In 2008, Mortis Ghost made a game with his friend, composer Alias Conrad Coldwood. It was a surreal roleplaying game about a baseball player fighting ghosts called Off. He shared it for free on a French-speaking forum, where it garnered a small audience. One player was a French artist who was inspired to make a piece of fan art, which she shared with her then-girlfriend. “I was very intrigued,” says Quinn K, now a writer and game developer. At the time, she was a 15-year-old living in Austria who had no idea how influential Off would be for her, nor she for Off.

After beating the game, K lay awake at night thinking about the ending. “Something had gotten its hooks in me,” she says. Wanting to show it to more friends, she resolved to translate the game from French to English — neither of which were her first language. “I wasn’t the right person for the job,” she says. “I was just the person that did it.”

Fan translation for games is often a tricky process, not just because of linguistics but also technical limitations and potential copyright claims by the original developers. But K knew it was possible to make her version work because there was already a parti …

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