Interview Slovaks check in on The Witcher

[Jasede]

Germans suck when it comes to caring about their language. 70% of TV adverts are in English here, because it "sounds cooler".

"Giga Fritten - so crunchy and tasty; einfach nur voll cool!!"
"Nothing between us"
"Come in and find out"
are all slogans used on the German market. Germans, when asked to translate, had no idea what they mean, but still buy products that sound "modern".

Our TV program SAT 1 would play their tagline "Powered by emotion" (wtf?) a dozen of times in an hour. It's /offensive/. How would you feel if 60% of your adverts in America would be in German!?

 

[jeansberg]

And yet they insist on dubbing movies.

 

[Zomg]

Our TV program SAT 1 would play their tagline "Powered by emotion" (wtf?) a dozen of times in an hour. It's /offensive/. How would you feel if 60% of your adverts in America would be in German!?

That reminds me of those Japanese video game import people that say things like: "Don't worry, the menus are all in English." What? Why?

 

[kingcomrade]

Back when I lived in Japan I learned that English is very trendy there. Not sure if this is still true (trends end, after all).

 

[Elwro]

The Germans seem also to have a dangerous habit of splitting books into parts and publishing them separately. Heck, they cut Mieville's "The Scar" into three books and it was not easy to spot they were in any way connected with each other. For a short moment I was delighted that I found new books by Mieville that I haven't read yet...

 

[Shannow]

splitting books:

wheel of time 11 (knife of dreams) costs 7€ at amazon.de
the german translation is at book 31 and costs 10€
i'm so glad that i started reading books in english a long time ago...

the localisation of games is even worse. not only are they badly translated, they sound crappy too and if they are modable, it's even worse. (i welcome thee, Bursche)
the only game i know that sounds good in german is gothic(2)^^

i was so happy to see, that bloodlines is in english apart from the installation menu.

maybe some of you will be able to comment on the different versions of the witcher when it's out

 

[Claw]

Heh, I wasn't even aware of that. I started reading Discworld in German, and switched to English halfway through the series. I've hardly read a German book since then.

It's really sad. I remember that originally the Star Wars movies were dubbed properly. At some point Kaiser became Imperator, that's maybe the first time I noticed something odd about the dubbing.
It's become far worse. I even had the feeling that they added English words the last time I saw the restored versions of Star Wars.

 

[meeneque]

The Germans seem also to have a dangerous habit of splitting books into parts and publishing them separately.

Well it's not only Germans. Take a look at the Steven Erikson books published in Poland. IIRC they splitted every fuckin book.

Coming back to the Sapkowski's translations - I'm not a Czech native speaker, but the polish->czech translation sounded really good. But it maybe because off the language similarities. I'm really anxious to see the english version.