English games translated into other languages quality?

[Roqua]

I was wondering if English games are translated into other languages as badly as non-English games are translated into English? I, personally, like bad translations. I am hoping that the Starpoint Gemini Warlords is very poorly translated because a lot of times figuring out what the hell is going on and what someone is trying to say adds a whole new gameplay system.

When it is voiced by native English speaking people, like in Drakensang 2, there are just some lines the voice actor must have been like, "What the fuck? This makes no sense at all and I have no idea how to deliver this so I will stick with neutral and bland."

I highly prefer when it is voiced by non native English speakers because they deliver the lines with gusto and pizzazz. So you don't just get confusing nonsense spouted at you, you get emotionally charged confusing nonsense spouted at you with enthusiasm.

If the world made a lick of sense this would be a selling point for games - poorly translated into English and dramatically voiced by people with a poor grasp of English.

If the native English games are translated well, you people in non-English speaking countries are missing out on some great gameplay enhancements.

 

[Hegel]

Baldur's Gate II Italian and French translations were hilariously bad.

 

[Sjukob]

I was wondering if English games are translated into other languages as badly as non-English games are translated into English?

Mostly yes for russian language . There are exceptions as always of course , The Witcher series in Russian sound better than originals , Gothic II ( not the first one ) has decent Russian translation , Blizzard games generaly have good Russian translations . I usually forget about bad translations , but Fallout , Arcanum were horribly translated .

 

[Melan]

They tend to be almost uniformly terrible here, since they are done on the cheap by people who try to cut corners on what they think to be unimportant things. Ultima IX was particularly bad; they translated gargoyles as water-spitters, and blackrock as black coal (both of which are technically correct, but utterly wrong). Small market, small-time crooks posing as publishers, entitled and stingy customers --> hilarity.

There might have been some improvement in recent years, though; I am really out of the loop.

 

[Dreed]

Lastly, I have to mention how the pool of actors does not always impress by its diversity, i.e. Marc Alfos / Patrice Baudrier / Patrice Melennec GODDAMN EVERYWHERE. Actors are very good but tend to be reused way too much.

Marc Alfos was fun, I miss his voice

 

[CptMace]

Let me guess, the voice of the emperor in Oblivion ?

 

[Scroo]

There are hilariously bad translations into german. Ususally they are fine, but sometimes... In oblivion the basic healing spell everyone had was called "Feuerball" (fireball) and combat phrases like "show me what you've got" were translated literally - which doesn't make any sense in german.

Or in Time Splitters in english an enemy says "who's your daddy" and they too translated it literally - and in german asking someone who their father is in the middle of a fight err well that was pretty weird

 

[Baron Dupek]

Baldur's Gate saga have better voices in potato dialect. Maybe with exception of Imoen, who sounds like ukrainian female thief.
Same with Twitcher saga, obviously.

Stalker is best. Both russian and english voices are awful and only reason first one is acceptable because it's russian (duh).
Why potato version is better? Because they got idea to put lector in it. Most people have lector in movies but in Stalker trilogy it was marvelous.

 

[Dreed]

Let me guess, the voice of the emperor in Oblivion ?

No, but he voiced every Bosmer and the main villain IIRC

I've been playing everything in full English for the past 5 or 6 years, so I don't really know the current state of French translation quality, but I've heard that the translations for Wasteland 2 and Divinity: OS were quite bad.

 

[CptMace]

I've been playing everything in full English for the past 5 or 6 years

Uncle Sam notes with satisfaction that France is on the good tracks.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

Gothic 2 has good polish version.

 

[Cadmus]

The last localized (not only translated which is an important difference) I played was Warcraft 3 and it was done really well, so much so that I miss the Czech VA when I play it today.

 

[Roqua]

Games tend to have very good French localisations (the birthing pains era was much shorter than the movies industry where it became consistently good only in the 70s) to the point where it's expected as basic standards and outliers are specifically remembered.

They do suffer however from the very typical issue that you mention of not always understanding the intonation due to, I suppose, reading lines from a script without seeing the cutscene and having to guess. There is also the problem of catchphrases, obvious puns or references that usually don't make it from one work to another because different translators didn't do the necessary research, being not fans but generic professionals.

An issue that is zigzagged a lot is how much the charisma of a work is carried over. In the films industry, translations were done with the idea that a mood had to be translated much more than specific words, and a great example of that is how old Disney songs are so different from the originals on a sentence-by-sentence basis while retaining every theme. But now, since many more people speak English, it means much more people apply to be translators and you see drops in quality in the most French way possible: trying the supermegahardest to shoehorn a perfect word-by-word translation instead of just going for a quick natural equivalent. I found it fun how they tried to push Frozen's song Let It Go hoping it would trigger the same pop-culture tsunami it had in the Anglosphere, only for it to fall flat on its face and never catch up because the translation was so unimaginative, despite a great performance by the singer.

It happens a lot more in games than in movies: for example, older Total War games displayed that kind of clumsy zealous translation, while the most recent ones, Rome 2 and Attila in particular, are completely natural. Some others stand out, like Jade Empire or Gothic 3.

The major issue with that, however, is when a work is supposed to be funny, reference-heavy, tongue-in-cheek, edgy, anything that requires some charisma. Most such games get shoddy translations where all the jokes seem very forced because the translators slavishly stuck to the original instead of picking anything that would work. Operation Flashpoint Red River is a great example of that, with the actor doing a good work, but the lines being so irreparably retarded that it just didn't work (translating "fucking" by "putain de" or "foutu" is a way too uncommon thing to be spammed the way it is in the game). The worst part is that the character in question is an obvious reference to the drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket, which was a great example of a translator that was given free reign to do his thing and is still a fountain of memes, jokes and references decades after its release, something that you have to understand is extremely rare in French-speaking culture.

Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon is another major offender, even when it wasn't its fault in some cases, for example having to translate quotes that were never translated in the first place (such as Mortal Kombat's "Test your might").

Lastly, I have to mention how the pool of actors does not always impress by its diversity, i.e. Marc Alfos / Patrice Baudrier / Patrice Melennec GODDAMN EVERYWHERE. Actors are very good but tend to be reused way too much.

Interesting. One of my brother-in-laws think that movie dubs are an atrocity, whereas I enjoy the movie far more when it is dubbed. Like Shaolin Soccer or Kung-Fu Hustle. For a while I had cable that only had only subtitled movies and I noticed that the subtitle translations wasn't nearly as funny as the dubbed translation. But, my brother-in-law persists the only way to watch a movie is subtitled and not dubbed. Since he is the biggest movie buff I know I figured most people probably felt this way, especially the French since I could never find dubbed French movies I wanted back in the day (Like La Femme Nakita and there was a French only ((at the time)) extended version of Leon the Professional come to mind quickly). I rented Oldboy and it only had subtitles and I didn't see the dubbed version until recently. So I just figured dubbing wasn't big and the world was forced to read movies like I have been forced to for most of my life.

I honestly always prefer a dubbed movie no matter how poorly dubbed it is. I don't care if a game has no voice overs at all, is poorly translated, or whatever, as long as the gameplay systems are fun. In fact, I'd much more prefer any voice acting budget go to making the game a better game.

 

[Severian Silk]

Any bad English to American translations?

 

[Grimwulf]

Original Gorky-17 was a p.gud game and had two translations here in Rusland: one that was pretty straight-forward and mediocre; and the other one was heavily modified, re-writing most of the texts and using better voice actors. The modified version is called Gorky-18, it's pretty fun.

 

[pippin]

Baldur's Gate II Italian and French translations were hilariously bad.

I remember the spanish translation for BG1 as something pretty bad. Generally, spanish translations were pretty mediocre, the only true exception was Grim Fandango. The spanish translation was excellent, and the voice talent was on point. A truly rare example though...

 

[taxalot]

Whenever a topic like this is mentioned, I feel compelled to tell the tale of Ubi Soft. But not the Ubi Soft you know : the Ubi Soft that you never heard about, the Ubi Soft that published some games in France that were made by other companies but felt they could market to the local, um, market.

Here's my experience with Ubi Soft localized games.

Ultima VI : They kept the game in English, yet translated the manual. It's stupid, really : if you're going to play the game, you'll need to understand English anyway. Also, guess what ? Lord British asks you to look up some words in the manual. So they basically fucked up the copy protection.

Ultima VII : they did a whole lot more effort this time. Seriously, you can't blame the effort. They translated the whole game in medieval french, since after all the first one used Thy/Thou and all that shit.
Except Medieval french is a much much bigger pain in the ass and it makes playing the game an incredibly awkward and painful experience where "yourself" is translated as "toy-mesme" (took me quite a while to see what they were getting at), Kissme is translated as "Baysemoi" (roughly : "fuck me"). The entire game is an unreadable mess. But boy, did that take effort.

Might and Magic IV&V : remember the riddles , the anagrams, and the times you have to type stuff ? The typing stuff you had to guess couldn't be done because of typos and accent shit. Whoops.

Might and Magic VI : An important clue in the manual was omitted.

Might and Magic VII : Ubi Soft apologized : they forgot to put the music tracks on the CD.

I'm sure there's more, but these are the only ones I've actually experienced. It's quite amazing because each RPG release was a total fuck up in an entirely different way, and it spans a LONG period as far as gaming years are concerned. I have no explanation. Apparently, Morrowind and Oblivion, also localized by Ubi Soft, were also completely fucked with a shitton of bugs added by the translation.

 

[pippin]

I've also heard one of the M&M games (prob. 6 or one of the sequels after that) had bugs because they wrote the translation using certain french characters which wouldn't work with the software used by the game or something like that.

 

[Baron Dupek]

I know similar case with potato version of Wizardry8. In the game there are no potato signs like "ą", "ę", "ó", "ł" etc. so if you get past 3/4 of the game and need to open doors to Some Important Temple and they ask you for - to type manually - "Dark Savant" (potato - "Mroczny Mędrzec") then say goodbye to your saves, they're worthless like you college education.
They added tiny micro patch (still no "ąę", they're not required by the game) but guess what - new game was mandatory. Here comes your Test of Faith'n'Might.

EDIT
damn, there is similar type of puzzles in Gorasul, but from comparing guides alone - I can see that they have different answers for (supposed to be) same questions.

 

[typical user]

Potato version of Dying Light (which is a game made by Potatoes) has really really bad polish VO. I couldn't stand it and had to switch to english version. For text translation, I can't quite remember what game it was but there was a case where I had some objective in my language but it didn't make any sense, I couldn't get to next stage of a mission or whatever it was so I translated in my head what the game wanted me to do and only then I realised how bad that translation was. There are also cases of amateur potato translations done by Russians 15 years ago and it was such a low quality that people simply find it hillarious. Just an example: original VO in english overlapped with poorly translated polish voice-over done by Ruskies.

There was even a thing with GTA IV (a horrible PC port) which had translated text on the box but the installator was in chineese or some other asian language which is not supported by polish Windows unless you install additional language packs. It was just some gibberish text which didn't make any sense or some blocks or empty buttons. Fortunately the "install" was the larger one. Glad the days without any official support for PSN and Xbox Live are over, everyone just ignored Potato market.

Another example is Diablo 2 which is mixed. It had great VO of main characters but if you used voice commands then the VO actor would speak it in such a manner like he/she didn't knew what the context was. Also Lord of Destruction added new commands which in case of Sorcess was recorded by different actor, so basically two separate voices. Not a big issue as rarely someone used this feature on Battlenet. But there were funny translations of items and mobs like "Pasibrzuch".

Now polish translations are getting better. Witcher 3 is a prime example as it has polish internet memes and jokes which make no sense in other languages like beggars who say "Szacunek ludzi ulicy" which was a phrase used by a polish rapper which turned into a meme. GTA V also has it's own quirks like "brałbym jak rolnik dotacje", which can be roughly translated to "I would take (her) like farmer takes (EU) subsidizations" or another one "przejebane jak w ruskim czołgu". Same thing as with Civ V achievement "poland can into space" which was translated to "Kosmiczna Husaria" (Space Hussars) because there is no polish translation for that meme.

I'm not sure if Jagged Alliance 2 had polish-specific signs using different font. Most games in the past had this issue. In Fallout 1 and 2 every dialogue choice is translated into what male character would spoke but in polish every verb, adjective and many others are altered by sex, in english they are not, so there were sentences like "Nie jestem tego pewny" spoken by female protagonist, which correctly would be "Nie jestem tego pewna".

Potato is a funny language, try to say Szczebrzeszyn or Brzoskwinia.

 

[Beautiful Clown Painting]

Sometimes you get better art through translation, see Baudelaire translating Poe in french, much better than the original. But I can't see that in video games so far, it's all hack jobs.

 

[deuxhero]

Skyrim's Japanese VA is better than the original (not a real accomplishment) but the translation itself (as far as I can tell from the voicework, no comments on all the other text) is often poor. The most obvious one is that whenever Bethesda had a line taking an English phrase but modifying it for the world like "skeever hole" (which, to any writers on the codex, is a fantastically non-creative and unfunny convention and needs to be avoided, especially when the original thing still exists in the universe, like rats still exist in the TES universe.) it's translated literally.

There's a noted contrast between the original and the DLC in voice acting direction. In the original the actors try to get as close to English pronunciations as possible, which leads to strange pauses and tone changes mid sentence as the actor has to stop, catch his breath, adopt a more American accent then continue speaking. The DLC thankfully drops this and goes with approximations an actor can say normally.

I'm not sure if Jagged Alliance 2 had polish-specific signs using different font. Most games in the past had this issue. In Fallout 1 and 2 every dialogue choice is translated into what male character would spoke but in polish every verb, adjective and many others are altered by sex, in english they are not, so there were sentences like "Nie jestem tego pewny" spoken by female protagonist, which correctly would be "Nie jestem tego pewna".

Do tomboys (real or fictional) not actively pretending to be male ever use masculine speaking styles in Polish? It's a thing in Japanese (at least in fiction.) and I'm curious if it is in other languages where sentences vary by the speaker's sex.

 

[typical user]

No, if they do they are viewed as trannies at least in real cases, gender-awerness is a taboo as Poles have very conservative culture.

In case of Fallout it was an issue with dialogue design because there were single lines for both male and female characters, newer games allow for more so your character is always speaking in correct manner.

 

[Bastion]

No, if they do they are viewed as trannies at least in real cases, gender-awerness is a taboo as Poles have very conservative culture.

It isn't a taboo. We all know that pederasts have a big problem with their gender-awareness.

Do tomboys (real or fictional) not actively pretending to be male ever use masculine speaking styles in Polish?

You know, there is a difference between tomboys and trannies. Tomboys (a girl acting like a boy) will not use the masculine form, but trannies (a girl thinking she is a boy now) will. The biggest problem, for Poles, will be making separated forms for all of these 16 genders - or maybe there are more now?

 

[Durandal]

The only games which receive a Dutch translation these days are Ubisoft shovelware, but there was one interesting case in the past:
In Burnout Revenge, grinding against cars is called Trading Paint. In Dutch, it was translated to Lakschaderuilbeurs (lit. paintwork damage stock exchange). Imagine seeing a tonguetwister like that on the HUD. Every Dutch reviewer laughed at that one. Stuff like fraaie boost might have been a literal translation from the English version, but it sounds so stupid in Dutch because nobody says fraai anymore. There's also stuff like spiegeltje-krak (lit. [little] mirror goes CRACK!), even een brokje om (lit. going around debris, which is a pun of even een blokje om which roughly means 'going around the corner') and op puinhoop van zegen (lit. 'trusting our mess in the hands of god', which is a puin of op hoop van zegen, which roughly means 'trusting our fate in the hands of god'.

While some terms looked terrible in Dutch and others were translated quite creatively to Dutch (like the aforementioned puns), the end result was that the Dutch translation looked fucking stupid regardless. There are Dutch equivalents for 'radicool' terms, but for most Dutch people it looks like you're trying too hard when you say them because (as opposed to Americans) nobody fucking talks like that here anymore. It's just a quirk of the language and society itself, and something a translator always should keep in mind.