Who make the atrocious translations?

[Barón Rojo]

I bought HoI4 in this Steam summer discount, expecting it to have a better translation than CK or EU4, being a newer game. I don't know about the latest game, Imperator, but here the translation is an abomination too. Starting with the occupation of Rhineland event, below Google translator level, to the absolute cringe in the focus trees (example, HMAS Assault, from the Australian tree, translated as "Asalto a Buques Australianos de su Majestad", Assault to His Majesty Australian Ships), to textual translations instead of using the Spanish expression ("Marxismo con matices chinos" instead of "características chinas", etc, etc), to things that don't need to be translated because they are ok in English (Commonwealth for example, or "Red is the new Orange", because it is a pop culture reference). And this is HoI4. With EU4 and Ck2 it is the same or worse. Guess it is another Paradox game I should play in English.

I remember HoI2 (or EU2, or CK1) when it was distributed in a box by an actual distributor and it was masterfully translated. Who are you paying for translating this, seriously?

 

[Will Steel]

At least it is translated and can be fixed.

Some scripts like Indic/Brahmi aren't even supported, so Hindi and others are impossible. Wrote an entire translation personal mod for HoI4, only for it all to turn out blank.

 

[Nussor]

Yeah, the translations are awful. I play everything in English now.

 

[Svennie 135]

They make the games in English. You may be happy that you HAVE a translation. There are faults in the standard English texts too, so what?

 

[Hanako Seishin]

Playing Imperator in Russian, terms city/province/state/region are used totally randomly, each can actually refer to any of the other. Also: military influence, oratory influence, civic influence... one would expect the fourth would be religious influence. But somehow it's zeal or something. Ah, I actually only played once on release, so I don't remember exactly, but you get the point. It's like whoever translated it never launched the translated game to see how their translation looks inside the actual game. Because it's impossible to miss errors already at the country select screen, there was totally something wrong with pop types, I think tribesmen mentioned twice instead of some other type. But somehow it was right inside the actual game. Which brings the question, why does the game use separate localisation text for pop types inside the game and on the country select screen?

 

[7163D]

I red sometime ago a witness from the french translator of Rome : Imperator (http://forum.reseau-js.com/topic/95...pour-imperator-vercingétorix-ioutalkinetomix/) who... had create a mod to fix translation errors. I think the problem is from Paradox, not the translator...
According to this guy, translators must work without "mod system", with direct modification of games files. So, each game update replace all files, and he have to rewrite each localisation file one by one, and check if here or there new variable have been created ou variable removed.
More, he have to create localisation for none-coded features, and create localisation without context is quite hard...

 

[Hanako Seishin]

Google translated from the link above:

First important point: developers are still convinced that a word in English is necessarily a word in another language. It shows in the interfaces, but also in the names of characters and families. If for example a historical character is created in the files with the surname "Lagid", and since they do not need plural, masculine, feminine or adjective it will remain "Lagid" whatever the context. So, "The Lagid", "The Lagid Empire", etc. One is in blatant contradiction with the rule that allows to have the masculine, the feminine, the plural and an adjective (only one!) For the surnames, as you can see for example in the file game / common / culture /00_latin.txt:

Marcius.Marcia.Marcii.Marcian

(ie: masculine singular.feminine singular.plural.adjective)

Well, that's just... I mean, it would be understandable if from the start they planned to release the game only in English, then it's the modders' problem if the game doesn't support the grammar of their language. But if from the start they knew they were going to release in other languages, one would expect they would also from the start include support for their grammar. Like adjectives having a gender too. Or cases. I know it must be hard and I was honestly impressed when I saw Ni no Kuni 2 not only having a Russian translation (the only Japanese game I know that has one) but it even properly used the genitive case for "You've found an <item>". Maybe it's because Japanese has cases too, but in Japanese it's much easier because they just add a particle after the word, not change the word ending, so there must have been an additional effort put to make it work not only for Japanese. And what a disappointment it was to see in the same game "воина" (of a warrior) spelled like "война" (war), but that's clearly a translator's fault, not a technical issue. But anyway, I digress. What I want to say is that it's 2019, for how long game localization has been a thing, one would expect the technical side of things would improve by now to allow supporting grammar of different languages, but somehow sometimes games even still struggle with supporting different alphabets.

 

[elektrizikekswerk]

Yeah, the translations are awful. I play everything in English now.

Me too, but awful translations is not a paradoxian problem but a general problem in the industry. Or any industry.

It begins with badly translated texts in video games, to bad translated puns in movies and some... dubious... translations in books and ends with "perfect" translations of manuals for technical devices imported from China...

 

[EarlKonrad]

Can't speak for Paradox games because I don't know how they make their translations, but by my personal experience this isn't a surprise at all.

It is hard to do a good translation for many, many reasons. When it comes to games, often times you are given the text without context so ou have to be constantly asking for clarification (which can be seen as being incompetent) and it isn't rare that you won't have the chance to know how the translation look in-game before release. There also the problem of too much text and not enough time, characters limit, etc.

I'm always amazed when I see a good translation -- in any media. It's easy to spot a shady work but if the Localized made its job you won't even notice that you are playing a work that was translated

 

[Tapio]

It's also the case in books, even supposedly high quality ones where a meaning can be turned to something completely different. Always, if in any way feasible, go for the original language in any media you consume. It also helps you learn the language, if you got the basics down.

Heck, even religious groups have split over translation differences...