Thanks to Vsevolod Zoubarev, there is now a Russian translation of Metamorphoses. I find this very exciting, though I cannot actually read a word of it myself…
To pass along the links from his email, in case anyone wants to try it:
Link to the archive with the game, short manual and the options.txt file
Link to the entry on the translator’s blog (in Russian)
Discussion on the local IF forum (which I can sort of make out with Google Translate…)
Cool. :)
This is astonishing timing. My wife Mary is a former Russian translator, and we are working through Jimmy Maher and Valentine Koptelsev of the Russian IF community to choose a Russian IF for Mary to translate into English.
If Mary can give you any help with any of the Russian language material you’d like to understand wrt Metamorphoses, let us know. Mary and I share the same email address.
The Russian IF community is small but bold, and what they lack in skill, they make up in enthusiasm. However, none of these people, as far as I know, are professional writers, so the translation is a very amateurish, verbatim one, and (coupled with the intrinsic wordiness of Russian) doesn’t capture the charm and feel of the original at all. Not to belittle their effort, but this is what it reads like to me:
“You wake up in silence. The raps, bangs and shouts, which didn’t let you fall asleep half the night, have disappeared. The air is cold, it smells like something burnt. The experiments of your teacher had to end, but with what result?
Something oscillates at the edge of your conscience — the memories of restless dreams…
Then you understand. You have been sent yet one more time. The taste of ash on your lips, the sand in the eyes. And you close your eyes…”