6 thoughts on “The IF instruction card, in French”

  1. I’m glad you liked our French translation!

    There were two things we couldn’t translate:

    * “Crazy Uncle Zarf”: we only translated “Uncle Zarf”, because we didn’t find any French equivalent and a literal translation of “crazy” would only have seemed insulting.

    * More seriously, is CURSE actually a verb used in IF? I guess it’s in the sense of “saying swear-words”, not “utter a curse against”; but even then, it doesn’t seem to be in the standard Inform library and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real equivalent of it used in a French game (or an English one, but I didn’t try in many of them!). We didn’t include it, anyway: I think it’d be a bit silly for us to recommend a verb if no game in French actually understands it.

    1. You could try to use the equivalent in French for “mad”, instead of “crazy”?

      About the “curse” thing, I think it means about using “strong words” like insults, try using silly, stupid and such words. Well, it is recommended to use them to discharge the frustration.

      1. The most obvious French translation of “mad” and “crazy” is the same: “fou”. Of course, there are many possible synonyms, some of them not so negative; but I can’t really think of one which would seem fun and friendly in that context, as it’s apparently supposed to sound in the original.

        I had also thought “curse” might mean what you say, but if it’s the case, I don’t like it at all! It’s completely inconsistent with the rest of the card, in which every verb is intended to be typed the way it’s written. (Not to mention that recommending to do that in some old not-so-good games would be a bad, bad idea…)

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