghost, he gave his approval. With the help of some friends in proofreading and asset creation, she put together a translation of the 10-ish-hour RPG by 2011. She posted it on the forums for a website called Starmen.net, which was popular among fans of the Mother / EarthBound series. K was partially inspired by a Mother 3 translation, and other Mother fans quickly connected with the similar vibes in Off.

After the initial release, K put out an improved version in 2012. By 2013, Off was an “astonishing success,” says Ghost, with users who discovered it on the Starmen forums spreading it via fan creations like art and cosplay to DeviantArt and Tumblr. On the latter, it was the sixth-most-talked-about game of the year, behind major franchises like Pokémon, Animal Crossing, Kingdom Hearts, The Legend of Zelda, and Mass Effect. Unlike those established hits, Off was free, spread only through word of mouth, and was still clearly finding a devoted audience.

Despite its popularity, K was aware that the translation wasn’t perfect. “A lot of people rip [it], and I get why,” she says. “It was full of very severe flaws, just born from the fact that I’m neither an English native speaker nor a French native speaker. So it was possible to make mistakes in both languages.” There were also other fans making their own translations or patches that added to K’s work. One of these, released in 2017 by artist Lady Saytenn, added an option for the batter to be referred to with they / them pronouns.

“That inspired me so much,” says K. Having had a few years of space from Off, and having improved in both English and French as well as “grown a bit wiser as a person,” she embarked on making a third version of her translation. This time, she collaborated directly with Lady Saytenn, as well as another artist who created image assets, Rosie Brewster.

K categorizes the second translation as the one that “most millennials” have played, while the third reached a younger wave of fans. K says that she was actually surprised to find that many people who encountered Off through the third translation hold it in high regard because “back when it first came out, that translation was not particularly popular.”

Some changes were straightforward, like correcting pop culture references that K had been unaware of, as well as an error where she had interpreted the French word femme as “wife,” rather than “woman.” It can mean either, but K’s choice changed the implication of a key line, and Ghost let her know it wasn’t what he originally intended.

However, some fans felt that the newest translation was overly sanitized; K says she deliberately made some characters “a little less crass” since “a big sign of an inexperienced translator is swearing a lot.” She also removed an instance of the R-slur, which upset “some edgy people.”

More nuanced was the shift to clearer language and a tendency to stick more closely to the original lines. The 2.0 translation had been vague and sometimes confusing in a way that players appreciated; it seemed to reflect the atmosphere of the game. “The little weirdnesses [in the 2.0 translation] really twist the knife on how strange and off putting the world of the game is,” says K.

But some of that was down to K’s imperfect French and English, so in the third version, she chose to clarify some lines, leading some players to feel that she had removed an aspect of whimsy and poetry that they had actually enjoyed.

These are tensions inherent to the act of translation, which is always adaptive. Now that Off is getting an official remaster, there will be a fourth version later this year, and it’s not clear how they’ll balance clarity and atmosphere, as well as its own adaptation, with K’s. The announcement was careful to acknowledge K’s work and says that the remaster will be “based on” K’s translation. She’s also been paid for what was once years of fan labor. But it does seem that the script is in the process of being readapted by professional localizers. (Publisher Fangamer did not respond to requests for confirmation.)

For K, the readaptation is a good thing. “The one thing I can say from everything I’ve seen of their updated version of the translation is they’ve improved it in every conceivable way,” she says. “I’m excited to rediscover the game.”

On the other hand, “it’s a strange feeling to be most well known for the work that you did on somebody else’s work,” says K, who has made several of her own games and is now working on Blanksword, a roguelike RPG “very strongly inspired by Off.” Ghost, too, says he’s changed a lot in the 17 years since Off’s original release. “I am of course very proud to have produced a game that has touched so many people, but I think that the game now belongs much more to the community,” he says. He is currently working on a new game called Help.

The remake won’t just feature an improved script but will also have updated combat mechanics, new animations, and some additional content written by Ghost. The goal was to “completely preserve the original atmosphere, while polishing everything that could be [polished],” he says. As with all remakes, this will be a difficult balancing act; adding in the complex adaptive work of translation, there will always be divided opinions over which of the now four major versions is the best.

But K’s efforts undeniably made Off what it is today, and the remake acknowledging and building on that history is a rare step in an industry where fan translations are usually unacknowledged at best and taken down at worst.