A Nice, Family-Friendly Game

When Sony launched the PlayStation 4, they needed a couple of launch titles to sell the system. One of which was “Knack”, an all-ages action platformer that ended up being moderately successful.

Sony’s Arabic game localization efforts were quite limited back then, so even a first-party title like Knack didn’t receive an Arabic localization in any capacity—something unthinkable today for one of the forerunners in Arabic support in the region as a whole.

Come the middle of the console generation, their efforts in the MENA region matured quite a bit. With Knack 2 on the horizon, translating it to Arabic was a no-brainer. But when they did, they called it “شاطر” (Shatir)—roughly “Clever” or “Talented.”

It was quite the (no pun intended) clever localization. One that normally shouldn’t raise any eyebrows, except for one small detail:
Sony does not localize IP names. At all. They consistently transliterate them.

If you’re an Arabic speaker, you’ve already figured out the actual reason behind the decision. A reason so important that it overruled IP consistency guidelines and big corpo legal concerns. But if you’re not, welp, buckle up.

Why it Couldn’t be Transliterated

The thing with transliteration hardliners is that sooner or later, they’re gonna hit a wall.
Starting with another outlier from the above selection, let’s examine how Sony handled localizing the title of “God of War: Ragnarok”.

Due to religious concerns, localizing a title that deals with pantheons is risky enough as is. To avoid further controversy, Sony censored in-game content, as well as avoided any references to godhood in customer-facing content, including the game’s title.

Knack was in a sort of similar, yet different, situation. You only need to check the game’s Arabic Wikipedia page to figure out why.

Hold my hand as you read this back-translation:

Fucked 2 (English: Knack II) is an action platformer video game, released to markets in September 2017 exclusively for the PlayStation 4 system. The first installment of Fucked was released in 2013, and the game supports the Arabic language with dubbing in the Lebanese dialect under the title Shatir 2.

The Wikipedia page for the game, following a blanket ‘don’t localize IP names’ rule, explains exactly why the title wasn’t transliterated.

The verb ‘ناك’ is the past tense of one of the filthiest verbs in Arabic, coming from the root نـ‑ـيـ‑ـك. As you’d assume from a rather conservative region, them’s fighting words.

The Greeks called the specific wall Knack hit “Cacemphaton”—an otherwise innocuous word twisted into something obscene via vowels, enunciation, or in our case, transliteration.

Guidelines Aren’t Everything

Had Sony not budged on transliterating the title, you’d be reading a very different, and probably much more amusing, article.

Considering the game wasn’t only translated, but also dubbed into Arabic, they would have suffered irreparable reputational damage in the region.

A somewhat recent example of what could have been is Microsoft’s “Minecraft Legends”, which was heavily suspected of using machine translation and mocked relentlessly for certain translations, including rendering “Grindstone Golem” as “غوليم الجلاخة”, which back-translates to “Gooning Golem” in many Gulf dialects.

Luckily, Sony listened to their local branch instead of being absolutist about their approach and avoided a total disaster.
But it doesn’t stop your mind from wondering: what if…?