Our Favorite Pets Boo and Mike

Anyone who has pets knows for sure they always bring fun with them. And there are two of these pets here in SBT Localization, Boo the Hamster and Mike the Cat. Of course, we don’t have an actual office yet (and why would we need another bureaucracy layer?), so our animals are imaginary. However, they are always in our hearts and they help us maintain a good mood and fighting spirit for the sake of bringing Ukrainian language to gaming universes.

A Hamster’s Wisdom

Our first pet was the hamster Boo. Anyone who is familiar with the Baldur’s Gate games will recognize this little animal that always accompanies his friend, the warrior Minsk.

SBT Localization and Baldur’s Gate are closely tied when it comes to Ukrainian localization, so it is not surprising that one day Maksym Duvanov (our former translation colleague, editor, and a man who turned video reports into art) invited Boo the Hamster into our community. And not simply because, but to create the Ukrainian language column called “Boo teaches”. Yes, yes, this hamster is very smart and he has his own opinion on everything, which he willingly shares with his friends.

Who Knows Much

Later, during various translation adventures, we collected several interesting English expressions. Hence, we decided to also introduce some English language tips. And who would help us with those?

Although we did not translate The Elder Scrolls series of games (at least not officially), many of us had a soft spot for the funny and slightly strange Khajiit traveler M’aiq the Liar.

“M’aiq knows a lot, tells some. M’aiq knows many things others do not.” Well, if he knows a lot, let him explain strange English expressions!

SBT’s Boo and Mike

These characters are great, aren’t they? However, until now, we have been grabbing their likenesses from the web, which is not very good, because of copyright and all that. For sure, we’ve been dying to get our own representations of Boo and M’aiq for a long time, so as not to offend anyone. There were conversations with several artists, but somehow they either lacked time or inspiration. When finally, our activist and tireless volunteer from Zaporizhzhia, Yevhen Tkach found exactly the person we were looking for all this time. The extremely talented artist-illustrator Lilia Martyniuk (liilu_art on Instagram) created brand new likenesses for Boo the Ukrainian Warrior and Mike the Cat (a relative of that M’aiq, at least he claims as much, but who knows with these felines).

Our new pets are extremely cute, so we hope that they will accompany the SBT Localization Team for a long time and help us uncover a lot of useful and interesting things.

If you like our animal helpers, be sure to check out liilu_art on Instagram.

Many thanks to Lilia for the drawings, and to our benefactors for their support. May your days be healthy and peaceful.

by Sofia Shul

Translated by Yurii Bisyk

March 29, 2023