Board Game Arena

Hello - having had a look around all the current guidelines for community translations, I'm still unclear on BGA's stance on the use of pre-existing localizations in community translation.

While it would be common sense and a no-brainer for players and fan translators to use the terminology and exact wording found in physical versions' existing localizations, there is an elephant in the room: rights and legality.

As I see it, having a game itself licensed on BGA doesn't necessarily extend to all the different publishers of that game around the globe, many of which produce their own localized manuals or even components. The BGA community using a local publisher's existing translation of a game's items, concepts and descriptions could even constitute copyright infringement.

Is there any official stance on BGA's part regarding the rights of pre-existing translations? I have a feeling the larger BGA translation community would probably rather not discuss this at all, but I also feel that this is a pretty important discussion to have.

In Dutch Law there is nothing to keep you from using the same translated terms as used in the official translation.
You cannot however copy the entire rulebook without permission, as that would be a breach of copyright law.

I'm a bit unclear about copying cardtexts and other snippets though. I have a feeling they would fall under copyright.
But you can still use the official terms, but not the entire text...

I have a preference for using the official terms, as it will reduce confusion between playing IRL and on BGA.
It also has a lot of value in using BGA to learn a game, then being able to immediately be able to play IRL, and vice versa.

Kaura_ wrote: ↑16 October 2025, 22:51 Is there any official stance on BGA's part regarding the rights of pre-existing translations?

I have found this in the FAQ https://boardgamearena.com/faq?anchor=faq_translations:
"When translating a game, the translator should know the game thoroughly and if possible have a box and rulebook of the game in the destination language to check for consistency."

This an excellent question, and BGA absolutely shouldn’t leave volunteer translators alone with this. The gold standard would be to only publish games when all publishers grant license, not only the one who originally published the game. Maybe that’s what they do - I don’t know. Also, it is possible that the contracts between the original publisher and the local publishers reserve the original publishers right to do so, but I’ve no idea if this is the case.

Apart from that: As you said, using single terms from the game is never a problem, and it is the way to go for translating games, like BGA says in the document Cigma quoted. You are also right in saying that card texts are the main problem. I can only see it from a German law perspective, but I hope it’s a common rule: You can use standard texts like “deal 2 damage” or “get 2 credits”. You can also use single special terms form the game, for example if they don’t use the word credits or gold but something unique to denote money. The same goes for translations of these words or standard texts. But something like “Send the Minotaur to the shadows of hell with a mighty blow” (just made that up) is a problem. You can’t just copy the translation in that case, IMHO, because that would be a copyright infringement, unless there is consent in some form. You’d have to do a translation of your own that differs from the local
publisher’s version.
Edit: Not sure how many games have problematic cards. Flavour texts are regularly excluded in BGA, and in the games I know, the effects are usually described in a very dense and straightforward way which should mostly mean that there are no copyright issues.