Nine languages
**English, Español, Português (Brasil), Deutsch, Français, Türkçe, 日本語,
Русский, 简体中文.** Set it in Settings under *Interface language*.
- **Names are transliterated where the script needs one and left alone where it
does not.** Daniel Noor is Daniel Noor in French and ダニエル・ヌール in
Japanese. Translating a surname into German would be a strange thing to do.
- **The wordmark stays in Latin script and is never recased by the interface
language.** Turkish uppercases a dotless i to a dotted one, so "Market Panic"
set in Turkish and shouted by CSS came out as MARKET PANİC. The two words are
a name and are now marked as such.
- **The register is meant to be dry.** The brief for every translator was a
bank's internal memo, not marketing copy. Where a line is deadpan in English
it should be deadpan in your language; if it reads as chirpy somewhere, that
is a bug and we would like to hear about it.
German compounds get to break where they must rather than running off the end of
a button, and the interface reflows for the languages that need more room.
You can stand up
**Press "Step back" and the camera pulls away from the terminal.** The interface
you were using turns out to be a monitor, on a desk, in an office, on whichever
floor of the building your career has reached. The desk does not pause while you
are out there — what you see on that monitor is the live interface, still
running, scaled into the bezel.
None of the room is a photograph. It is all drawn, every quarter, from the state
of your run.
**Out of the window there is a city.** The skyline sits where it should for the
floor you are on: from the lower floors you are looking up at other people's
buildings, and from the top you are looking down on most of them. Behind the
near towers there is a second, hazier city — the one that tells you the view
carries on. The glass takes the season: frost in winter, rain that actually runs
in autumn, nothing at all in summer, because four seasons of weather effects is
a screensaver. There is a moon, there are stars where the buildings do not reach,
and when the lights in your office go down you get the room reflected back at
you.
**The office fills up as your career does.** The ceiling fittings go out one by
one as the market turns, so a bad quarter is a darker room. There is a credenza
with the things you have earned on it, a keyboard, the chair you just got out of,
and the printed career plan on the desk — pick it up and it is the same plan the
launch screen draws, just held closer.
**And there is a bell.** It is on the desk, on your left. It does nothing at all
and you can hit it as fast as you like.
The people on your floor
The office used to be furniture. It now has the firm in it, and everybody in it
is reporting something.
**The desks are staffed by your actual client book.** One desk lit per account
you serve, inside however far the firm has grown by surviving. Win an account and
somebody is at a desk that was empty last quarter; lose one and a desk goes dark.
Where the firm has grown into a desk it no longer has the work for, there is a
chair and nobody in it. Each lamp is lit in the colour of the relationship it
belongs to, so a floor with two pink desks on it has two clients heading for the
door.
**Somebody from the investment committee comes out to find you.** Ward on
returns, Noor on risk, Mercer on clients — each of them tracks a different half
of what you do, and every quarter close moves them. Whoever has lost the most
faith is the one standing on the floor when you get up, so *who* it is tells you
what the firm thinks the problem is before you have read anything. How long they
have been unhappy is how close they are standing. Nobody there at all means the
committee is content, which is the only quiet this room offers.
**The regulator sends people.** Above the exposure the game already calls a
watched book, somebody is out on the floor, turned toward your desk. Above the
critical one there are two, and the second stands closer.
**Everyone is a way in.** Click the person from the committee and you land on
their own intervention. Click the floor and you are in the client roster. Click
whoever compliance has sent and you are in the conduct queue. The meeting room
across the way seats your clients by how they feel about you — walk over and you
can see them and your own floor in one picture.
Sound
**The room has its own.** Step back and the terminal's ambience drops away
behind you — it is a screen across the room now, not a thing under your hands —
and what comes up instead is the building: low rumble, air, the hum of a floor
that is still switched on. Sit down again and it goes back.
**Music rotates.** A track now plays two or three times and then the pool moves
to a different one, rather than settling on one piece and staying there for an
hour. Which pool it draws from still depends on how the run is going.
And the bell sounds like a bell — a struck one, with the hammer and the
overtones, not a beep. It is the same strike every time you hit it, however fast
you hit it.
Getting around the room without a mouse
Every object you can act on is a real button. They can be tabbed to, they light
up when focused, and they are labelled — the one over the committee member says
who is waiting and what they do.
Stepping back also now says what is in the room, not only which room it is. If
the regulator has sent somebody, if a committee member is waiting, if the client
book is in trouble, you are told on arrival rather than having to go looking for
a button that may or may not exist.
Smaller things
- The market writing is translated, not skipped. A headline that reads "A bank
run begins over audio that never happened" in English is
"Набег на банк начинается из-за записи, которой не было" in Russian and
"存在しなかった音声から取り付け騒ぎが始まる" in Japanese.
- Client names keep the proper noun and translate the rest, which is what a fund
actually does. Northstar Pension is Pensionskasse Northstar in German, Caisse
de retraite Northstar in French, Northstar年金 in Japanese.
- Store pages and screenshots exist in all eight new languages.