The title says it all. But before I go on a rant and point out the most critical issues (that need to be adressed ASAP; as there is press looking at this game right now and germany is a big gaming market), let me just tell you that the dialogues themselves are acceptable. No, really, every contextual text block has been decently translated.
However, everything that doesn't have a context, in other words: system messages and gameplay elements look like horrible, horrible google translations.
Here are the worst offenders:
Character attributes
'Constitution' has a weird translation. Just use "Konstitution" and be done with it.
'Dexterity' was translated with "Gewandheit". Use "Geschicklichkeit" instead. This is btw also what every single dictionary suggests first; why go for the least likely translation?
Combat log
Every friggin' damage text! The words "Piercing damage", "crushing damage", etc. were translated as verbs, not nouns! This leads to weird gibberish like:
"Haut Schaden"
which would, translated back to english mean:
"crushes/skins damage"
So, again, here's how it should look like:
"Piercing" --> "Stich"
"Crushing" --> "Wucht"
"Slashing" --> "Hieb"
Item names
This is by far the worst issue:
Every second item in the game has wrong string references for it's name. A Hunting bow has the name "Intellekt +2" instead of "Hunting Bow". Yes, I'm not making that up. This is confusing as hell for new players, as they will assume the item is enchanted with +attribute.
Fix this asap please!
Flavour texts
Every second flavour text has wrong formatting. Grey and white are completely mixed up most of the time. Very often the grey for a flavour text mixes up with the white for direct speech, making it extremely hard to read as the double quotes imply something is direct speech, but it's marked as a flavour text and vice versa. Also, there's plenty of double quotes missing completely.
This is especially offending at the beginning of the game, where almost every single dialogue has loads of flavour text. Fortunately, it getting better at later points in the game when the flavour text gets more scarce (I never liked it anyway ... I wish Obsidian would go back to BG-style direct speech only).
Dialogue-voiceover disparity
I know that this was a budget decision, but it's extremely confusing to read german dialogue (which you, as a german, will understand) and listen to english voiceover at the same time (which, again, most germans will understand aswell). This creates an enormous disconnect between hearing and seeing, which makes dialogue really hard to understand. I have absolutely no trouble watching japanese anime with subtitles (as I don't speak japanese), but watching english with subtitles is confusing as hell, as you understand both and your brain can not concentrate on one of the perceived languages completely, mixing things up, not understanding anything.
I mostly couldn't read anything until the voiceover was done playing. It's like someone constantly screaming in your ears when you are trying to read a book. It doesn't work (Imho, for a 45€ off-the-shelf game, not having german voiceovers is unacceptable, but that's another story).
At least give us an option to disable the english voiceover in dialogues when activating the localization!
I tried decreasing the speech volume but that also disables voiceovers that I don't want removed (outside of dialogues).
I ended up switching back to english, as the german localization was painful in every imaginable way. Sometimes even outright unplayable (system messages are virtually unreadable). Please fix this ASAP!
Question
Zwiebelchen
The title says it all. But before I go on a rant and point out the most critical issues (that need to be adressed ASAP; as there is press looking at this game right now and germany is a big gaming market), let me just tell you that the dialogues themselves are acceptable. No, really, every contextual text block has been decently translated.
However, everything that doesn't have a context, in other words: system messages and gameplay elements look like horrible, horrible google translations.
Here are the worst offenders:
Character attributes
'Constitution' has a weird translation. Just use "Konstitution" and be done with it.
'Dexterity' was translated with "Gewandheit". Use "Geschicklichkeit" instead. This is btw also what every single dictionary suggests first; why go for the least likely translation?
Combat log
Every friggin' damage text! The words "Piercing damage", "crushing damage", etc. were translated as verbs, not nouns! This leads to weird gibberish like:
"Haut Schaden"
which would, translated back to english mean:
"crushes/skins damage"
So, again, here's how it should look like:
"Piercing" --> "Stich"
"Crushing" --> "Wucht"
"Slashing" --> "Hieb"
Item names
This is by far the worst issue:
Every second item in the game has wrong string references for it's name. A Hunting bow has the name "Intellekt +2" instead of "Hunting Bow". Yes, I'm not making that up. This is confusing as hell for new players, as they will assume the item is enchanted with +attribute.
Fix this asap please!
Flavour texts
Every second flavour text has wrong formatting. Grey and white are completely mixed up most of the time. Very often the grey for a flavour text mixes up with the white for direct speech, making it extremely hard to read as the double quotes imply something is direct speech, but it's marked as a flavour text and vice versa. Also, there's plenty of double quotes missing completely.
This is especially offending at the beginning of the game, where almost every single dialogue has loads of flavour text. Fortunately, it getting better at later points in the game when the flavour text gets more scarce (I never liked it anyway ... I wish Obsidian would go back to BG-style direct speech only).
Dialogue-voiceover disparity
I know that this was a budget decision, but it's extremely confusing to read german dialogue (which you, as a german, will understand) and listen to english voiceover at the same time (which, again, most germans will understand aswell). This creates an enormous disconnect between hearing and seeing, which makes dialogue really hard to understand. I have absolutely no trouble watching japanese anime with subtitles (as I don't speak japanese), but watching english with subtitles is confusing as hell, as you understand both and your brain can not concentrate on one of the perceived languages completely, mixing things up, not understanding anything.
I mostly couldn't read anything until the voiceover was done playing. It's like someone constantly screaming in your ears when you are trying to read a book. It doesn't work (Imho, for a 45€ off-the-shelf game, not having german voiceovers is unacceptable, but that's another story).
At least give us an option to disable the english voiceover in dialogues when activating the localization!
I tried decreasing the speech volume but that also disables voiceovers that I don't want removed (outside of dialogues).
I ended up switching back to english, as the german localization was painful in every imaginable way. Sometimes even outright unplayable (system messages are virtually unreadable). Please fix this ASAP!
Edited by Zwiebelchen20 answers to this question
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