Though Baba Is You (@babaisyou) ships with its UI translated into a variety of languages, including both Traditional and Simplified Chinese, the rest of the game is widely understood to be unlocalizable. The mechanics of Baba Is You are, after all, driven by the slippery, edge-casey semantics of the English language. For any other written language to serve the same purpose as English in Baba Is You, the meanings of the words in its vocabulary would have to match their counterparts in English vocabulary 1:1, at which point it would entirely cease to be a separate language—it would simply be a cipher of English.
And yet, it almost doesn’t matter. The English words that define so much of the gameplay mechanics of Baba Is You fit a grammar that is not English, exactly—the word “HAS”, for example, has a very specific meaning ingame very different from how I am using it in this sentence—and exploring the nuances of this grammar in the context of solving puzzles is one of the great joys of the game. That’s one of the reasons why this game is nonetheless beloved in many non-English speaking countries, where the ingame shaky-text animated sprites for “SHIFT” and “EMPTY” might as well just be a triangle and a circle respectively.
That hasn’t stopped modder LeavingLeaves from trying to translate the game’s sprites into Simplified Chinese, however, and the results are striking and gorgeous. What’s remarkable is how the modder sacrifices intelligibility for precision in their translation—unlike the game’s official Simplified Chinese translation, which is comprised of common words in modern vernacular, this tileset uses a lot of obscure, even occasionally archaic characters to match as closely as possible what the words actually do ingame.
The character used for BABA, for example, is 皅, pronounced “ba”—a character so obscure I had great difficulty typing it in this sentence: handwriting IMEs do not include it in the list of modern words their OCR algorithms scan for, and pinyin IMEs bury it deep in the list of possible results. Compare this with the 巴used in the official localized UI, another dephoneticization of “ba ba” which is so common a five year old could read it—and consequently could mean any of a bajillion things not suggested by the English “Baba”. The translation in the mod is less ambiguous, but also impenetrable to anyone who is not a student of ancient Chinese poetry.
为 (為 in Traditional Chinese) for IS, as well—oh man, this deserves extra attention, since IS is the most important word tile in the game. Look, 是 is right there, it’s very common and remarkably close, it’s more than good enough—in fact, the official Chinese name for this game is 巴巴是你, a literal translation of “Baba Is You” that leaves no ambiguity. But this translator went above and beyond to use 为 instead, to go the extra mile to capture the smallest nuances of the English word “is”. You see, the only difference between 是 and “is” is that 是 is a mere statement of identity: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is a wrestler and 巨石强森是个摔角手, but while you can say Dwayne Johnson is Black Adam in the 2022 Black Adam movie, it is factually incorrect to say 巨石强森是黑亚当. That’s where you need other identity verbs, like 当 or 为.
90% of the time, 为 more accurately describes what the IS tile actually does ingame than even the English word “is”—it leaves no confusion as to why a line of tiles that spells 墙为钥 (WALL IS KEY) immediately transforms every wall in the level into a key. But in one very important edge case, the titular BABA IS YOU, 为 is a poorer translation than 是, because it makes inscrutable one of the game’s most memorable failure conditions: ego death. You see, if you break all of the IS YOU clauses that exist in each level—usually a single instance of BABA IS YOU—the game suddenly ends, cutting out the music with an ominous ambient droning noise. This is not death, per se. Baba—or whatever you replaced BABA with—is still alive, right where you left them. It is simply not true anymore that Baba is you. And, in fact, nothing is you. If nothing is you, you don’t exist. Simple to explain in English, relatively straightfoward with 是, nonsensical with 为, and maddeningly impossible to explain in any other language that frames the act of existing (and the absence of a statement of existence) in a different way.
At the same time, in describing better what IS actually does in terms of the game mechanics, 为 completely changes what IS means. Translated back into English, this mod becomes more like BABA AS YOU, or BABA BECOMES YOU. That’s just as thought-provoking about the relationship between ingame avatar and player, and almost as existentially terrifying, as the mechanic of ego death.
I am positive the translator knew this, and went with 为 anyway. That’s emblematic of the quirkily maximalist approach to this mod.
What does this mod gain from such a novel localization strategy? Well, for one, it succinctly compresses each tile into a single Chinese character—something the shitty Chinese knockoffs of Baba Is You fail to do—which is important, because multiple Chinese characters crammed into a square are at best hard to read, and at worst ambiguous (many Chinese characters are comprised of two to four other Chinese characters adjacent to each other in a square). But even more important is how it preserves Baba Is You’s thematic tone.
The characters are calligraphed in the same messy, handwritten stop-motion style as the original English, creating an effect that conveys whimsy and improvisational playfulness in as culturally familiar a manner to Chinese players as it does to Western ones. But the words themselves, a mix of casual, conversational vernacular characters in the less than a century old written language of Simplified Chinese and the ancient and inscrutable vocabulary of Classical Chinese, carry tremendous gravitas, appropriate to the events of awe-inspiring, cosmic scale that transpire in the game’s later puzzles as a consequence of their open-ended semantics.
Aligned in neat rows and columns like a Buddhist sutra, these simple and unbelievably concise sentences define and alter the very laws of the game’s universe. They feel like magic spells because they are magic spells. A game that already plays like reading ancient Chinese poetry feels now is, itself, transformed into Chinese poetry.
