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CDProjektRed games have strong scripts. How do they localize?

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I'm sure that it's more than just a translation artifact.
 

Fry

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Some Slavic dropped articles would be the best translation...

"Geralt goes to house. Geralt kills cat. Geralt is asshole."
 

TedNugent

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I like the English voice actor, and I'm an American native English speaker.

It's gravelly, cool and composed. It suits his script and his wry sarcasm.

I'd love it if I understood Polish, though. Must be interesting to hear the script in the native tongue.
 

Fry

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I'm an American native English speaker.

Me too. Not a fan of the "GRRRRR, I'm so gritty" school of VO.

No idea f you can run the game with Polish voice and English subs. That would be kinda cool.
 

Zeriel

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I like the English voice actor, and I'm an American native English speaker.

It's gravelly, cool and composed. It suits his script and his wry sarcasm.

I'd love it if I understood Polish, though. Must be interesting to hear the script in the native tongue.

He's not absolute garbage-can tier, but I get the feeling that either the direction or how the actor is taking the direction isn't so great. He sounds like he's a professional voice actor, but comes across the same way Bateman did in Batman: silly. And considering Bateman is a really good actor, it's a natural comparison of what happens when a good actor does something silly. He was probably told to sound gritty and detached, took it a little too far, and the VA director either thought it sounded great, or was too timid to correct it.
 
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I'd love it if I understood Polish, though. Must be interesting to hear the script in the native tongue.

You can mix and match the VO and subs to your liking in the first 2 games. It still is very interesting to hear the native the tongue. And so far away from the English voice acting, I find the latter insufferable, especially the silly constipated voice of Geralt.
 

yes plz

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Polish VOs with English text is how I played the whole series and it was great. Geralt's voice actor is terrific and the cast is actually consistent throughout the series whereas I think every character aside from Geralt has had their voice actor changed at least once in the English version.
 

*-*/\--/\~

Cipher
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The thing that stood out the most in Twitcher 3 for me was that every single character in the game said 'me' instead 'my'. Me house, me mates, me wife. Is that some kind of special potato English? :D

It's a pretty common lower class British speech pattern. Many medieval fantasy games use it.

The thing I've noticed about Witcher 3 dialogue is that Geralt rarely uses pronouns. Always "Must have gone somewhere", not "He must have gone somewhere".

I have noticed, that's why it's weird when you hear it from peasants and aristocrats alike.

Geralt's speech didn't speech didn't really bother me... though he frequently pissed me off by losing half his hitpoints after jumping from 2 meter height. I remember him leaping from castle walls without getting hurt in one of the original books... probably got too old for that by now. :D
 

TedNugent

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He's not absolute garbage-can tier, but I get the feeling that either the direction or how the actor is taking the direction isn't so great. He sounds like he's a professional voice actor, but comes across the same way Bateman did in Batman: silly. And considering Bateman is a really good actor, it's a natural comparison of what happens when a good actor does something silly. He was probably told to sound gritty and detached, took it a little too far, and the VA director either thought it sounded great, or was too timid to correct it.
Do you mean - Christian Bale in Batman? What an interesting way to refer to him.

I've always wondered if Bale is even a good actor.
 

crawlkill

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He's not absolute garbage-can tier, but I get the feeling that either the direction or how the actor is taking the direction isn't so great. He sounds like he's a professional voice actor, but comes across the same way Bateman did in Batman: silly. And considering Bateman is a really good actor, it's a natural comparison of what happens when a good actor does something silly. He was probably told to sound gritty and detached, took it a little too far, and the VA director either thought it sounded great, or was too timid to correct it.
Do you mean - Christian Bale in Batman? What an interesting way to refer to him.

I've always wondered if Bale is even a good actor.

Bateman was the guy Bale played in American Psycho, I think.

I kind of like the Chris Nolan Batman voice. The Witcher is a big clash of grimdarkness and jokey fourth-wall-breaking. I think Geralt (and maybe some of the sorceresses) see(s) the world they move through as fundamentally absurd, and is probably aware that he, too, is kind of goofy and exaggerated. But normal people don't have that luxury, so he has to take their tragedies seriously. It works for me.
 

MisterStone

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I've played Witcher games in both English and German and found them to have, by the low standards of the industry, very solid scripts. Forget the actual story--just the words coming out of characters' mouths usually work really well, and I've never seen any of the madness Engrish typical of localized Japanese games. Does anyone know what language the games are originally written in? Does CDPR just have a writing staff hyperfluent in English who start their scripts there? Do they just hire really good teams to do the localization? Has anyone played the games in Polish and English or German both? Is Polish "the original," and is it even better there? Been curious about this since forever, not sure if CDPR has ever commented on it.


Wow, amazing, a company that actually hires a translation agency that uses competent native English-speaking translators to translate stuff into English instead of paying some local dumbshit three-year college student English major in potatoes.

Yes, I am butthurt about something... I basically can't get translation work in the US because native English-speaking Chinese to English translators are low-balled out of the market by ass-hat translation agencies that hire people in China to 'translate' stuff into shitty English, then they want people like me to 'enhance' their fucked up copy for $.02 per word, which means they're both ripping off their clients by selling them inferior product and trying to rip me off, since the 'polishing' this work is basically like doing a translation again, since you'd have to read the original version in order to know WTF the shit English means. And anything that doesn't get grabbed by these people goes to someone contracting people Singapore, where of course everyone is 'flawlessly bilingual'. Well, to be honest, the Singapore people probably do a decent job...

It's ridiculous that the Witcher games stand out for having good quality translation. We should assume anyone who spends hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars developing a game would have enough sense to spend a few thousand dollars to get a decent translation done. Anything less is like smudging shit on a cake before setting it in the glass counter at a bakery. But shit translation is so common it's actually the games that are done right that stand out.

Did I mention that I am butthurt about this?
 
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Storyfag

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Why did these summons reach me so late, oh good rabbi? Right! I was busy playing TW3. Too busy to stalk the Codex.

I've never played a game as well-localized as any of the Witchers. I've never been so impressed.

Thank you for these kind words. I can, however, only speak of TW2, and that at the risk of CDPR's commandos splattering my brain all over the wall. Any claims that TW2 was written in English first are... marketing. But both the translators and the editors put a hell of an effort into making it palatable in the Queen's tongue.
 

Ptosio

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Not matter how well done the translation may be, the Witcher is still way better enjoyed when you're fluid in Polish language and culture.

witcher 2 and 3 (and I imagine their future games) are written in English, but the Polish localization is not only a translation - it's a full fledged localization, meaning it contains more stuff pertaining to Polish culture, some rewritten text, and in general feels rather like the original version. The Polish translation is as amazing as may CD-Projekt's translations of other games they publish in Poland.

No, according to what they say it's the other way around:
http://wyborcza.pl/1,75475,17909240,Geralt_odejdzie_niepokonany___Wiedzmin_3__ostatnia.html

Interview with Jakub Szamałek (Cambridge PhD in...Mediterranean Archaeology of all things...) and Karolina Stachyra, writers for the game

Game is going to be sold all around the world, but you've written it in Polish. Did you try to make the translators' work easier already during the process of writing the original script?

J.S.: We didn't care at all. In our script, elvish soldiers sing "Scoiatel have come to the windows" [parody of a Polish independence fighter's song from IWW], in other places some drunkard sings "Oh, Slivovica, my wife!" [parody of Polish blues song]. The translator either change it for something easier understandable for an American audience or just leave it "as is" as an exotic curiosity. Let's say we make a reference to some legend about old Poland that every Polish kid knows since kindergarten. We were quite curious, what would they make out of it, how they're gonna turn it into something universal. They've just left it for it was exotic.

K.S.: Sapkowski's made an universal character. A monster slayer for hire, wandering from one village to another. In every culture you can relate to him, Americans relate it to the Wild West mythos.

J.S.: And the Japanese see Geralt as a ronin, wandering samurai who's not serving any lord. A Japończycy z kolei w Geralcie widzą ronina, czyli wędrownego samuraja, który nie służy żadnemu panu.


Yeah, but still, in Sapkowski's prose you have some very concrete references to Polish politics or history, for example an alegory of the Pogrom of Kielce. Do the translators come to you asking for a clarification about certain lines?

K.S.: There's no need to, they're great professionals, bilingual, fully fluid in both cultures. Borys Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz is a Pole who grew up in Arizona. Travis Currit is an American with Polish wife who's lived in Poland for years. Sometimes they do ask, but that's just coffee machine conversation, after all we share the same building.

J.S.: I'd rather say it's them explaining stuff to us. Borys is a walking Witcher encyclopedia. At times who storms into our room ranting that this scene cannot refer to a great-grandfather of some king but at least his great-great-grandfather or else the chronology would be screwed.

So yeah, seems they've learned from the mistakes of the first game and this time they have a really professional team.

The other translations are not done "in-house" AFAIK, but judging from the article in Eurogamer.cz they're doing everything they can to assist and help make the translation as good as possible (Czech translator used both Polish and English script to double-check their work)




I was just amazed that a Polish language game routinely uses puns in the English language version.

Yeah, sometimes they sound quite desperate, though (it's an attempt to translate Polish idiomatic expression about imps (chochliki):P)

 

Surf Solar

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Witcher 2 and 3 are some of the very very few games I actually prefer to play in german (the other one being Jagged Alliance 2) Excellent translation and voice acting on top, amidst the sea of terrible translations in other games. Really have to give kudos for that.

Also, Geralts voice has quite a character in the german version, I could listen to that for days. The english one sounds so typical gravely deep, I couldn't stand listening to that.

Best would be using the polish version, but I am not fluent enough for that sadly.
 

NotAGolfer

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German localization for Witcher 3 is indeed solid.
But it has its issues.
Nilfgaardians speaking their own language don't sound convincing at all for instance. And that's not just because the language is probably just made up gibberish but also because the voice actors don't even try to make it sound legit. It sounds like they read a language they don't understand, with hard German pronounciation. In short it's ugly. Not meaning my native language is ugly, it just sounds ugly if you pronounce English, French or any other language than German itself this hard (unless Werner Herzog does it, then it's charming).
And children grate on my nerves. They seemed to have a few child voice actors, but still far too old for their roles.
The Geralt guy is great though.
Overall it's good.

But for anyone who's still reading and tried both: Should I maybe use the English version instead? Nilfgaardians really annoy me tbh.
And they made a few mistakes (Geralt searching for Ciri "auf Yennifers Geheiß" is bullshit for example, I bet they phrased it differently in Polish), but not that many it seems. As I said, good, sometimes even monocled German wording in most cases, but not stilted.
 
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adddeed

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Ive played Witcher 1 + 2 in French, and now Witcher 3 in French, and its very good.
 

Paul_cz

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I vastly prefer english version over all others. Geralt sounds the most distinctive, and I love Zoltan, Yennefer and others as well. Plus Charles Dance was a great choice for Emhyr.
 

Sam Ecorners

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Played all three games in three languages: Kwan, Potato and Putinski. I think Kwan VA has been excellent, especially Geralt. While he is grave spoken, his acting is actually very subtle, but very fitting the character. In fact, I feel the other two actors overplayed him. They seemed to have approached VA from a more stage centric perspective, with stronger intonation, which I don't think works for Geralt.
 

Perkel

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Played all three games in three languages: Kwan, Potato and Putinski. I think Kwan VA has been excellent, especially Geralt. While he is grave spoken, his acting is actually very subtle, but very fitting the character. In fact, I feel the other two actors overplayed him. They seemed to have approached VA from a more stage centric perspective, with stronger intonation, which I don't think works for Geralt.

Disagree Polish VA for Geralt imo is perfect. In english version they made him basically Dirty Harry while in Polish version he is subtle in his speech often talking low key nearly whispering.

Then there is whole use of language. They did awesome job with english version but polish version is clearly superior here as language is often complex and used well in situations while english lines are often simple and sometimes fell off the point.

Polish VA of other characters though is sometimes bad and English VA work better.
 

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