TL;DR
Hi, I would like to introduce AWS BuilderCards and my contribution to produce Japanese edition of the card.
What are AWS BuilderCards?
AWS BuilderCards is a kind of trading card game in general words.
AWS BuilderCards is a fun and educational trading card deck building game designed to teach how different AWS services work together to build well-architected workloads.
Here describes the introduction of BuilderCards.
AWS BuilderCards
Disclaimer
- This article focuses on the story of the production of the Japanese version of BuilderCards. You can see many blogs around the world, in your mother tongue, that describe what is the cards and how to play them in detail.
- This article is original in Japanese and translated by DeepL.
How we produced the Japanese Edition
Background
The background of the AWS BuilderCards Japanese edition (hereafter referred to as "the Japanese edition") is described in detail in a note by JAWS-UG @jawsdays.
【日本語版登場】AWS BuilderCards 体験コーナーのご紹介 by JAWS-UG Blog
AWS BuilderCards の日本語化を山口(@kinunori)さん、吉江(@typhon666_death)さんが企画し、翻訳作業を山口(@kinunori)さん、榎本さん(@coosuke)が行いました。
翻訳者の山口さんからコメントを頂戴しています。
「日本語化にあたっては AWS BuilderCardsの原作者 David Heidt さんに大きなご支援を頂きました。実際、日本語化したAWS BuilderCardsを日本に届けてくれたのはDavidさんです。ありがとうございました。
そして、Davidさんへ日本語化企画の打診などを対応していただいた AWSコミュニティマネージャーの沼口さん、いつも私たちの活動に協力して下さりありがとうございます。
最後に、参加者のみなさま、ぜひJAWS DAYS 2024会場で AWS BuilderCards を体験してみてください！」(Translate by DeepL)
AWS BuilderCards was translated into Japanese by Yamaguchi (@kinunori) and Yoshie (@typhon666_death), and translated by Yamaguchi (@kinunori) and Enomoto-san (@coosuke).The translator, Mr. Yamaguchi, commented on the translation.
We are grateful to David Heidt, the original author of AWS BuilderCards, for his great support in translating the AWS BuilderCards into Japanese. In fact, it was David who delivered the Japanese version of AWS BuilderCards to Japan. Thank you very much.
And to Mr. Numaguchi, AWS Community Manager, who approached David to help us with the Japanese version, thank you very much for always cooperating with us in our activities.
Finally, to all the participants, please try AWS BuilderCards at JAWS DAYS 2024!
My work
Mr. Yamaguchi asked me to help with the translation work. Together with Mr. Yamaguchi and David, the developer of BuilderCards (who lives in Germany and is a Solution Architect at AWS in the gaming field), we mainly worked on the following tasks
- Translation of the cards (mainly to check if the Japanese was correct)
- Card binding review (checking the appearance of the Japanese text when it is printed on the cards to make sure that there are no errors in the notation, etc.)
- Communication with David regarding the above two tasks (in English)
Digest until completion
When I joined the project, the first draft of the Japanese version (version 0.0.1 or so lol) had already been submitted, and I was trying to make sure that the translation from English to Japanese would be consistent with all the cards (47 cards in total, is the number correct?) one by one.
It took 4 days from the participation to this point.
Next, we gave him feedback on the review results and asked him to revise and update the Japanese version for a couple of days. The Japanese version is now up to version 0.1.0 (...let's say! lol) and is handed over to David.
From here, we reviewed the binding created by David, who manufactured the cards. Specifically, I reviewed it from the perspective of whether there had been any line breaks in odd positions in the Japanese, and whether it had been something that could be read smoothly by Japanese people. I repeated this process over and over again.
For example, here is what David's binding (let's call this version 0.1.5) looked like.
And my feedback with the version was,
The horizontal notation is correct, but please turn the letters 90 degrees to the right. As it is, we will have to tilt our heads to the left to read, which I think will stiffen our shoulders lol.
That's how we created version 0.99.99. About 10 days had passed since I joined the project when David told us, "I submitted it successfully! Thank you very much for your help!"
As mentioned in the JAWS-UG's blog introduced at the beginning of this article, the Japanese edition was delivered successfully in Japan at the end of this month.
What we focused on when producing the Japanese version
Localize, not translate, the BuilderCards.
The contents of BuilderCards are broadly classified into three types of cards.
- Starter Cards ・・・ Ten cards distributed at the beginning of the game. They have a picture of on-premise systems.
- BuilderCards ・・・ Cards with AWS services listed on them. The best part of the game is to buy these cards from the Marketplace and build your AWS architecture.
- AWS Well-Architected Card ・・・ Score Card. Ultimately, the player who collects the most points on this card wins.
Of these, the most work time was actually spent translating the starter cards. In contrast, translating the builder cards and the AWS Well-Architected cards were not as difficult a task. It was just a steady cycle of translation, review, revision, binding, review, and revision.
For the purpose of English to Japanese translation, you can use translation services such as DeepL, Google Translate, or more recently ChatGPT to translate and correct English by setting prompts. Many of you who read this blog come into contact with English documents on a regular basis, and I am sure many of you are familiar with these tools (I am one of them!). However, since I was fortunate enough to assist in the production of the Japanese edition, I decided beforehand that I would not simply produce a translation into Japanese, but rather produce cards localized for Japan. This is the reason why I wrote "Japanese edition" instead of "translated (into Japanese) version" in this blog. Then, I turned my attention to the starter cards.
My obsession
If you have played the English version of BuilderCards, you have probably seen some kind of poop written in English on the starter card. I realized that these are actually English proverbs or English versions of so-called "system operations" jokes that, if you read them carefully, can be a bit funny. I looked that it would not be funny to translate these sentences directly into Japanese, so I decided to give the starter card a uniqueness as a Japanese version. From here, the days of searching for a Japanese version of the starter card began.
For example, when there is an English proverb, there may be a corresponding Japanese proverb. In this case, we adopted the Japanese proverb. This solved most of the problems, but there remained a couple of cards that just did not translate well into Japanese. For these, rather than translating them seriously, we dug up sayings that were popular in the Japanese IT community and incorporate them into the starter cards.
We'll let you know what kind of sayings were engraved on the starter cards until the BuilderCards experience corner on the day of JAWS DAYS 2024....
Summary
So, the Japanese version has been successfully completed and will be unveiled at JAWS DAYS 2024 on 2nd of March. I hope you all look forward to the day. If you share your impressions on your SNS, I will be very happy to hear from you.
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