It’s where they keep the nuclear wessels

At first, when I heard that eve was worldwide in its player base, I thought nothing of it. There were corps that didn’t speak English well, there were language channels for people that spoke other languages, there was some huge russian alliance I didn’t want to mess with, etc, etc.

It’s been a few months since then, and in three years, four weeks of which were spent on an exchange trip in Germany, the language barrier has never been more of an irritant.

Months ago, I logged onto the WH pos to find a bunch of interceptors flying around our guns, exhausting our missile ammo. I politely asked why they were doing this, and they replied that they were showing us why we needed webbers. After a few more minutes, they started talking amounst eachother in German, and me, with my year and a half of high school German, tried to join. Predictably, I was laughed at in ways that I couldn’t understand.

A few weeks before that, I was able to hold a pleasant conversation for a few minutes with Cold Steel alliance for a few verbal rounds before they defaulted to eve-german and totally lost me.

Ad of course, there was the whole Black Wing incident with the carrier bounce and whatnot, but they knew enough English to be confused for a native speaker. Anyway, language isn’t too much of a problem because in WH space, you rarely see anyone and even rarer see anyone who isn’t trying to kill you before you can say “Wie stehts du?”. So, I’ve attributed the four to five encounters with Russian players in the WH to be entire coincidence.

First, we scanned down a nullsec WH that went to the middle of shadow of xxdeathxx territory. We weakened the WH considerably, so all they could send in was a few frigates. They buzzed us, we ran to the pos, they left, we found one of the wrecks in a sleeper site later on. In hindsight, leaving cans named with insults clumsily translated with an online translator wasn’t the most mature response, especially since we couldn’t find them after I launched them…..

Well, if anyone finds an empty C5 with several cans in clumsy Russian questioning your ancestry, you don’t have to care.

Then, we scanned a neighboring WH with a tower called “cool breese” or something, in Russian. Since we hadn’t yet found a way to dislodge the cans, we left a secure can at the WH exit saying “Please ignore insults” with some spirits and tobacco in it. We checked back in an hour with the can untouched and the WH closed.

Anyway, getting to the actual language portion, I was hauling 500 blocks of compressed ABC out a WH in my trusty itty V when I ran into another Itty V doing presumably the same thing.  I opened a convo to say, essentially, “Hi, don’t shoot me, I’ve got 3 cloaked BSs defending me” while simultaneously asking in corp if there was anyone who could guard me as I moved the last hundred blocks out. After the second paragraph of threats and assurances, the dude informed me that he couldn’t speak english and to please type slower. Immediately switching gears out of embarrassment, I pulled up an online translator and through his two years of english and my typing, we managed to say hi. I friended him, in case I needed his advice or translation.

Only two more russky encounters, stand firm.

First, the time I lost my covops in a covops fight was against two russian dudes, one of which linked a video of a person laughing at me and the other said

“Понятно, это как старый русский говорили в советские дорога Россия вилки вы”

If anyone would mind translating that, it’d be appreciated. Anyway, the last and latest encounter was earlier in the week, when, trying to find an exit, I ran into a c6. Subsequently, I ran into another C6. On the third C6, I was getting irritated but found a dark blood medium POS on the scanner. Taking a quick look, the 1.2 bil tower had a webber array, four large laser turrets and four small laser turrets, several biochemical, polymer reactor arrays, ect. I noticed sister scan probes on the directional and went back to the first c6, jettisoning the can w/ the neighboring WH BMs, figuring that he’d find them eventually and if I saved him some trouble, he might tell us, say, an exit he’d found. Eventually, the same number of scan probes he had been using appeared, and I tried drawing him out in local. No luck was too be had, but as I sat 50km off our WH, I watched as a Minmatar covops uncloaked briefly and jumped to our C5. Convoing the pilot, I said hi, explained that our WH had no exits, and asked if he had found any.

He replied that he didn’t speak english.

After a few short sentences he told me that he was russian, so, with the handy-dandy in game browser I opened a free translation software and translated “Can you understand this?”.

He replied with “your talk crazi”.

At this point, he closed out of the convo and presumably closed the WH. I say presumably because I closed out after him and made a turkey sandwich.

It seems to me that people in an international game are going to need translators at some point, and xxdeath is definitely going to need them come Dust, since I can probably count the number of native russian consolers on one hand with four fingers missing (hyperbole).

It looks to me that there’s a niche for people who speak two languages, with a possibility of a “translators channel”, or maybe it’s the foreign corps duty for them to have an English speaker. Or is it just me, and everyone else never has to talk with someone who can’t talk to them? I mean, I’d pay for someone to help me explain a problem to a dude in Deutschland. Not very much, but I’m sure Entity would trade several ships for a translator if he was trying to buy officer mods from a lucky 10/10 plex runner.

Disclaimer: I in no way resemble, know or otherwise interact with Entity. Also, I tried asking in the Russian language channel for translation services and they ignored me >.>

сейф мухи