Video Game Translation?

[Anonymously Famous]

Does anyone here have any stories about fantastically good or bad video game translations that they've experienced? Zero Wing is obvious, but do you have anything else?

I'm trying to amass examples that I can present to my class.

[ThingerDudes]

Final Fantasy Tactics on PS1 has some bad translations. I think they might have fixed it for the PSP version. Most of the bad translation is from being direct translations and sounding really awkward and bad spelling of mythical names.

And there's also the famous "This guy are sick" in FFVII

For good translation, I like the Korean unit names for SC2, but it's a little awkward because Brood War was really big in Korea and they just used the English names then, so using Korean names in SC2 for the units that carried over is a little weird for me. e.g. 해병 (haebyung) vs 마린 (marine). I guess it's a case of picking which to use: the names that are already in the culture, or the names that are 'more correct'

I'm not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for but I like that there's fan translations for games like Ys that get a lot of notability. Those translations in my experience tend to be good.

[Anonymously Famous]

Thanks for the example of StarCraft. That's interesting that they transliterated in Brood War and translated in SC2.

[ThingerDudes]

There was actually no translation for Brood War IIRC which is why the English names were used. They just kinda stuck around after that.

[Anonymously Famous]

Okay. Gotcha.

[atomtengeralattjaro]

I don't usually play translated video games..
Playing games in english as a teenager has taught me a lot of english.

I've just tried the hungarian translation for Mount&Blade Warband, it's not too bad, although it exhibits some of the usual partially translated issues. (Some of that might be because of a mod I have installed though..)
This guy wants to say "Let's raise our winecups in honor of our host, Sanjar khan", but he fumbles something like "let's raise our glasses full of winecup drink". This is probably a difficult game to translate, because a lot of these sentences are stiched together from parts, as they have dynamic elements (the type of drink and the name of the host changes based on the situation).
Other than that, there are only a few errors here and there, and some things sound a bit awkward, but only a bit. The overall the experience is a bit jarring because of the partial translations, so I prefer english..

I've also tried Portal 2, it's alright, but the accented characters look weird: http://imgur.com/a/72saj
Much of game-jargon is hard to translate, the way they translated "single player game" for portal 2 sounds weird because the word for "player" is derived from the word for "game"...

But to answer your question, nope, I don't know of any fantastically bad translations. Hell, the Warband one might've actually been really good, with a bit more attention.

[Anonymously Famous]

The Portal 2 oddness might be the selection of a default font because those characters don't exist in the Portal font.

Thanks for the screenshots to go along with your examples!

Also, I'd be willing to bet that several of your English games are in fact translations.

[atomtengeralattjaro]

Maybe, I dunno. How many developers actually make games in their own language anyways? Far-Eastern ones probably do, but in the west?
I'd wager a lot of games are made in english to begin with.

[Anonymously Famous]

A lot of them made by Nintendo and Sony come in Japanese first, and are then localized into English. A lot of times, English may become the "pivot language," and other languages will be localized from the English.

[Uly]

English is sort of a crowd sourced language.

[Anonymously Famous]

I suppose it is, in a way.

[vraiment]

A lot of mexican translations for 90's cartoons are extremely awesome

[Anonymously Famous]

I remember watching some Powerpuff Girls on the Spanish Cartoon Network channel. I assume it was the Mexican translation, but I'm not sure.

[Arkannine]

Not really a bad/good translation thing, but I always find it impressive how poor support for international languages is on Windows, sometimes.
Case in point: fan-translated Japanese games usually require a hugely complicated installation that requires changing locale and sacrificing at least two black chicken whilst chanting inside an inscribed blood pentagram.
I don't know if Microsoft did it for performance reasons or whatever, but character rendering should be abstracted from locale settings.

[Anonymously Famous]

character rendering should be abstracted from locale settings

They really should. I wonder if they're OS locale specific as some attempt to limit piracy.

[atomtengeralattjaro]

because otherwise it would be too easy to change it?

[Anonymously Famous]

Changing the language should be easy.

[atomtengeralattjaro]

Da.

[Arkannine]

Ja.

[ThingerDudes]

kekeke