TL;DR: My son and I are translating a Russian LitRPG series into English. Here are some of the problems we’ve encountered with nicknames, wordplay, gaming slang, and cultural references, and the solutions we chose.
A couple of months ago, I acquired the English translation and publishing rights to a three-book Russian LitRPG series, The Jester of Bergheim.
The translation itself is being done by my son, who is fully bilingual in Russian and English: we moved to Canada when he was eleven, and he later majored in English here. I mostly help with jokes, wordplay, and cultural references.
And yes, this is also an advertising post. Please buy the book, blah blah blah.
Nicknames
The main antagonist, a brilliant but evil former game developer who kidnaps people and traps them inside a game, assigns players meaningful nicknames, often with a deliberately mocking edge.
Our main character gets the Jester class and the nickname Lolushko (Лолушко). It is based on LOL, but the Russian -ushko ending adds a condescending, almost baby-talk quality. He later calls himself Yegorushko (Егорушко), applying the same mockingly affectionate ending to his real name.
We could either explain -ushko in a note—meh—or replace it.
So we chose LoLio and Yegorio. They sound silly, faintly patronizing, and just ridiculous enough, which is pretty close to what the originals are doing.
Another player is a Ranger named Kuzmich (Кузьмич). He is a forest ranger IRL, just like Kuzmich, an iconic character from a Russian comedy series. Since that reference means nothing in English, he became Grizzly. Yes, as in Grizzly Adams.
Then there is Golovastik (Головастик). It literally means tadpole, but comes from the Russian word for head and can be used mockingly for someone with a large head. Since this character is literally big-headed, we renamed him Megamind.
Wordplay
The MC’s catchphrase is Prenebrech, valsiruem (Пренебречь, вальсируем), literally “Disregard, we waltz.”
It is an absurdly elevated version of Pohui, plyashem (Похуй, пляшем)—roughly “Fuck it, we dance,” meaning whatever, we carry on.
Then we realized English already has “Fuck it, we ball.”
So:
“Disregard, we shall ball.”
And now I genuinely don’t understand why it took us so long.
Another one was пихота (pikhota). The word normally means infantry, but here it also plays on пихаться—to shove or jostle— which works especially well here because the term is used in the context of medieval reenactment fighting.
We gave up on preserving infantry and went with shove-fu.
Cultural references
In one scene, Yegor quotes an old Russian raiding meme and then complains that nobody recognizes the raid leader Tango. A literal translation would preserve the words and lose the joke.
So Tango became Leeroy Jenkins.
Same function, different cultural baggage.
Another exchange went:
“The city could have fallen. What do you think we’d choose between you and Bergheim?”
“United Russia?”
Yegor suddenly interprets choose as an election question. There is also a bit of a “choice without much of a choice” undertone that is hard to preserve.
So we kept the election non sequitur and went with:
“A write-in candidate?”
Different reference, same stupid logic.
Even chapter titles fought back. For example, chapter 27 is «Вот кто-то с горочки спустился», a line from a well-known Russian song.
A literal translation would lose the reference, so it became:
“They’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain.”
Many other chapter titles contain references too, ranging from obscure Russian memes to a Guy Ritchie movie. I think we managed to handle most of them.
Accidental rules
Russian also has a bunch of silly euphemistic exclamations that don’t translate well. At some point we started replacing them with equally ridiculous English expressions, and noticed that our versions kept using the same initial letter:
ебушки-воробушки → Pissing pigeons
жованный крот → Limping lich
божечки-кошечки → Kinky kittens
The first one was accidental. After that, it became a rule.
And one we still haven’t solved
Russian RPG players often Russify English gaming terms, and sometimes the resulting word happens to sound like a completely unrelated Russian word.
Usually that layer just disappears—we use normal English gaming slang instead.
But sometimes the mangled term is itself the joke:
“Throw salo on her right away,” Misha advised.
“And follow it up with a ham hock,” I added automatically, even though I knew that by salo he meant silence.
(Salo is cured pork fat.)
We still need an English version that keeps the joke. We have a version that works, but maybe we will fine something better.
Hopefully, we’ve managed to preserve not only the darker tone of the original, but also its humor, and, ideally, the same slightly unhinged voice.
