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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]

Avoid translations whenever you can;)

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 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).

[Surf]

Good you mention JA2, because for me thats the only game where the german translation is actually better than the original. As for the rest, I completrly agree with scyp. Not only do translations fuck up the original effort of sounddesigners and voice over artists ( on the other hand, fuck voice over, it greatly contributed to the decline in gaming) , you also get such abominations like Andy described. The best is always to nuy the original product, regardless if its a game, a book or a movie. Every monkey can learn english, its an easy language and greatly helps to enjoy original versions of media.

[Johnnybravo]

I really like how they included option to use original audio in Metro 2033. I wouldn't be able to play the game in Russian, but even though the English audio was quite good, it was excellent with Russian one.

[Eternauta]

( on the other hand, fuck voice over, it greatly contributed to the decline in gaming)

Do you include Fallout and Planescape: Torment in that? I think voiced over parts were an excellent ingredient in those games.

[Surf]

Do you include Fallout and Planescape: Torment in that? I think voiced over parts were an excellent ingredient in those games.

I myself can live without Voice Over, but in FO and PS:T it wasn't bad since only key npc were voiced. What I meant was that nowadays it is pretty much given that each character must be voiced else it is considered "shit" by the "new generation of gamers". This also means greatly limiting the amount of text and thus the choices in dialogs so your finances don't go too high when you have to voice so many characters.

[Eternauta]

I myself can live without Voice Over, but in FO and PS:T it wasn't bad since only key npc were voiced. What I meant was that nowadays it is pretty much given that each character must be voiced else it is considered "shit" by the "new generation of gamers". This also means greatly limiting the amount of text and thus the choices in dialogs so your finances don't go too high when you have to voice so many characters.

Then we agree, that honestly sounds much better than "fuck voice over" because imho it's a technique that can add a lot to a game.

[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]

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

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.