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1697 members have voted

  1. 1. Translation to which languages should be a priority in your opinion (in addition to English, French, German and Spanish, which are already confirmed)?

    • Dutch
      39
    • Chinese
      279
    • Italian
      561
    • Japanese
      115
    • Korean
      46
    • Portuguese
      89
    • Polish
      406
    • Russian
      351
    • Turkish
      312
    • Other (specify in comments)
      66


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Hehe. He doesn't state anything here imo. He just refuses to share any info. But tbh, for me the way he does it suggests they indeed have a deal with Cenega/1C. One thing we know for certain (from update #15) is that they have a deel with some distributors in Poland and Russia.

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Unfortunately, it seems that Cenega will be responsible for distribution and localisation in Poland indeed and Fergus' statement only made me sure that it's the awful truth.

 

I'm not a big fan (to put it mildly) of their distributive politics and localisation skills comparing to....heh...all others... and I'm pretty sure that a group of dedicated and skilled fans plus some proffesional translators who are clearly present at this forum (Ryslaw for instance) are capable to do it better than Cenega.

 

I realize that it's safer for Obsidian to look for distributors who did numerous localizations in the past, but I think selected group of translators not connected with distributors could do amazing work with translation. There are a lot of skilled and compenent folks in Poland who can do it.

 

I now that translating such massive amount of text (I'm excluding voice-acting, cause cinematic translation is I think definitely enough for most Polish buyers) it's not an easy task, but hey, I'm confident that it's doable (and much cheaper for Obsidian).

 

I myself have no problem playing English version, but there are many players in Poland who will really enjoy good translation and they truly deserve it.

 

So, please guys, consider all Your options wisely and don't be so eager to select Cenega as Your distributor. I know You are reading and taking into cosideration many of our opinions at this forum and this is really important for all folks in Poland (and Russia apparently).

Edited by Cahir
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Jag kan inte tala engelska. Översätt till svenska, annars så kidnappar jag Chris Avellone och sätter på honom betongskor och släpper av honom i Östersjön!!!

Batman: [intimidate] "Let her go".

Joker: [Failure] "Very poor choice of words."

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I wonder if translation tools make translating the game into languages that were already confirmed by Obsidian possible (Polish for example). It will be really nice if communiy could do their own translation in case of terrible jobe done by distributors. Yes I'm still worried that Cenega will be handling this and frankly I didn't sleep well last night because of it ;(

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I wonder if translation tools make translating the game into languages that were already confirmed by Obsidian possible (Polish for example). It will be really nice if communiy could do their own translation in case of terrible jobe done by distributors. Yes I'm still worried that Cenega will be handling this and frankly I didn't sleep well last night because of it ;(

No need to recreate the whole translation, I'm sure that you can use the official translation as base and work from there.

I've had some problem with official translations too (I'm italian), that's why since Final Fantasy 7 I started playing in english whenever I can (seriously, I even bough Deus Ex: HR two times because the one sold in italy had only Italian and French dubbing. The horror.).

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I wonder if translation tools make translating the game into languages that were already confirmed by Obsidian possible (Polish for example). It will be really nice if communiy could do their own translation in case of terrible jobe done by distributors. Yes I'm still worried that Cenega will be handling this and frankly I didn't sleep well last night because of it ;(

 

If it were possible, it would be akin to releasing a fixpack for in-game text. Corrections of these sort are very easy to implement with a proper toolset and don't require too much time and effort to do, since a huge portion of the original translation is bound to be ok. The devil is in the details.

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Don't translate at all. Community tools will allow people to localize it and besides, in my language translations are often of poor quality, so I always play in english even my OS is in english because I don't like translations at all.

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Regarding bad localisation and the necessity of translating games:

As a German native speaker and professional translator with experience in translating smart phone, TV and Software UI, among others, I can tell you this:

 

Localisations of games have a tendency towards being sub par. I know this and that's why I mostly steer clear of German localisations.

 

But I am lucky, I speak and understand English better than most non-bilingual Germans.

For some people reading and understanding a game they wish to immerse themselves in is not possible in a foreign language.

They may have to resort to a dictionary or even get the meaning all right most of the time, but it still means an extra effort for them.

It's quite akin to subtitles. Do you enjoy watching a movie and having to read the subtitles to understand it? Usually the answer is no.

 

And as for the translation workload and quality:

Usually the text is extracted out of software and handed to a big company for translation in multiple languages.

The problem is that the people translating the software do not have the time to play it or even the means to search for difficult to understand sections.

And most of the time the first sentence you get may be the first sentence you read when playing a certain part of the game, but the second could be something that comes up 5 hours of playtime later.

There is no such thing as consistency, which makes it very hard to know – and thus translate correctly – that "The carrier of the emblem of a thousand fires", when addressed as such, is actually a woman and not a man.

Later on you will realize the mistake, as you find out when playing the game and localization testers may realize the issue. Or they may not.

 

And this issue is also true for describing a room/setting/item with the appropriate register of words, when you have never seen the graphical representation for yourself or have no idea what the original writer envisioned.

 

 

All I can say is use a combined effort during beta (if a localized beta comes out) to find issues and keep writing feedback mails with flawed translations to make the localization team aware.

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has anyone noticed that the percentages of each option of the poll are incorrect? :facepalm:

Here lies Firedorn, a hero in bed.
He once was alive, but now he's dead.
The last woman he bedded turned out to be a man
And crying in shame, off a cliff he ran.

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has anyone noticed that the percentages of each option of the poll are incorrect? :facepalm:

The sum gives 100, so they seem to be correct?

nope

Here lies Firedorn, a hero in bed.
He once was alive, but now he's dead.
The last woman he bedded turned out to be a man
And crying in shame, off a cliff he ran.

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