xzar_monty

Sorry to derail this a little bit, but was anyone else slightly disappointed by the fact that Helig of Thein is supposed to be a very old undead wizard but then you can actually kill him at a low level, and it isn't even difficult? The same goes for the "archmages" at Raedric's throne room -- killable at level 4. Some archmages they are.

This is interesting. So, to be more specific, which titles do you enjoy? I like BG2, PoE and Deadfire a lot. I like P:K quite a bit, but much of the writing is too cheesy. I would like to like NWN, but the 3D approach just doesn't work for me, and the writing is poor. IWD is quite all right, but as there is no character interaction, it gets shallow.

Excellent song for sure. But if you listen to what's going on, in the first link Zappa's band is not playing what Vinnie explains in the second. In other words, for whatever reason Zappa has rearranged Keep It Greasy so that it's entirely in 4/4, as you can easily check if you listen to the first link. The complex and Mahavishnuish 19/16 and 21/16 times have all been dropped. The live version definitely works, but it just isn't what Vinnie explains.

I wonder who's behind this "We're really stressing that it might be in your interest to side with one these factions, but even though you're going to be able to live without them, they're going to be around for much/most of the game anyway" thinking that is very prominent in PoE, Tyranny and Deadfire. At least. (Any other games?) I think Obsidian could toss that aside.

Isometric cRPG is such a niche genre that I don't think the market has ever been even close to saturated. My hunch(*) is that the majority of people who enjoy these games have at least tried nearly all the major titles and would be happy to buy most new games in the genre. Isometric cRPG has never been a genre where you've been able to say, "I haven't tried that one, because there are so many other games to play." (*) So yes, it's a hunch, so I might be completely wrong.

I wonder whether he's playing the console version. But does that have overly long load screens? The bugs I tend to get are 1) that potion bug you mention, and 2) the thing where someone gets stuck in a loop during a battle and won't come out of it, with the combat log absolutely filling up with "X abandons [doing something]", like ten notifications per second. I think my game has only ever crashed just once.

There is more than one island, and once you've named them all, you will get a message saying the quest can proceed. It's likely (but not certain) that you simply haven't finished the quest, in which case everything is as it should be.

Yeah. Your first point is somewhat related to what it is to translate a musical -- quite possibly the most difficult form of translation. Much of the text is set to music, so the translation has to be rhythmically accurate down to the level of syllables, not only text boxes. Translating poems and songs can be similar, but a musical has a lot of them. Concerning your second point, I am almost inclined to think that it might be better not to translate these games at all, but obviously I'm not in a position to have an informed opinion: in order to have that, I would have to know the financial side (costs vs. increased sales, all that stuff) a lot better than I do. Actually, I don't know it at all atm.

Actually, it's not. Translating an essay of 10,000 words is a lot easier than translating 406 small pieces of text that add up to 10,000 words. Losing coherence and making errors of logic is much more likely in the second case.

Yep. So, the mechanics of translation are very different in a book or a movie from what they are in a computer game. This is important to keep in mind. It's comparable to how art forms differ. Writing a book is one of the cheapest ways of making excellent art (if you can do it -- which most people obviously can't, myself included). But making a movie is nearly always at least fairly expensive, as is getting a symphony performed. Translating a computer game isn't necessarily always more expensive than translating a book, but it almost certainly is a lot more complicated. The text in a book is in a "straight line" from start to finish, whereas in a computer game it's scattered all over the place.

Fair point. Probably because the field is so new that there essentially are no established traditions. In a sense, I believe Josh Sawyer also alluded to this when he said that he doesn't know of any time- and cost-efficient solutions to his translation dilemma. The industry hasn't established itself yet when it comes to this question.

Making one from scratch is a lot more difficult and time consuming. Translation is one of those unfortunate jobs that is difficult to do well but where errors are fairly easy to spot if you have reasonable knowledge of both language and context. So, correcting a faulty translation is a lot easier and quicker than making one from scratch -- and this, by the way, is precisely the reason why publishing houses have editors and proofreaders whose job is extremely important. I personally want my editor to be as harsh and nitpicky as possible, because although the criticism I receive may not feel nice, it will certainly make the finished work a lot better. The extra work done by those dedicated guys you mention probably falls somewhere between editing and translating, i.e. they were doing some of both.

After writing my reply to Josh Sawyer, I started wondering about the same question. It would be interesting to know the finances of, say, the Italian translation. I.e. how much it cost and how much business it generated among people who only play in Italian. Of course I'm not going to get that information. If I was Obsidian, I would quite possibly just ditch the idea of localization, but this is mainly because I know how difficult it is to get a good translation of something like this, and because I certainly wouldn't accept a bad one. But I am not Obsidian, so of course I cannot really say. There are many questions Obsidian has to consider when making decisions like this, and I know nothing about all the relevant things. It has to be remembered that there are also bad translators, like there are bad writers and bad singers. Who work in the field despite their obvious shortcomings. So at least some of the fault may lie there, too. For example, it is fairly well known among translators that the first Swedish translation of Lord of the Rings is poor. Tolkien writes about this in his letters. (I have not read it, so I have no personal comment to make.) By the way, your suggestion is potentially a good one, but it would likely only appeal to amateurs. Some of whom may be excellent, don't get me wrong. But as a professional in this field, I would never take part in a translation job like this for free.

There is no such solution. The writing in Deadfire is ambitious, literary and challenging, and while its quality doesn't approach good literature, it is definitely not pulp, either. There is verve and poise in the choice of words, and while it occasionally gets too verbose for its own good, it is generally enjoyable and engaging. You are quite right that Obsidian is not doing something uniquely weird and stupid, but this in itself does not say much. I have over twenty years' worth of experience in this field and close to eighty books to my name, and while I'm not an authority as such, I know fairly well what I'm talking about. The problems you describe (in terms of the amount of text in the game and the amount of time available) are real, and they are exacerbated by the fact that the text is ambitious, i.e. pulp would be a lot easier to translate. But the solutions chosen are far from ideal: essentially, the translators would need a lot more time, which in turn would cost a lot more money, and I can see how this might not sound good to Obsidian. But the fact remains: given the time and resources allocated to the translation project, the results can be quite poor, and while pointing this out may feel harsh, it is justified.

This is very hard to understand -- but then it's also off topic, so maybe we should just stop. I mean, it's impossible to understand what "poetry modified" might mean without seeing any examples. Also, most authors use language in a very specific way -- Tolkien's use of English is quaint and erudite but not especially problematic to translate. James Joyce's English is problematic to translate, for example.

Yep. Deadfire is ambitious both in style and in content. If Obsidian simply outsourced the translation to a third party, as you suggest, it tells me that the company either did not understand what it was doing or it did not care. The second possibility sounds unlikely, so I would bet that it just didn't understand what it was doing, which comes back to my earlier point about Obsidian being clueless. Your description of the difficulties of translation, even of simple texts, sounds authentic and apt.

Making changes to the source material, if it means changing what Tolkien wrote, sounds unbelievably dubious (not to mention directly against all tenets of proper translations) and is something the Tolkien estate would not accept. I cannot comment on the Polish versions of Tolkien, but it's fairly well known, for example, that the first Swedish translation of LotR (which I also have not read) is poor. This happens, as unfortunate as it is.

You don't even have to build up your ship. As none of the factions appeal enough to me, this is what I've done in both of my playthroughs. I don't ultimately side with anyone, and as I'm not really interested in shipbuilding, I take the alternative route in that, too (I'm sure you know what it is). What I do wonder is whether it's always the same faction you encounter at the final location, if you've sided with none of them. It was for me, in both of my playthroughs.

This is fair enough, and reasonable. Having worked in the field for a couple of decades, and having dealt with translations of highest-quality literature, I can assure that what you're talking about is not easy, unless of course a translation is just awful. English is not my first language, but I know it well enough to make good judgements there. In my other foreign languages, no, although I have translated a little bit of poetry from French.

Cluelessness may be putting it strongly, I can agree with that, but something somewhere went very wrong, and apparently Obsidian was unaware of it (because the horrible translations went ahead), and that in itself would qualify as some kind of cluelessness.

All of these claims are true. What I would add to the question of translation is that being a good translator is a different skill altogether, i.e. different from being able to speak a language very well and different from being able to write very well. To take an analogy from music: playing an instrument, being able to improvise on it and being able to compose on it are three entirely different skills. There is some overlap, but even that is not guaranteed: you can be a superb classical musician but still not able to compose or improvise at all. Likewise, knowing a language, being able to write well and being able to translate from one language to another are three entirely different skills. Apparently, what Obsidian lacked was 1) good translators and 2) quality control to point out that the translations they received were rubbish.

What he's writing there does not demonstrate having a clue, although it is not proof of cluelessness, either. What he's talking about is something one obviously has to know if one's going to get involved in something like this. The very basics, meat and potatoes. Does Josh Sawyer actually speak a language other than English? Not that he has to, of course. You will have to keep in mind that Obsidian's translations (most of them, at least) are demonstratably awful, so Sawyer's understanding of this particular phenomenon is not worth much.

This is interesting! Thanks. Here's my theory as to why: P:K was created by a Russian company for a market that is predominantly English-speaking, so the company itself is already aware that language is important, and I'm pretty sure that almost everybody at P:K speaks at least two languages. North Americans, on the other hand, are notoriously bad when it comes to speaking languages, and clearly Obsidian has/had no understanding about what proper translation actually entails. So, a Russian company understands the issue and produces quality (although the quality of the English in P:K can sometimes be debated, no question), whereas a North American company has essentially no clue. There is a saying, not entirely true, that if you only speak one language, you don't really speak any languages at all. Simply learning another one will expand your mind an awful lot, and this is something that far too many English speakers are unaware of.

First-person perspective, not isometric, d'oh. Too bad. Still, interesting to see that Eora is not abandoned. (Not going to try this one, though.)

I would agree that the kind of concern you describe is most prevalent in the United States, in my experience. And yes, there must be huge differences within that country, too -- I have essentially experienced only the coasts, not the areas in between. So I cannot really make strong claims.