Update: Hollow Knight: Silksong sinks to 'Mostly Negative' Steam review status among Chinese gamers over its bafflingly bad translation, with Team Cherry promising to improve it
www.pcgamer.com
The extent of the issues makes it sound like a tall order.
    • Paddzr@lemmy.worldEnglish
      135·
      8 days ago

      Did we?

      So this itsy tiny company, called CD Project. You know what they started as? Locolisation for the Polish market because there was no standards. That’s their claim to fame before ever starting on a game themselves.

      Your comment has to be an anecdotal. Because games lived and died by localisations. Game like Gothic is legendary in Europe but the English version was quite lack luster and even though the games were vastly superior to elder scrolls, they couldn’t penetrate.

      • prettybunnys@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        131·
        7 days ago

        Someone set us up the bomb.

        Yeah. We laughed real hard at shitty localizations and ad even loved the games still.

        • addie@feddit.ukEnglish
          9·
          7 days ago

          Somebody set up us the bomb.

          Zero Wing is quite a hard game to love, tho. That phenomenal opening is followed up by a very mid Gradius knock-off. I’d probably have chosen Symphony Of The Night as the best game with an awful translation - voice acted by native speakers, too.

  • Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pubEnglish
    661·
    8 days ago

    don’t speak a language

    have no idea yourself how the end product will turn out

    every person you hire has to be trusted with a grain of salt and you have to take them at their word

    Nightmare, but now that the game is out, it isn’t like the content is under Fort Knox anymore and they can peer review it with the community until its right.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      I think translations should involve a pair of people where both know both languages but one is fluent in the one while the other is fluent in the other. Or a single person fluent in both, but if you don’t know the other language, it can be hard to verify that fluency and I’m sure it’s not very hard to find people willing to lie about their proficiency to get a job.

  • Phoenix3875@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    8 days ago

    You know how bad things are when I searched for some examples and the first result is a localization mod.

  • IndescribablySad@threads.net@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    315·
    8 days ago

    A good translation of a game with only like 50 pages of text. They could bust out a passable translation within a week. How long would a great one take? Like two, three weeks to write?

    • k0e3@lemmy.caEnglish
      291·
      8 days ago

      As a translator, I wanna say that translation isn’t a simple conversion of words when it comes to story. It takes longer than that to translate a good story of 50 pages because you have to make sure you understand the story and even the unwritten parts of it to convey the right nuance and tone.

      • IndescribablySad@threads.net@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        38·
        8 days ago

        My father used to translate books and managed about a page per hour with an editor to offer notes. I stand by 2-3 weeks to manually translate 50 pages of dialogue and exposition to a great, shippable quality. It’s more difficult when the subject matter is this disjointed, but I don’t imagine it would slow someone down by more than 4x. Particularly if there are notes on tone and premise available.

        • k0e3@lemmy.caEnglish
          141·
          8 days ago

          Maybe you were just talking about the story and perhaps you’re right. A whole team might be able to handle it with perfect editor’s notes and zero questions, zero changes.

          But I would like to also add that Hollow Knight’s story is very cryptic and the lines by all the characters are very disjointed. It’s also a fantasy so there are a lot of made up names, terminologies, ideas, and play on words that simply may not exist in the target language.

          I don’t know what genre or language pairs your father used to translate, but English to Chinese, I imagine, is quite difficult.

          I read an article about the Japanese localization of the game and the translator did a lot of back and forth with the devs (not just an editor), to discuss the world and tone. It wasn’t just a matter of “we want it this way by this day,” and boom, it’s done.

          Furthermore, you have to consider all the extra UI stuff they have to translate when it comes to video games.

          So, while I respect your opinion, I too stand by mine that 2 - 3 weeks seems too short especially if we include the UI stuff as well as review/QA.

          It could be that your father was just better than me at translating lol.

          Edit: I’m also wondering if the PPC needs to review the content (not the quality) before it is approved for sale in China.