[HN Gopher] Brood War Korean Translations
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Brood War Korean Translations
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 198 points
Date : 2025-01-17 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.sourcedive.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.sourcedive.net)
| ZeWaka wrote:
| I wonder how well AI audio generation would work here, to produce
| a voiceover video like the original input.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Neat. I wonder what Google Translate uses these days and if its
| gotten or will receive an update to a new LLM.
| leshokunin wrote:
| Don't let the title fool you: this is anextremely thorough and
| creative take on translating and making more approachable the
| commentary of StarCraft.
|
| As the author rightly points out, in its 27 years of existence,
| commentary around the game has become a domain specific language.
| Not just Korean or English.
|
| This approach of automated scripting and using AI to understand
| roughly what was said and then make it coherent is really cool.
| amatecha wrote:
| If the author sees this: with yt-dlp you can download lower
| quality versions of videos to save bandwidth, like so:
| yt-dlp -f "bv[height<=720]" <url>
|
| (where <url> is your URL or video ID)
|
| That will download up to 720p quality.
| doctor_phil wrote:
| The author mentions just downloading the audio track. That's a
| lot less data than downloading any video at all. ;)
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| I get that it's "wrong" but I really like the translation of
| "natural expansion" to "courtyard"
| jaeyounkg wrote:
| This was an fun read, as someone who's both a Korean BW player
| and a speech recognition researcher.
|
| It's interesting to note that the original Korean transcription
| already has many errors, seemingly (and impressively) corrected
| by LLMs later on. For example, 12 anmadang bildeu (12 courtyard
| build) is actually 12 apmadang bildeu (12 frontyard build), which
| might have been more understandable to BW players. Similarly
| tueceori bildeu (processing-at-two build? makes no sense lol)
| should have been transcribed tuhaeceori bildeu (two-Hatchery
| build).
|
| Therefore it may also be helpful to directly feed the slang
| dictionary into Whisper's inference process using contextual
| biasing. There are lots of ways to do this, but the simplest
| would be to increase the probability of slang words in the
| dictionary in the final prediction layer of Whisper by a constant
| factor. This is fairly easy to implement, for example by using
| HuggingFace's library:
| https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/internal/generat...
| bee_rider wrote:
| Do they actually use the Korean word for, like, tossing
| something to refer to the Protoss? That's a pretty funny cross-
| language pun if so.
| jaeyounkg wrote:
| Haha, no I acutually never associated this with the English
| word toss lol.
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| Half of the words in the Korean blurb are just romanizations.
| Even build is just bil-deu
| sushid wrote:
| No, Protoss is just toseu, which is just hangulization of
| "Toss" aka Protoss.
| chongli wrote:
| I am a StarCraft fan and I have no idea what a courtyard or a
| frontyard is supposed to be! However I do know that the names
| of buildings, units, technologies, and strategies are usually
| heavily abbreviated in English. Perhaps the same is true in
| Korean? A 12 barracks build would usually just be called "12
| rax", a two hatchery mutalisk build would be called "2 hatch
| muta", and a three hatchery hydralisk timing attack / all-in
| would be called "3 hatch hydra bust".
| rcthompson wrote:
| I believe the equivalent term used in English (exhibited in
| the new translation) is "natural", short for "natural
| expansion", which refers to the obvious location where the
| player should build their first expansion. It sounds like the
| term used in Korean for this concept literally means "front
| yard" rather than matching the English term.
| Reason077 wrote:
| Makes sense. And presumably the 12 means that you expand to
| your natural ("courtyard") with your 12th worker unit
| (probe, in the case of protoss).
| starcraftgamer wrote:
| A lot of Korean slang is a little different. Source: not
| Korean but have been in the English community a long time and
| picked some stuff up.
|
| "1rax double" is equivalent to "1rax expand" or "1rax CC".
| They use multi or double to mean expand in the early game.
| Instead of "cheese" or "all-in" they use "pil-sal-gi" which
| means ace/joker card or "han-bang" which means an army or
| attack on few resources.
|
| I am not sure what short-hand they use for barracks, gateway,
| etc.
| chongli wrote:
| _Instead of "cheese" or "all-in" they use "pil-sal-gi"
| which means ace/joker card_
|
| That's a really interesting one to me! One thing I've
| noticed is that Koreans do not seem to have the same
| hangups / negative attitude towards cheese strategies as
| westerners do!
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| Pretty cool and shows a clear issue I've seen across any LLM. the
| language and grammar is so formal/robotic
| mock-possum wrote:
| As the author points out, this does seem like exactly the kind of
| language problem that LLM's ought to excel at, and I love that
| moment of discovery when the testers were so busy discussing the
| content that they forgot to focus on the accuracy of the
| translation!
| bee_rider wrote:
| Dumb question from someone who only played money-maps as a kid:
|
| What do the numbers in front of the building mean? 12 Hatcheries
| seems like... well, 12 seems like a possible but implausible
| _number_ of hatcheries to build (hypothetically it is possible of
| course). And 12 spawning pools is obviously not useful. So that
| makes me think it is the position in the build order list. But,
| they list other builds, like:
|
| > The second is the 12 Hatch, 12 Pool, 12 Gas
|
| Which doesn't make a ton of sense in with that parsing. I mean it
| must not be a straight list. Maybe it is a tree, and 12 is the
| depth for this building? But that seems late, I can't think of 11
| buildings to build before gas. Maybe they include units too? Or
| maybe just drones/overlords?
| narcindin wrote:
| Is it how many workers you have when you build that building
| zzlk wrote:
| It's the supply of when you should build it. In the early game
| it's essentially how many workers you have.
| SynasterBeiter wrote:
| It denotes how much supply you should have when you start the
| building. All of your supply at this stage comes from workers,
| so it's also an indication how many workers you should train.
| LegitShady wrote:
| In the game you build buildings and units. The units take up
| "supply" which there is a limit on. At the beginning of the
| game you mostly just building workers (unless you scout your
| opponent is going for an extremely early attack), who mine
| resources and construct buildings.
|
| The numbers indicate the supply you should be at when you build
| the structure.
|
| so a 12 hatch 12 pool 12 gas means you get to 12 workers and
| then build those 3 buildings in that order as soon as you have
| the resources for those.
|
| For zerg the workers actually become the building, so I assume
| you hit 12, build the hatchery, build another worker, build the
| spawning pool, build another worker, and then build your gas
| refinery.
| starcraftgamer wrote:
| Yes as zerg the lost supply is counted, so you can either go
| 12 hatch 11 pool 10 gas or 12-12-12 if you want to be a
| little bit more economically greedy at the expense of making
| it much harder to hold 8rax in ZvT as an example.
|
| As you get later into the game people who play more seriously
| also use the in-game clock, or timing a building placement
| relative to how complete a different building is to determine
| building timing. This helps with subtleties like whether you
| lost your scouting worker or not (-1 supply), if the early
| game got really weird because you had to build more units to
| hold some aggression, etc.
| stackghost wrote:
| IIRC it started with "4-pooling" which is when, as Zerg, you
| build a spawning pool while only having 4 workers (it's been
| years, forget what they're called), rebuild your 4th worker and
| then start making zerglings to achieve a super-early attack (a
| "rush").
|
| Then your opponent calls you all sorts of vile names and
| questions your sexuality, etc.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's only if you manage to get the first two zerglings out
| faster than it takes for opponent's SCVs to arrive at your
| base and kill your drones (that's the name of Zerg workers)
| :).
| gs17 wrote:
| > And 12 spawning pools is obviously not useful.
|
| I vaguely remember a Husky video where he actually did a "9
| pool" with building 9 spawning pools.
| bee_rider wrote:
| That would be just a flex or a joke or something, right?
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Correct. You can also find the same joke about "6 pool"
| around 1:38 in this classic music video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU2mD02HWnk
| moefh wrote:
| There might be a video where this happens, but I think it's
| more likely that you're misremembering it; there was a
| somewhat famous game cast by Husky where Cella[1] (a
| professional player) was joking around on the Internet
| playing 2v2 (2 teams of 2 players each).
|
| He asked his partner what strategy he should use, the person
| responded with "13 gate" (meaning: keep building probes until
| you have 13, then build your first warpgate). Cella pretended
| to misunderstand and instead built 13 warpgates, which is a
| horrible strategy, but they still won the game. They only won
| because his partner could barely defend him in early game
| while he was building the warpgates. After surviving early
| game, it wasn't a fair fight even with a horrible strategy,
| because it's a professional against "normal" people on the
| Internet.
|
| I don't think the video exists anymore, Husky famously
| removed his whole channel with a lot of StarCraft 2 early
| history, but I found this Reddit thread[2] talking about the
| game (WeRRa was Cella's team at the time, that's why they
| call him CellaWeRRa).
|
| [1] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Cella
|
| [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/dyjk9/cellawe
| rra...
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| People already explained that's it's how much supply you have.
|
| In practice this is easier for people to use than actual clock
| timings, because it's more robust to delays or interference. If
| you remember "third rax at 30 supply" then even if you're
| playing a little slow, you will still know roughly when to
| build that. But if you memorized exact clock timings and now
| you might be 20+ seconds behind, it's hard to know when you
| should fit in the new building.
|
| It's not perfect of course, and if you get cheesed and the game
| goes weird then you'll have to start improvising rather than
| relying on just supply timings, a lot of times after a cheese
| where neither side definitely wins, the balance between tech
| and economy is now very non-standard and you can't rely on
| conventional rules of thumb anymore.
| Reason077 wrote:
| Doesn't it mean you build your expansion once you have 12
| worker units?
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| I really wish someone with the resources and connections could
| get in touch with South Korean broadcasters in order to get
| access to their archives so that more historical games could get
| uploaded and re-commentated for a western audience.
|
| My favorite Brood War slang term is Ee Han Timing [0]: basically
| when you take a risky build that has to do damage in a small
| timing window. A ton of exciting Brood War moments come from
| exploiting tiny timing windows.
|
| [0] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Ee_Han_Timing
| debo_ wrote:
| Artosis was doing this with historical games and then he
| started getting DMCAed from the copyright holders of the
| original broadcasts.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Yeah, I heard about that. Someone with enough resources and
| connections could probably license the rights, but I doubt it
| would ever be profitable. Still, I really hope that this key
| part of gaming history doesn't end up lost.
| karmakaze wrote:
| That's much of the game in a nutshell, in varying degrees. If
| one player makes many units and the other is instead collecting
| resources, the first player has to do damage to equalize or
| else the other player got away with it and the first is way
| behind. At the top levels, smaller actions like making one or
| two early attack units applies the same to a smaller degree,
| but early game differences compound thus matter more than the
| same later on.
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| Kinda funny that in an article about translations, the author
| gets signal-to-noise completely backwards. A high signal to noise
| (over 9000) is very good. It means you are getting a lot of
| signal with very little noise. Decreasing signal to noise means
| getting more noise.
| flerchin wrote:
| Yes I had to read that a few times to understand it. Much like
| the google translations.
| jfim wrote:
| The author also used domain specific language when they meant
| jargon.
| allcentury wrote:
| I loved this article, thanks for writing it.
|
| I attempted playing a few world cyber game US regional matches
| and I was always amazed how much faster everyone else was. Then I
| remember when they live streamed it from Korea and I saw how fast
| they played and I was blown away. From a strategy point of view,
| something so basic about the game that I missed was when a blog
| introduced me to some math for a protoss zealot power up that
| defeated a zergling in 2 hits rather than 3. That's when I
| realized this is a chess game and I got hooked.
| maeil wrote:
| Reminds me, many years ago someone paid me to translate a Korean
| wiki article about some League of Legends pro player to English.
| No idea why, most of it was random trivia, it didn't contain any
| notable insights. But it was decent money as a side job so I
| didn't bother asking. Possibly similar motives to this article?
|
| > Very few of members of the foreigner community are fluent in
| Korean. Foreigner access to Korean BW discourse is a
| contradicting concept: if you speak Korean fluently, you have no
| reason to be in the foreigner community, as it only has access to
| material that is strictly inferior and more limited. For this
| reason, Korean-speaking members in the foreigner community are
| exceedingly rare.
|
| I can vouch for this in general - after becoming fluent I've
| stopped looking up anything related to Korea in English because
| the quality of information is much worse. I'm sure the same holds
| for other languages and places.
| vippy wrote:
| ok but where are the vods?
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| for any of the lucky 10000, like me, who were left wanting to see
| what this game looked like:
|
| https://youtu.be/Nm-PXmOELAw?si=Z-RXbdqNzkSF3cqx
|
| my brief search didn't show me any more obscure Korean only
| strategy videos, so maybe this one is just for the lowly
| foreigners :(
| starcraftgamer wrote:
| I've been watching BW out of Korea since 2007. Previously also
| played but it's been many years. This is really cool, thanks for
| sharing!
|
| There are two YouTube channels I wanted to take the opportunity
| to shout out, the first one does English translations of Korean
| BW content, and the second one provides commentary on recent
| tournaments like the ASL with a little bit more depth then
| Tasteless and Artosis (no hate but to me their commentary is too
| off topic and they miss basic things about build orders).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@jinjinBW
|
| https://m.youtube.com/@StarCastTVENG
| egurns wrote:
| Warms my heart to see effort put into a beloved game. Just this
| week I watched a YT video of a sc custom game where the players
| were discussing whether its worth the effort to translate in-game
| korean-language content. Its an old game that is played by a
| niche community in north america. The majority of custom games
| are created in korean and never get to translated for the small
| number of north american players that would be interested.
| jaimebuelta wrote:
| LOL, as a non-native English speaker, reading this reminds me of
| EXACTLY the same problem of translating many things, but more
| precisely, computer articles and software development.
|
| There's a huge amount of terms that are difficult to translate
| (sharding? Hash?). The only real solution is to adopt them to
| your language, more or less adapted, which is what happens over
| time. But it requires a community that, to some degree, is able
| to cross the gap between the languages. In this case, learning
| English.
|
| Talking about software development in Spanish (my native
| language) is a succession of imported terms from English.
|
| I don't think there's a good way of doing that, and I'm
| interested to see how automatic translations deal with it,
| because the only way this can work is with a process of mixing
| both language in a social way and see what terms evolve from that
| process.
|
| And you need, in the terms the post describes, people that know
| Korean at least in a non-fluent way. And the game itself, of
| course.
| nicois wrote:
| Nit-picking, but a high signal to noise ratio is desirable,
| indicating low levels of noise compared to signal, not the
| reverse.
| spongebobism wrote:
| Impressive project, and I always love reading about the
| communities that form around competitive games.
|
| It feels kind of sad to admit as a chess player, but "Najdork
| variation" is one of the funniest typos I've seen.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| I was a reasonably competitive BW player until the Korean teams
| arrived on the scene. I'll always appreciate how they elevated
| the level of gameplay. Really nice guys, too, I learned a lot
| from playing with them, and it was fun talking strategy via chat
| to the best of our mutual linguistic abilities. Good memories. I
| would have absolutely loved something like this project back in
| the day.
| xedrac wrote:
| > Najdork variation
|
| I think OP doesn't like the Najdorf Sicilian... or is this some
| meme opening I don't know about?
| jboggan wrote:
| This is amazing. I'm getting chills!
|
| As a side note, I have gotten into watching a "foreigner" BW
| channel everyday called ArtosisCasts. The videos are very
| strategic and high level commentaries on games as they are
| watched for the first time, with some after-match highlights for
| especially interesting maneuvers. It has really made me
| appreciate the depth of the game, as well as explain how I was so
| bad at it in high school. It has actually made me think a lot
| about startups, economic optimization, and how you approach the
| "meta" of any activity you're undertaking.
| navane wrote:
| How far off are we from local immidiate voice translation?
| Something on my computer that translates all spoken words by my
| computer, keeping tone and intonation?
| dfan wrote:
| Even when Google Translate got pretty good I was not really able
| to effectively translate Chinese or Japanese text about Go (the
| game). I had similar issues to the ones mentioned in this post.
| Many Chinese and Japanese words (e.g., "ko") have a very specific
| meaning in the context of Go, but they also have regular meanings
| (e.g., "robbery") in more normal contexts, so Google Translate
| would translate text in a generic way, which made everything
| unintelligible. With modern LLMs, I can now preface my
| translation requests with instructions such as "I am going to ask
| you to translate some Chinese text accompanying weiqi diagrams.
| Your translations should be idiomatic and not shy away from Go
| jargon. For example, Chai = extension, Jia = pincer, Ci and Qu
| = peep.", and it does a fantastic job, enough for me to basically
| read anything I want. It was lucky for me that evidently enough
| Go material already existed in the training set that I didn't
| have to do anything more special.
|
| (Some chess corrections, in case the author is reading: the moves
| at the start of chess games are called openings in English, not
| openers; there are not distinct white-piece and black-piece
| openings, although of course an individual player will probably
| study a given opening from the point of view of one side or the
| other; their study is considered fundamental all the way up to
| the highest level, in fact more so as you increase in skill; and
| the Sicilian variation in question is the Najdorf, not Najdork.)
| Sesse__ wrote:
| Najdork is now headcanon.
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