Brood War Korean Translations
48 comments
·January 17, 2025jaeyounkg
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/generat...
chongli
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
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
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
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.
bee_rider
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.
asdasdsddd
Half of the words in the Korean blurb are just romanizations. Even build is just bil-deu
jaeyounkg
Haha, no I acutually never associated this with the English word toss lol.
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leshokunin
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.
_dark_matter_
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.
jfim
The author also used domain specific language when they meant jargon.
flerchin
Yes I had to read that a few times to understand it. Much like the google translations.
bee_rider
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?
stackghost
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
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) :).
TulliusCicero
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
Doesn't it mean you build your expansion once you have 12 worker units?
SynasterBeiter
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.
gs17
> 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
That would be just a flex or a joke or something, right?
TulliusCicero
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
narcindin
Is it how many workers you have when you build that building
zzlk
It's the supply of when you should build it. In the early game it's essentially how many workers you have.
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amatecha
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>
That will download up to 720p quality.
doctor_phil
The author mentions just downloading the audio track. That's a lot less data than downloading any video at all. ;)
spongebobism
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.
allcentury
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.
nicois
Nit-picking, but a high signal to noise ratio is desirable, indicating low levels of noise compared to signal, not the reverse.
starcraftgamer
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).
sharkjacobs
I get that it's "wrong" but I really like the translation of "natural expansion" to "courtyard"
TheAceOfHearts
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.
karmakaze
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.
debo_
Artosis was doing this with historical games and then he started getting DMCAed from the copyright holders of the original broadcasts.
TheAceOfHearts
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.
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.