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Game translations

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Andr3aZ:
I just thought about how shitty some games are translated into other languages.
Sometimes the job is done pretty good, but other times it just goes horrible.

As we have people from almost every corner of the world here, so post some examples for bad translations.

I'll start with German translations:

Oblivion: your first healspell is called "Feuerball" (Fireball) - someone messed up here pretty good.
Fallout NV: Raiders are called "Unholde", while the german "Räuber" would have been ok, "Unhold" is a more granny-like expression for a bad guy. It would be like calling them bogey-men.
Fallout: "Du wurden getroffen" basically means "You have been hit" but the verb resembles to a plural "You". Imagine "They was hit for 5 hitpoints". Feels wrong? So does the german phrase for a native speaker.

Bartosz:
...and on top of that you're getting terrible voiceovers that are simply killing whole effort original sound designers and voiceover actors have put into the production (polish version of Torment for example, while quite good on translation level, had the voiceovers recorded like for some pop-album, compressed and loud, which is not what original sounded like at all (which, in my opinion was contributing greatly to torment's overall atmosphere)).

Avoid translations whenever you can;)

HertogJan:

--- Quote from: scypior on September 12, 2011, 10:31:54 am ---Avoid translations whenever you can;)

--- End quote ---

Agreed.
Fortunately for that I live in The Netherlands. Together with the Flemish part of Belgium only 22-23 million people speak our language. That means it's not that financially interesting to have localized game versions. Only the manuals and packages are localized.

I only bought 1 localized game once which was by accident. The original disc got damaged so I had to replace mine.
That game was Jagged Alliance 2. The character's speech in the Dutch version was horrible. The humor was completely gone. Luckily I managed to overwrite those files with what I could recover from the damaged disc and from the directory I had installed it in. Thanks to gog.com I have a working English version once again.

Andr3aZ:
I have to say they did a kinda good job on german version of Jagged Alliance 2. Sure much original intended puns can only be understood in english but especially Ivan Dolvich is still hilarious with some of his comments (good thing they left his russian parts of the speech files).

And yes scypior has a good point. Especially if the original version used much more voice actors. In much translated games every town commoner is voiced by the same voice actor.

I usally play games on steam and steam is set on english so it automatically downloads english versions without setting any extra options. When I am at some friends house and see the localized version of games i played im usally disgusted at the ruined athmosphere.

But if youre used to a voice you usally find the voices of the other language version strange. Happens to many films where synchro-voice actors change. I played the Riddick games on english first and then watched the movies on german TV, kinda good voice actor but still feels weird.

Eternauta:
The Spanish translation of Fallout 1 was a total failure. It sometimes even seemed they had used some sort of Google translator :P And it was translated to Spanish from Spain, not "Latin" Spanish, so it was also a bit alien to me. Luckily they decided not to translate the voices! (so they didn't fuck Loxley's accent up for example).

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