In October 2013 I was contacted by Bieno Marti who
informed me that he at Commodore Plus had created a text adventure game based
on ‘the Prisoner,’ however the game was in Spanish only. However there was the
plan to produce an English version of the game, which can be downloaded from
Commodore Plus in order to play the game on your own computer. But there was a
problem with translating the Spanish text into English, as the idea was to
maintain the feel of ‘the Prisoner.’ Well I thought how am I going to manage
this, when I cannot read Spanish? But I was sent an English translation of the
Spanish text {translated by an on-line translator} and then it was up to me to
translate that into good English, but at the same time to give the text the
feel of ‘the Prisoner.’ I thought that’s easy enough to do. And yet, when I
received the text I found it to be made up of a number of short messages and
location descriptions which had been written to a specific number of words, and
I could not exceed that number of words. So when faced with a piece of text
with say 25 or 55 words, I had to put that into good English, and at the same
time give it the feel of ‘the Prisoner,’ which I have to say was not at all
easy. Sometimes when I thought the piece of text was perfect I would sometimes
find that I had exceeded the set number of words, so that then the text had to
be edited down yet keep what I had written and in line with the feel of ‘the
Prisoner.’ At times I found it frustrating, and yet pleasing and rewarding when
a piece of text turned out perfect. That would galvanise me to get on with the
next piece of text, which would prove stubborn enough against being translated
into good English, let alone allow itself to be given the actual feel of ‘the
Prisoner.’ However persistence eventually paid off, and finally in early 2014
the text of El Prisonero had not only been translated into good English, but
maintained the feel of ‘the Prisoner’ series, and was duly despatched to Bieno
Marti in Spain who was very pleased with my work.
The
Prisoner adventure game has now been released, and can be found for download via
the following link:
Be
seeing you.
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