Solving Language Barriers for the LCS

pyroHedge·Feb 22, 2015·1 votes·974 views

The LCS is becoming more global, and with it has come some language problems. I could be wrong about this, but it seems to me that if a Korean comes to the NA LCS, that person is not only forced to learn the new culture, but the onus to solve the communication issues is entirely their's. I'm wondering if there's a better way.

Here's one suggestion. Rather than have the non-English speaker be fully responsible for bridging the language gap, have the whole team help by learning certain League-specific key words in the other person's language. This way the non-native speaker can easily pick out key words, like ward or dragon, and therefore has more energy to put towards playing better and understanding the rest of the directions.

Some suggestions for words the English speakers should learn in the non-English speaker's native language:

Dragon, Baron, Tower/Turret, Inhibitor, Nexus, Creep/Minions, Monsters, Bush, Vision Ward, Sight Ward, Scan, Baron Buff, Dragon Buff, Red Buff, Blue Buff, Support, ADC, Jungler, Top Laner, Mid Laner, gank, lane, base, back, push (lane), freeze (lane), flee/run, attack/go-in/engage, defend (like an objective), help.

In general I think proper names (like champions, abilities, or summoners) should remain in English. Additionally, I would argue that Top, Bot, Mid, and Jungle all stay English because by and large those words are extremely short and therefore efficient during a game. I'm not sure what to do with CC and CS, though I'm inclined to think they should remain as they would sound in English, again due to their brevity.

The above list is exactly 30 words and shouldn't be that difficult to learn and memorize (though I'd image remember to use the other language for those words would be significantly more challenging).

So anyone have thoughts on this? Good idea? Bad idea? Not worth it idea? Should a slate of words (like those above) just be converted into a standard language (kind of like how in music all terms are written in Italian) for all teams to use? I'm really sad that some of the players who were brave enough to make the jump to a new region are facing as many challenges as they are, and I'm trying to think of ways to make it easier to make that jump.

2 Comments

Joesus ChristFeb 22, 20151 votes

this isnt really a LCS thing to regulate, it is up to the teams to handle internally. i think most teams do something similar to this.

you also have to consider when 1 non-English speaker comes into a predominantly English speaking team, it makes more sense for 1 person to learn the team's native language, than for 4 people to learn a foreign language.

if you have a team that predominantly speaks Korean, the opposite would be true(see Winterfox). and if a NA player went to a KR team, you wouldnt expect all 4 korean players to learn english, you would expect the NA player to learn Korean.

while i like this sort of idea, you still have problems conveying more complex ideas very quickly(although a lot of the overall strategy is done off the rift from what i understand). and a lot of teams do have in-house translators. but regardless, this sort of thing is left up to the individual teams to handle.

pyroHedgeFeb 23, 20151 votes

My intention originally was for the teams to handle this, so we should probably focus on that. I just thought about choosing a standard as I was writing and wondered about people's thoughts on it.

Concerning teams, though, the idea certainly isn't for four players to learn a language rather than one. Instead I'm suggesting that four players learn a mere 30 words while the one player learns the other couple thousand.

From a comprehension perspective, if a player says "I'm going to gank bot and if we're successful we'll hit dragon," a non-native English speaker might pick out some choice words, like "going to" and "successful" and "hit," but "...going to...successful...hit" isn't very clear. However, if the key words were known, even if no other keyword was understood the sentence would still read "...gank bot...dragon" which one might be able to guess the meaning. Moreover, as any foreign language teacher will tell you, learning a language is significantly easier if you can put it in context. So understanding "going to," "hit," and "successful" is a lot easier if you have context around them, which in turn makes learning the overall language easier.

The bottom line for me is that this is a team sport and the effort to integrate someone should be a team activity. From what I read all teams are working hard to make the foreigners feel at home here. But I think this could be a reasonable (though not necessarily easy) change that would have a dramatic impact on in game communication.

Again, though, those are my feelings. I feel you may have misunderstood me initially more than flat out disagreed. So I'm trying to clarify rather than insist this is a great idea.