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Game translations

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Luther Blissett:
I tend to find small bits of voiceover are really good to give a bit more character to some people in the game universe, but generally I find it's just too slow if used throughout. If longer speeches are all spoken, it doesn't help to "immerse me", it just makes me skip it. Give them a voice for their initial "hello sentence" and select little phrases here and there, to give a sense of their character, accent and attitude, but full conversations are just painful. Little sentences like JA2 has are perfect - think of Hamous saying "I see the nasty man!" and "I find it!".

For me, the worst offenders for pointlessly long speech are in-game tutorials with a "Welcome Commander! First press the up arrow key to move forward..." etc. By the time they've finished their first speech, you could have read and played through the entire tutorial and started playing the game. Here's one you may recognise :

"Let's get started recruit!

During the mission you can view your surroundings by using the cursor keys to scroll the viewing window. You can also use your mouse to scroll the window by holding it over the border of the desired direction. Centre the game window on Rex by" CLICK CLICK CLICK shut up. I've finished reading it. Click start mission.

Bartosz:

--- Quote from: Luther Blissett on September 12, 2011, 09:34:47 pm ---Give them a voice for their initial "hello sentence" and select little phrases here and there, to give a sense of their character, accent and attitude, but full conversations are just painful

--- End quote ---

Exactly.

Unless someone reads slower than voiceover actor plays his role, but then we pity him:)

Reiniat:
All the bethesda Fallouts are traslated to spanish like shit, the worst thing is that only 8 actors make ALL the voices, is like a blasfemy to the game. I honestly learn most if not all of my english from play Fallout, The Elder Scrolls and read forums like this. Fuck Harmon Hall, if you wanna learn a foreign language just play videogames. Now im trying to learn a little bit of German, Russian and Czech from this game.

I have a funny thing:
In the videogames of Dragon Ball the Dragon Balls are traslated to "Las Bolas Del Dragon" wich in my language has a very obvious double sense: Dragon Testicles.

Most of the beautiful traslation to Spain spanish come from Ubisoft, games like Farcry 1 & 2, Assasins Creed, have really beautiful traslation, also Bioshock 2 is a good example. The Big Sister almost make me cry in the last scene.

Sius:
Well they say czech translations and voiceovers are one of the best (for movies at least) but everytime I watch a movie with czech voiceover I'm feeling like vomiting. Its not easy to translate movies and tv shows and even when you got some good voice actors you still got to fit in with "mouth opening". And some simple 2 word english phrases simply don't have 2 word equivalent (sometimes its for like whole sentence to get the meaning right).

And thats why voiceovers in most cases kill the meaning and whole point of things. But in case of games I must say that czech translations are pretty cool. Even those fan-made are good and sometimes even faster than official publisher (like it was with F3 expansion and NV). And I must say that I LOVE when some translator puts a bit of a personal attitude to the thing, like changing some "for czech person unknown brand/name/something" for czech brand/name/something. Or change original english joke which would be too hardcore to explain in czech into something "familiar" to czech person... those are the best translations but unfortunately those are rare.

Balthasar:
Yeah some games have/had some terrible translations, both in text and voice over. I agree, that it's mostly way better to play the original (english) version of a game (especially when there is much text and voice ofc) but personally i tend to play many games in the translated (german) one to give it a try at least. English isn't that hard to learn etc., thats right but i still can get more into the atmosphere of a game when it's in my own language. But this needs some good effort in translating and sadly this isn't the case in most games. And then the atmosphere feels just not right.

Some kind of compromise i like is when the original voice over is beeing kept and only the dialog text is translated (with an option to disable text at all). Some good example is The Legend of Kyrandia, even though it's an old DOS game ;). IIRC Monkey Island 3 had some pretty acceptable german translation too (in voice and text) and they were so smart to not translate the famous Pirate Song. They simply cut it out.

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