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Brood War Korean Translations

314 points by todsacerdoti 2y ago

ZeWaka 2y ago
I wonder how well AI audio generation would work here, to produce a voiceover video like the original input.
jayd16 2y ago
Neat. I wonder what Google Translate uses these days and if its gotten or will receive an update to a new LLM.
- tkgally 2y ago
  I’ve been wondering that, too, for the past two years, ever since it became clear that the then-new GPT-4 could translate better than Google Translate could. A lot of people still use Google Translate because that’s what comes up in Google requests for translations; also, it seems to be the translation engine built into Google Docs. However, properly prompted LLMs are definitely better than the previous generation of dedicated machine translation, which I’m afraid is what Google Translate still seems to be.
tetrisgm 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  The author mentions just downloading the audio track. That's a lot less data than downloading any video at all. ;)
  - jordigh 2y ago
    -f 140 is the right yt-dlp parameter to get just the audio.
    - woodson 2y ago
      I think it's just "-x". It should select the best audio quality automatically.
  - amatecha 2y ago
    Oh, I missed that! In that case, yt-dlp -x <url> .. or optionally to convert it to mp3 on the fly: yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 <url> .. or doing so with also the best audio quality available: yt-dlp -f 'ba' -x --audio-format mp3 <url>
sharkjacobs 2y ago
I get that it's "wrong" but I really like the translation of "natural expansion" to "courtyard"
- rollcat 2y ago
  I like "front yard", it makes sense for SC2 where some recent maps do have a back base (usually with fewer minerals and/or gas). These "backyard bases" are also often encountered on team maps; deciding which player takes the front is strategic. P&T can build batteries and bunkers together, but Z gets a buff on creep and can spread it forward much faster.
jaeyounkg 2y ago
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 안마당 빌드 (12 courtyard build) is actually 12 앞마당 빌드 (12 frontyard build), which might have been more understandable to BW players. Similarly 투에처리 빌드 (processing-at-two build? makes no sense lol) should have been transcribed 투해처리 빌드 (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/generation_utils#transformers.SequenceBiasLogitsProcessor https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/internal/generat...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bee_rider 2y ago
  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.
  - sushid 2y ago
    No, Protoss is just 토스, which is just hangulization of "Toss" aka Protoss.
  - jaeyounkg 2y ago
    Haha, no I acutually never associated this with the English word toss lol.
  - asdasdsddd 2y ago
    Half of the words in the Korean blurb are just romanizations. Even build is just bil-deu
- 2y ago
nfRfqX5n 2y ago
Pretty cool and shows a clear issue I’ve seen across any LLM. the language and grammar is so formal/robotic
- int_19h 2y ago
  This depends a lot on how the model was fine-tuned. There are many LLaMA tunes that are not at all formal, for example. With ChatGPT specifically, some forceful prompting can make it sound much better.
mock-possum 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Is it how many workers you have when you build that building
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- zzlk 2y ago
  It's the supply of when you should build it. In the early game it's essentially how many workers you have.
- SynasterBeiter 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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.
TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
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 https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Ee_Han_Timing
- debo_ 2y ago
  Artosis was doing this with historical games and then he started getting DMCAed from the copyright holders of the original broadcasts.
  - TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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_ 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Yes I had to read that a few times to understand it. Much like the google translations.
- jfim 2y ago
  The author also used domain specific language when they meant jargon.
  - zellyn 2y ago
    I noticed this too, although to be fair, “domain specific language” is a remarkably good definition of “jargon”
  - adamtaylor_13 2y ago
    Domain specific language, to a person outside that domain IS jargon.
- gavindean90 2y ago
  I too got thrown off by what they said. Not that the article was really worse off for it, but it took me a moment to parse the meaning.
allcentury 2y ago
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 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
vippy 2y ago
ok but where are the vods?
Unearned5161 2y ago
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 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 :(
- rvba 2y ago
  Artosis (the person who is the English speaking commentator in the video) is in general quite technical - especially when it comes to the Terran fraction (one of the three fractions in the game; the other is Protoss - that you see in the video, and third is Zerg). However Korea had a much bigger scene, with lots of players, coaches, teams - so they probably have more institutional knowledge. So the suspicion, or assumption is that Artois can be the high-school coach level, but there are university coaches and professional coaches, who perhaps are even better. And they are better since in Korea Brood War had much bigger monetary backing - and social backing too. If everyone in your highschool played the same game, there would be more players. Then if there were around 12 (or more) professional teams, they would find more talent, but also better coaches. And it's not that Koreans dominated completely, players from other countries could win against them too, but usually they would not, especially as a whole match consisted often of few games (usually: best of 3 (so you need to win two games to proceed), best of 5 for finals). To rephrase this differently, the two main English speaking comentators nowadays seem to be Artosis, who is technical and the second is "Falcon Paladin" channel, who is entertaining and commentary is often "what he sees on the screen" (with no, or sometimes even bad takes about strategy - or explanations "why we see what we see"). If Korea has 50 such commentators, then probably some will be entertaining and some will be very technical. On a side note, Starcraft Brood War is not only very well balanced for play and entertaining to play - it is also very entertaining to watch, since units are relatively distinct and it at least partially avoids the "unit blob" problem (where one group of units attacks another group of units) due to existence of various units that make area damage (for example.. tanks). And yes I know that in big battles there are blobs, but at pro level they generally work really hard to spread the units across the battlefield - even if the units are primitive and have bad pathing. I digress, just wanted to say that the game is simply pleasant to watch - because it has a certain clarity.
starcraftgamer 2y ago
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://www.youtube.com/@jinjinBW https://m.youtube.com/@StarCastTVENG https://m.youtube.com/@StarCastTVENG
egurns 2y ago
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 2y ago
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.
- jordigh 2y ago
  With Spanish we have the added complexity that there are different linguistic traditions around the world. For example, in Mexico I learned "depurar", an existing Spanish word that closely fits the meaning of "debug". However, many Spanish speakers simply say "debuguear", just directly borrowing the English word. In Mexico I also learned "desempeño" to describe the performance of a computer or software, but in Argentina I've heard "el performance" to say the same. I think the most common thing is to just use English loanwords without trying to find existing Spanish words that fit the meaning.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  Why would sharding and hash be difficult to translate when they use metaphors that are easy to visualize in a "physical" context ?
  - MichaelDickens 2y ago
    I think the words' metaphorical meanings don't help much unless you already know what they mean. If you heard the word "sharding" for the first time and all you knew was that it had something to do with computers, I think you'd have a hard time guessing that it means "partitioning rows of a database across multiple servers to reduce load".
nicois 2y ago
Nit-picking, but a high signal to noise ratio is desirable, indicating low levels of noise compared to signal, not the reverse.
spongebobism 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
> Najdork variation I think OP doesn't like the Najdorf Sicilian... or is this some meme opening I don't know about?
jboggan 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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, 拆 = extension, 夹 = pincer, 刺 and 觑 = 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__ 2y ago
  Najdork is now headcanon.
gverrilla 2y ago
> "Starting off the most affluently" is an awkward and verbose way to say "this is an economic opener/build." Why would it be awkward and verbose?
leoc 2y ago
This is great work, but really it seems that anyone who is a truly dedicated Brood War amateur should knuckle under and learn Korean. It really isn’t that unapproachable: with a decent approach (try https://refold.la https://refold.la ) you should be able to get somewhere useful in maybe “just” 3000 hours.
jorgesborges 2y ago
I've always wanted translations of Korean game broadcasts (GSL/ASL). I'm curious what balance their commentators strike between game analysis and entertainment, and whether there's a disparity between Korean and Foreigner game analysis. Do they have a Tastosis?
diziet 2y ago
I was able to understand the Google Translate version well, but I am very familiar with the intricacies of BW and zerg 12hatch openers. Chatgpt and Claude did an incredible job translating the korean text: Claude: Today I'll teach you about the 12 Hatchery build. I'll explain the types of 12 Hatchery builds, their advantages and disadvantages, and the build orders in a simple but detailed way. Against Protoss, this is the build you use when you want to start with the most economic advantage. Against Terran, there are several builds you can do with 12 Hatchery, so I'll explain some of the most commonly used builds. The first is the two-hatchery build that starts with 12 Hatchery: 12 Hatchery 11 Spawning Pool 10 Gas This build uses early gas, and it's often used when you want to quickly transition into a three-hatchery build with three gas bases. The second build is: 12 Hatchery 12 Pool 12 Gas This build allows for moderately fast tech tree and moderately fast three-hatchery expansion. This build is commonly known as the "safe three-hatchery" build, and you can think of it as a build that enables both quick Mutalisks and quick third base.
ynniv 2y ago
FWIW, I asked Claude to translate and compare its translation to this as well as Google Translate. I then pasted top threads from this page, and asked it to retranslate the original. First: Hello, today I'll be teaching you about the 12 Inner Base build. I'll explain the types of 12 Inner Base builds, their advantages and disadvantages, and give you a detailed but simple breakdown of the build order. Against Protoss, this is a build you use when you want to start with a more economical opening. Against Terran, there are several builds you can do with a 12 Inner Base. I'll explain some of the most commonly used builds. The first is the Two Hatchery build that starts with 12 Inner Base. The order is: - 12 Inner Base - 11 Spawning Pool - 10 Gas This build utilizes early gas. It's commonly used when you want to quickly transition into Three Hatchery play with three gas bases. The second build is: - 12 Inner Base - 12 Pool - 12 Gas This gives you moderately fast tech tree progression and moderately fast Three Hatchery expansion. This build is commonly referred to as the 'Safe Three Hatch.' You can think of it as a build that gives you both fast Mutalisks and fast three base play. >>> Then, post HN comments: Hello, today I'll teach you about the 12 Natural build [note: actually 앞마당/frontyard in Korean StarCraft terminology, seemingly transcribed as 안마당]. I'll explain the types of 12 Natural builds, their advantages and disadvantages, and give you a simple but detailed breakdown of the build order. Against Protoss [토스/Toss in Korean], this is a build you use when you want the most economic opening. Against Terran, there are several builds possible with a 12 Natural. I'll explain some of the most commonly used ones. The first is the Two-Hatchery build [투에처리, should be 투해처리] that starts with 12 Natural. The order is: - 12 supply: Natural expansion - 11 supply: Spawning Pool - 10 supply: Gas This build utilizes early gas. It's commonly used when you want to quickly transition into a Three-Hatchery build with three gas bases. The second build timing is: - 12 supply: Natural - 12 supply: Pool - 12 supply: Gas This gives you a moderately fast tech tree and moderately fast Three-Hatchery expansion. This build is commonly known as the 'Safe Three-Hatch' [안 3에처리 in Korean], and you can think of it as a build that enables both fast Mutalisks and fast third base.
0xedd 2y ago
[dead]

314 points by todsacerdoti 2y ago

ZeWaka 2y ago

I wonder how well AI audio generation would work here, to produce a voiceover video like the original input.

jayd16 2y ago

Neat. I wonder what Google Translate uses these days and if its gotten or will receive an update to a new LLM.

tkgally 2y ago
I’ve been wondering that, too, for the past two years, ever since it became clear that the then-new GPT-4 could translate better than Google Translate could. A lot of people still use Google Translate because that’s what comes up in Google requests for translations; also, it seems to be the translation engine built into Google Docs. However, properly prompted LLMs are definitely better than the previous generation of dedicated machine translation, which I’m afraid is what Google Translate still seems to be.

tetrisgm 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
The author mentions just downloading the audio track. That's a lot less data than downloading any video at all. ;)
- jordigh 2y ago
  -f 140 is the right yt-dlp parameter to get just the audio.
  - woodson 2y ago
    I think it's just "-x". It should select the best audio quality automatically.
- amatecha 2y ago
  Oh, I missed that! In that case, yt-dlp -x <url> .. or optionally to convert it to mp3 on the fly: yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 <url> .. or doing so with also the best audio quality available: yt-dlp -f 'ba' -x --audio-format mp3 <url>

sharkjacobs 2y ago

I get that it's "wrong" but I really like the translation of "natural expansion" to "courtyard"

rollcat 2y ago
I like "front yard", it makes sense for SC2 where some recent maps do have a back base (usually with fewer minerals and/or gas). These "backyard bases" are also often encountered on team maps; deciding which player takes the front is strategic. P&T can build batteries and bunkers together, but Z gets a buff on creep and can spread it forward much faster.

jaeyounkg 2y ago

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 안마당 빌드 (12 courtyard build) is actually 12 앞마당 빌드 (12 frontyard build), which might have been more understandable to BW players. Similarly 투에처리 빌드 (processing-at-two build? makes no sense lol) should have been transcribed 투해처리 빌드 (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/generation_utils#transformers.SequenceBiasLogitsProcessor https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/internal/generat...

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bee_rider 2y ago
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.
- sushid 2y ago
  No, Protoss is just 토스, which is just hangulization of "Toss" aka Protoss.
- jaeyounkg 2y ago
  Haha, no I acutually never associated this with the English word toss lol.
- asdasdsddd 2y ago
  Half of the words in the Korean blurb are just romanizations. Even build is just bil-deu
2y ago

nfRfqX5n 2y ago

Pretty cool and shows a clear issue I’ve seen across any LLM. the language and grammar is so formal/robotic

int_19h 2y ago
This depends a lot on how the model was fine-tuned. There are many LLaMA tunes that are not at all formal, for example. With ChatGPT specifically, some forceful prompting can make it sound much better.

mock-possum 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
Is it how many workers you have when you build that building
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
zzlk 2y ago
It's the supply of when you should build it. In the early game it's essentially how many workers you have.
SynasterBeiter 2y ago
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 2y ago
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.

TheAceOfHearts 2y ago

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 https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Ee_Han_Timing

debo_ 2y ago
Artosis was doing this with historical games and then he started getting DMCAed from the copyright holders of the original broadcasts.
- TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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_ 2y ago

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 2y ago
Yes I had to read that a few times to understand it. Much like the google translations.
jfim 2y ago
The author also used domain specific language when they meant jargon.
- zellyn 2y ago
  I noticed this too, although to be fair, “domain specific language” is a remarkably good definition of “jargon”
- adamtaylor_13 2y ago
  Domain specific language, to a person outside that domain IS jargon.
gavindean90 2y ago
I too got thrown off by what they said. Not that the article was really worse off for it, but it took me a moment to parse the meaning.

allcentury 2y ago

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 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

vippy 2y ago

ok but where are the vods?

Unearned5161 2y ago

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 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 :(

rvba 2y ago
Artosis (the person who is the English speaking commentator in the video) is in general quite technical - especially when it comes to the Terran fraction (one of the three fractions in the game; the other is Protoss - that you see in the video, and third is Zerg). However Korea had a much bigger scene, with lots of players, coaches, teams - so they probably have more institutional knowledge. So the suspicion, or assumption is that Artois can be the high-school coach level, but there are university coaches and professional coaches, who perhaps are even better. And they are better since in Korea Brood War had much bigger monetary backing - and social backing too. If everyone in your highschool played the same game, there would be more players. Then if there were around 12 (or more) professional teams, they would find more talent, but also better coaches. And it's not that Koreans dominated completely, players from other countries could win against them too, but usually they would not, especially as a whole match consisted often of few games (usually: best of 3 (so you need to win two games to proceed), best of 5 for finals). To rephrase this differently, the two main English speaking comentators nowadays seem to be Artosis, who is technical and the second is "Falcon Paladin" channel, who is entertaining and commentary is often "what he sees on the screen" (with no, or sometimes even bad takes about strategy - or explanations "why we see what we see"). If Korea has 50 such commentators, then probably some will be entertaining and some will be very technical. On a side note, Starcraft Brood War is not only very well balanced for play and entertaining to play - it is also very entertaining to watch, since units are relatively distinct and it at least partially avoids the "unit blob" problem (where one group of units attacks another group of units) due to existence of various units that make area damage (for example.. tanks). And yes I know that in big battles there are blobs, but at pro level they generally work really hard to spread the units across the battlefield - even if the units are primitive and have bad pathing. I digress, just wanted to say that the game is simply pleasant to watch - because it has a certain clarity.

starcraftgamer 2y ago

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://www.youtube.com/@jinjinBW https://m.youtube.com/@StarCastTVENG https://m.youtube.com/@StarCastTVENG

egurns 2y ago

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 2y ago

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.

jordigh 2y ago
With Spanish we have the added complexity that there are different linguistic traditions around the world. For example, in Mexico I learned "depurar", an existing Spanish word that closely fits the meaning of "debug". However, many Spanish speakers simply say "debuguear", just directly borrowing the English word. In Mexico I also learned "desempeño" to describe the performance of a computer or software, but in Argentina I've heard "el performance" to say the same. I think the most common thing is to just use English loanwords without trying to find existing Spanish words that fit the meaning.
BlueTemplar 2y ago
Why would sharding and hash be difficult to translate when they use metaphors that are easy to visualize in a "physical" context ?
- MichaelDickens 2y ago
  I think the words' metaphorical meanings don't help much unless you already know what they mean. If you heard the word "sharding" for the first time and all you knew was that it had something to do with computers, I think you'd have a hard time guessing that it means "partitioning rows of a database across multiple servers to reduce load".

nicois 2y ago

Nit-picking, but a high signal to noise ratio is desirable, indicating low levels of noise compared to signal, not the reverse.

spongebobism 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago

> Najdork variation I think OP doesn't like the Najdorf Sicilian... or is this some meme opening I don't know about?

jboggan 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago

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, 拆 = extension, 夹 = pincer, 刺 and 觑 = 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__ 2y ago
Najdork is now headcanon.

gverrilla 2y ago

> "Starting off the most affluently" is an awkward and verbose way to say "this is an economic opener/build." Why would it be awkward and verbose?

leoc 2y ago

This is great work, but really it seems that anyone who is a truly dedicated Brood War amateur should knuckle under and learn Korean. It really isn’t that unapproachable: with a decent approach (try https://refold.la https://refold.la ) you should be able to get somewhere useful in maybe “just” 3000 hours.

jorgesborges 2y ago

I've always wanted translations of Korean game broadcasts (GSL/ASL). I'm curious what balance their commentators strike between game analysis and entertainment, and whether there's a disparity between Korean and Foreigner game analysis. Do they have a Tastosis?

diziet 2y ago

I was able to understand the Google Translate version well, but I am very familiar with the intricacies of BW and zerg 12hatch openers. Chatgpt and Claude did an incredible job translating the korean text: Claude: Today I'll teach you about the 12 Hatchery build. I'll explain the types of 12 Hatchery builds, their advantages and disadvantages, and the build orders in a simple but detailed way. Against Protoss, this is the build you use when you want to start with the most economic advantage. Against Terran, there are several builds you can do with 12 Hatchery, so I'll explain some of the most commonly used builds. The first is the two-hatchery build that starts with 12 Hatchery: 12 Hatchery 11 Spawning Pool 10 Gas This build uses early gas, and it's often used when you want to quickly transition into a three-hatchery build with three gas bases. The second build is: 12 Hatchery 12 Pool 12 Gas This build allows for moderately fast tech tree and moderately fast three-hatchery expansion. This build is commonly known as the "safe three-hatchery" build, and you can think of it as a build that enables both quick Mutalisks and quick third base.

ynniv 2y ago

FWIW, I asked Claude to translate and compare its translation to this as well as Google Translate. I then pasted top threads from this page, and asked it to retranslate the original. First: Hello, today I'll be teaching you about the 12 Inner Base build. I'll explain the types of 12 Inner Base builds, their advantages and disadvantages, and give you a detailed but simple breakdown of the build order. Against Protoss, this is a build you use when you want to start with a more economical opening. Against Terran, there are several builds you can do with a 12 Inner Base. I'll explain some of the most commonly used builds. The first is the Two Hatchery build that starts with 12 Inner Base. The order is: - 12 Inner Base - 11 Spawning Pool - 10 Gas This build utilizes early gas. It's commonly used when you want to quickly transition into Three Hatchery play with three gas bases. The second build is: - 12 Inner Base - 12 Pool - 12 Gas This gives you moderately fast tech tree progression and moderately fast Three Hatchery expansion. This build is commonly referred to as the 'Safe Three Hatch.' You can think of it as a build that gives you both fast Mutalisks and fast three base play. >>> Then, post HN comments: Hello, today I'll teach you about the 12 Natural build [note: actually 앞마당/frontyard in Korean StarCraft terminology, seemingly transcribed as 안마당]. I'll explain the types of 12 Natural builds, their advantages and disadvantages, and give you a simple but detailed breakdown of the build order. Against Protoss [토스/Toss in Korean], this is a build you use when you want the most economic opening. Against Terran, there are several builds possible with a 12 Natural. I'll explain some of the most commonly used ones. The first is the Two-Hatchery build [투에처리, should be 투해처리] that starts with 12 Natural. The order is: - 12 supply: Natural expansion - 11 supply: Spawning Pool - 10 supply: Gas This build utilizes early gas. It's commonly used when you want to quickly transition into a Three-Hatchery build with three gas bases. The second build timing is: - 12 supply: Natural - 12 supply: Pool - 12 supply: Gas This gives you a moderately fast tech tree and moderately fast Three-Hatchery expansion. This build is commonly known as the 'Safe Three-Hatch' [안 3에처리 in Korean], and you can think of it as a build that enables both fast Mutalisks and fast third base.

0xedd 2y ago

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