The world is full of unique languages characteristic of different cultures throughout the world, a challenge that translators face when locating a game in other languages.
Such was the case with Neo Cab and an overwhelming inconvenience that was found when translating the game into Italian. This was explained by developer Fabio Bortolotti in an interview with GamesIndustry, also commenting on how a solution was reached working together with the development team.
These were his words:
In case of ambiguity, in Italian, generally, the masculine (pronoun) is simply used. This would have been a great betrayal of the vision (from Neo Cab). But since the game takes place in a kind of near future, we could at least imagine that, in Italian, 20 years from now, gender-neutral pronouns will be invented and used. Therefore, we tried to find a possible solution and wrote a very quick document about the gender nature of the Italian language and what our possible solution was.
We asked the writers: would this serve you? And they said yes. They just had to implement an additional letter in the game (which is the 'schwa', the opposite of 'e', (ɘ)) and it worked. By working with developers, we were able to turn what seemed like an impossible challenge into an opportunity to create a world. It was not an invention of translators, it was a solution found together with developers and writers.
Via.
