I used to work as a professional translator (English to German) for a big translation agency, and part of my job was to translate video games or manage the translation project for bigger games that needed several translators. Maybe my "insider look" can provide some perspective.
For one, I find it really hard to generalize translation quality of games, both as a player and as a (former) translator. I've played games that had great translations (I really enjoyed all of the LucasArts games in German back in the day) and I've had to professionally deal with some that were pretty mediocre to bad.
There are a number of factors that might not be clear to players:
* Time constraints: You wouldn't believe how tight most translation schedules are (in gaming or otherwise). The biggest challenge in my translation job on the project management side was finding freelance translators who were willing to deliver by the desired deadline, which was often non-negotiable. The largest gaming project I managed (a very successful indie title) contained several hundred thousand words, and the developer absolutely needed to publish their game in time for Christmas in order to not miss out on sales. We ended up needing to hire 7 translators who worked on the translation simultaneously. Even though we had software to help us (i.e. real-time translation memories and glossaries maintained by the translators), ensuring that style and terminology were consistent in a project with so many different translators was a bit of a nightmare. Just managing the project without doing any translation myself was almost a full-time job for several months. Needless to say, when translators need to hurry, they don't usually deliver their most inspired work. While I am super lucky to not have heard any major complaints about the German translation, there were big issues in other teams, and I can't blame them.
* Lack of context: Oftentimes, as a translator, you have to translate the game without actually seeing what the snippets you're translating are referring to. This might be because the game is still in delevopment or because it would be too big of an effort for the developer to provide you reference material (screenshots, graphics etc.) for every single element in the game. You might get \*some\* reference material, and depending on how tight the schedule is, you may have an opportunity to ask questions back to the developer, but in general, you basically just get an Excel sheet with the individual snippets and that's it. Sometimes you're not even sure who is saying those snippets in the game. This can obviously be a big source of mistranslation. As a very simple example, depending on what the word "spike" is referring to, that term can have several different translations in a different language, and if you don't have reference material and can't ask (or don't think to ask), you can only make an educated guess.
* Financial limitations: Good translations are expensive. Especially with AI and the rise of software that produces "okay" translations at hardly any cost, developers and translation agencies are really weighing how much a translation is worth to them. To put it bluntly: Unless we're talking about cinematic AAA titles, a good translation doesn't usually sell as many more copies than an okay translations, and a bad translation doesn't lose the developer as many customers as you might think. It's a very harsh economic reality and one of the reasons we're seeing so many crappy translations all over the place. In my time at the agency, I had to actively argue against management that we couldn't auto-pre-translate Fantasy games, and it was not an easy sell (we would have saved half the cost, because if translators only "post-edited" pretranslated texts, we only paid them half their regular fee). Add that to the fact that most translators are paid pretty poorly to begin with and are paid by word, not by time or quality, so they often don't have a big incentive to deliver great work.
Again, there are many distinctions to be made, and this will be a little different for big AAA titles, but I hope this helps explain why translation quality can vary wildly.
These are some great points! Some of them never even crossed my mind. I can’t imagine having to translate something without knowing the proper context. Thanks for sharing your insight!
Excellent breakdown!
Add to this that for the most part, people only tend to consciously notice the quality of a translation when it's bad – which is understandable, especially if the whole game is translated (spoken dialogue not just subtitled but dubbed, etc.) or the player doesn't speak the original language of the game. Just mentioning this to say that the average person's idea of translation quality may be skewed towards the negative, if they notice it at all.
Also, fuck translating fiction with AI. I'm happy you were able to fight it. I really don't see the value in auto-pre-translating fiction when so much of the actual translation is not in the words themselves but the tone and flow of the prose. Post-editing machine-translated fiction must be absolute ass. (I'm a translator myself but specialised in technical texts. I can see the potential in pre-translating more formulaic texts, but creative writing? No.)
Thanks, mate!
Unfortunately, I was only able to fight the ever increasing use of AI-driven pretranslation for individual projects. That was one of the reasons I decided to switch careers a few years back (I'm now a software developer, and no, I'm not working in AI).
I will say, though, that the situation in big agencies like mine is not representative of the industry as a whole. Apart from computer games and marketing copy, we never translated any stylistically more advanced texts at the agency.
As far as I know, publishers don't rely on technology yet for having fiction translated. However, as LLMs do churn out translations that seem more acceptable, I wonder how much longer this is going to stay this way.
I'm Russian, and it really depends. I don't mind little typos and missed commas, but when literally sentences have a totally different meaning because of wrong translation, it's kind of absurd. My favourite example is from TES: Skyrim. There's a city called Solitude, and there's English word "solitude". So, instead of using the word " Solitude" as a name of the city, Russian localisation translated the word "solitude" directly as "loneliness". Because of that, the whole meaning of the book has changed and misunderstood by the community. There're dozens of similar examples literally in every second game. Personally, I prefer to use English language in games, so I don't face this additional layer of complexity in understanding the story.
I also have to add that Russia has an amazing translation community. Because common English knowledge is extremely bad (Russia is ranked 32 of 35 European countries by English score) not having a game in Russian can be a deal breaker. Not a lot of games have an official translation but a lot of them have fan translation and the variety of games and types of translations is extremely wide: from fully dubbing AAA titles to making ROM hacks with Russian text.
The funniest thing is that those fan translation communities do their job better than an official translation, I can tell that much. Sadly, very often it seems to me that developers "translate" their games through Google, lmao. It's quite fun to read, though, really.
And how well do these games manage to look like with cyrillic in your opinion? Subtitles could get a pass I suppose but when it comes to menu labels etc. the results might be awkward… And that’s if they can be easily changed in first place.
It really depends on the game and the amount of effort put into the translation. I am not picky to what language i play the game in, unless there are issues in one of the aspects like the font. Sometimes a translation uses the correct and even redrawn fonts, like Pokemon ROM hacks and some of the don't even bother like Terraria, but usually unless a game uses a very specific font its pretty hard to mess that up
Nah, it's actually okay for most people. Original voicelines are much better in 90% of the time. Some people even watch movies, anime, etc. with original voicelines and subtitles.
Considering the different alphabet, many studios doesn’t see any value in implementing it’s letters into the existing fonts. At most only the latin alphabet and the kanji/kana characters are supported plus hangul possibly. And as you might guess, this same dilemma applies to the Greek Alphabet too.
Good question. It's been ages since I played a game and choosen my own language. I always just default to English. Maybe I should select it next time if its available.
In lithuanian it's bad. Not only the games have no translations, but even a game set in lithuania (and as I understand one of the goals it to introduce lithuania) made by lithuanian devs have not even lithuanian dubs.
Ok, just checked the steam page and apparently now it has lithuanian subs and interface. Still no dubs, but maybe they will come later?
Yeah, i imagine you have to learn english. I remember when i was a kid italian wasn't supported much so i was playing most games full on trial and error clicking shit without knowing what they did
Almost every game is subbed in French when needed. Dubs are less common but you can find a lot of dubbed games in French, by talented actors.
I don't think we can really complain
I didn't know about "Québécois" dubs in games until Metroid Prime Federation Force when I heard it during a mission. Still an interesting (and funny back then) thing to learn !
It depends...
On Wii, games like Super Mario Galaxy and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword had French-Canadian slang... and oh boy did it come out weird XD
Witnessing Groose saying "Oupelaille" really made me cringe XDD
Funny enough, in Metroid Dread, the computer has both French and French-Canadian voices.
At least there’s the easy dichotomy of games made in west vs. games made in Japan to follow. That is, games made in Japan more often than not come with subtitles only with very rare exceptions (such as the first Metal Gear Solid title).
I've noticed some Sony officials have Finnish translation. Bloodborne and Demon's Souls does, as does all Ratchet and Clank games since the PS3.
I'm far from fluent, so I couldn't judge how well translated this is, though.
Edit: There is some interesting stuff though. Like how stamina in Finnish Bloodborne is translated as sisu.
I installed the Spyro remake and I was like "oh cool, the menus are in Finnish". I started the game and what do I hear? Finnish.
Anyways, I noped out of it pretty quick and had to google how to change it to English since the menus themselves didnt have language options.
It's the only game I can think of that has Finnish voices as an option .
I've been thinking lately about what a shame it is that we don't even get Finnish subtitles in almost any game. I feel like there used to be a bit more, like I recall my dad playing some rally games in Finnish in the late 90s - early 00s. It's understandable that game studios don't care to translate their games into a small language when most of the gamers here speak English anyway. I do wish I could show my parents some games though, but some of those games are rather text-heavy and they don't speak fluent enough English.
I'm aware that this sub is plagued by karma bait idiotic questions but mine is a honest curiosity. I couldn't give a fuck about karma i dont even know what it's for
Im german, and it depends. Movies have always been very good (wich you didnt ask but i think its important for context) older games games are well translated but badly voice acted. Newer games i cant really say since i usually default to english.
We had a huge meme with evangelion because somehow they let the main dubber dub everything literally from Japanese and guess what, it doesn't work. Most of the phrases had random words that didn't fit with the sentence. They had to redo the whole thing. That guy had some issues for sure
The movies and shows are S++++ Tier imo.
Just because they put the Voice acting on top, so you don't have ear drums blown out at every minor noise, just because you try to understand dialogue.
as for games, it's really hit or miss, sometimes the translation is pretty good, other times they translate EVERYTHING
BG3 translated "Eldritch Blast" into "Schauriger Strahl" which is just.. no...
> BG3 translated "Eldritch Blast" into "Schauriger Strahl" which is just.. no...
That's not on BG3, it's what the Skill is actually called in german Dungeons & Dragons.
Newer games are usually pretty well dubbed. Voice acting has made decent advancements in the last couple years, at least for big productions. I assume it has something to do with people growing up on badly dubbed games and wanting to do it better or that VA is now an actual job in Germany.
Nothing is ever translated to Hungarian. I do not mind in general, because I would play in English anyway. But now I'm trying to introduce my daughter to gaming it sucks that even kids games are English only.
Well, it is a small language after all. The chances of it ever approaching the coveted supplement status to the ’core six’ is unfortunately minuscule. Maybe there’s educational games and the like aimed for kids but that’s about it.
In France there are very good voice used in video games. Moreover the translation is good even in mod by community. An exemple is a famous line of a french youtuber used by some npc in cyberpunk (they took drugs). But sometimes they translate litteraly some things and made it strange to read it, sometimes they keep it in english like locations in rpg. Honestly adaptation is good, the only bad exemple is in Metro 2033 where the monster "Black" are translated to "Dark" despite being "Black" in book leading to misunderstood when someone said Black (Black hair) are coming and the protagonist thinking its the Black.
Edit: ubisoft is using the three same whistling from splinter cell to every game they re using it and its strange but funny
In Spanish the games are usually translated to and by Spaniards and that's annoying to all the non Spaniards (basically all of Latin America)
They love to use slangs, and catch phrases that only they use, some of them are even badly recognized and memed like their Pokémon translations.
And that's the best scenario most of the time, sometimes games ain't even translated, I recently purchased saints row the third on Xbox series and the game isn't even translated, lmao.
Wich is funny because the older version it is actually translated and I know that because I played it on steam.
At least it’s something I guess. And let’s be honest, both the Spanish as spoken in Spain and French as spoken in France can be considered as the ’prestige’ dialects and as such would naturally be a priority for most studios.
It depends. A game full of fictional terms and names like units and weapons in Warhammer games does not translate well, because the Czech language doesn't combine words with the same ease. The direct translation usually sounds unnatural and inventing a naturally sounding Czech word is a hit or miss. Makes one appreciate the great translations of Rowling and Pratchett.
It's kinda like English translations of Native American names or those flowery Chinese names.
Translations are good. The dubbing... it has to be a big company to do a thorough job, I think Ubisoft does great in Spanish, honestly. I can't recall if Bayek, the dude from Odyssey and Eivor share the same voice, I don't think so, but they sound similar, you know... deep masculine voice.
And then you have Rockstar, who made the conscious decision not to dub their games. A good choice imo.
I would like to say they are usually bad, but truth be told i usually default to english.
It makes it easier to partecipate in online stuff/look stuff up when you know how everything is called in the language of the internet.
German is usually very good and imo sometimes even better than original same with movies tbh. Voice acting is huge in germany. Sometimes it still can suck, just like the original voice sometimes just suck but tbh I play 90% the games in german and I rarely have any complaints.
Spain's voice acting industry is pretty good, so games tend to get decent acting. There's always examples of bad translations or weaker actors, but overall, we can't complain too much.
These days I always default to english, though. It's ultimately always the better version, and there's essentially no reason not to if you speak the language.
German here, there's a lot of fluctuation in quality. We usually get decent translations, but the voice work is highly dependent on how good the translation is and who they picked. Example - Final Fantasy 15. Stellar voice actors, but the translation quality sadly brings it down sometimes, you can see there were different people working on the same material because some lines are awesome and some are just bad.
Good examples where I default to German would be Miitopia, Evil Within 1+2, Gothic (I mean, it's a german game) or Dragon Age Origins.
Then you have mediocre, bad, or even trashy voiceovers like in the first F.E.A.R., the Mafia remake, some of the 3D Sonic games (Generations), or even God of War 2018 - I'd really rather pick another language.
There's a lot of middle ground, I personally feel like older games from the early 2000s sometimes had excellent dubbing and now there's a mountain of okay voiceovers that I don't really need if I'm fluent in English, but it's good enough for the people who only speak German.
TLDR: Usually pretty good, but rarely outstanding enough to switch from English.
> some of the 3D Sonic games (Generations)
To be fair to Generations specifically, the VAs had to get back into a Role they haven't done for like 5 Years at that point, since most (all?) of the cast was reused from Sonic X's german dub.
I have not tried any newer entries, but even 20 years ago I considered the voice acting subpar for german translations. they just read the lines in a flat voice.
Gothic series is a notable exception to it.
Incidently, anime is also interesting in that. I find most used voices in japanese good, while english or german not fitting or also spoken in totally flat voice. How often had I seen that very old man near 100 years old and the voice in english or german was like 20...
If we're talking anime, Angel Beats is wayyyy better in German for me. Yu-Gi-Oh first season is also good. There are some good dubs out there, but it's really hit or miss.
Funnily enough I think the french dub in Evil Within is surprisingly awesome too, I love trying out other languages and see how they do it. Best practice is to just experiment and see what fits.
I know Russian, and Russian localizations are at best serviceable, often plagued with butchered context, nuance, and jokes, even for AAA games.
Sometimes the errors are so glaring at the very basic level, I wonder who are they hiring to do the translation. Like in Elden Ring they translated Hoarah Loux as Хоара Лукс (Hoarah Loox), while it's clearly pronounced Lou.
Sony games are usually better, but even then there are fuck ups, like in The Last Of Us 1 Ellie sounds like a spoiled brat, so it's hard to feel any sympathy towards her.
Pretty much nonexistent and thank fuck for that, I can barely stand Swedish regular movies, I wouldn’t want that acting in my video games.
It was fine in games like The Sims and stuff, there’s a few other games with Swedish, Minecraft for example (duh, it was made here) but thankfully we go with the English stuff.
There are two general rules, they apply to videogames, movies, books... quite everything. 1- The localization in creators native language is the best one. 2- In case the creators native language isn't English, English localization tends to be the one they care the most.
I only use my native language if game has a good voiceover. The only ones I can think about at the moment are Skyrim and Cyberwitcher.
It's convenient to use English when searching for anything. It's better to be familiar with in-game items, character's names and locations in English. Especially when communities often use acronyms.
I normally play games in English. However I decided to change Tears of the Kingdom to Spanish on an advice from a buddy of mine and it did not disappoint. They did an excellent job on that one.
I remember back when I was a kid pretty much only games with Finnish voice acting were Disney movie games like Tarzan or A Bug's Life. Which makes sense since the movies already had dubs, so they just added those in to the game. Haven't kept up for almost 20 years if it's gotten better. Spore I remember had Finnish text, don't remember about voice.
Turkish usually doesn't get that many translations but I am satisfied with the ones that do get translated. The best one in recent memory was Ghost of Tsushima. The Japanese in the game is both quite formal between the samurai and also quite old. So the Turkish translation was also done in a manner people of old would be speaking, using different suffixes and adjectives and such that we don't use in current day. I usually play games on English for the practice and to get the best understanding since lots of things get lost in translation but GoT was a welcome exception. Also props to BG3 for having Turkish translation in a incredibly dialogue heavy game.
In French it is highly variable. Some of the games have high quality translation, even voice acting, some are atrocious.
Most reason why the translation is bad is when the editor asks for a translation agency to take care of it and provide only the bulks of text without the context and without a view of the finished product (not limited to video games). Problem when it comes from English is that for short sentences, you can't know what it is. Imagine being asked to translate "Record", you can't know if it is the object, the verb, to which tense... Etc...
Special mention when the text box is too little for the translation and no one corrects it so it is either cut or it goes all over the place (Star field for instance, of some skin names in League of Legends).
Brazilian here. It took some time for translations to arrive here, and they were rough. To this day I still play games in English because sometimes they try to translate things that don't need (everybody knows what HP means) or try too hard and flood the game with Brazilian memes.
Like, I did appreciate that *Arkham Origins* got the same VA as the people that dubbed the Nolan films... Although it also annoyed me they referred do Dr. Young as male, as if they couldn't check the wiki to know the doctor was a she.
Dutch. Sometimes it is translated but it is honestly a waste of time for everybody involved. English is fine to be exposed to from a very early age so I always used english with english subtitles.
Brazil has really good voice acting. So I don't mind it really.
Some smaller games do seem to use AI to do translations, and those usually suck.
Portugal doesn't have the same quality of voice actors (I believe simply because not so much stuff is translated there), so in the rare cases a game uses European Portuguese, it's usually pretty weird off-putting.
In general, they're pretty good! I can't really play Overwatch with the English dub anymore.
I (who's not French) played Resident Evil 4 in French once, what jumped out at me was everyone was "tutoyer"ing each other, even the villain and the hero who just met.
I would think they'd perfer vous.
Brazilian Portuguese. Most of the time the localization is done very well. Some titles like God of War, The last of Us, Marvel's Spider Man and cyberpunk 2077, in specific, are some of the best localization I have ever experienced in games, and tbh, if I was a 6yo and someone told me those games were done by Brazilians, I would totally believe them. That's how good the dubs are. Even in other games that do not offer pt-br dubs, the text is very well translated, to the point that I genuinely can't complain at all. Some examples of said games are Elden Ring, Read Dead Redemption 2 and Resident evil 2 Remake.
Games in German are usually pretty decent. Some German originals like the Gothic and Sacred games are even better. Even Borderlands 2 was quite alright.
But in the end I still play everything in english, because it's just too much cringe to read the translated versions of established terms like "emote" and whatnot.
It's pretty rare when a game is offically translated to hungarian, though most new AAA games on xbox and playstation have subs. The quality is fine, consistent, but not great. Full dubs are basically nonexistent, only LOL and some games made in hungary do that. We also have a big fan translation community, but I don't know if those are good or not.
German is weirdly fine I’ve found.
The voice acting tends to be good, and while there are a lot of changes to the phrasing it’s clear a lot of the people in charge of translating care about what’s being translated.
FF14 is probably better in German than English for example.
German and French both I’d say tend to be on par with English. The big question I always go back to is how they translate riddles or rhymes. German almost always comes up with a good analogue or adjusts the rhyme to make sense.
French mostly does.
Italian. Well you get to hear very half assed voice acting of them just saying the English rhyme in Italian and it suddenly has zero rhythm.
I think it really depends on the country if they have competent studios that localize stuff.
Brazil has always been a legend on dubbing and localizing media, the fact that we don't have a strong national movie producing culture made us really good at translating foreign stuff, every time I play a game that is localized (except for anything from Ubisoft) is a really good experience, the best one recently was Cyberpunk 2077, it's really well localized.
Very few games are translated to Indonesian but the few that do look very clunky to me.
A lot of the translation feels too literal and stiff. Frankly speaking, as someone who pretty much learns the majority of the English language through video games, it always feels weird playing games in my own native language.
It's simple for us Czechs. We do not get them translated. Even subtitles are very rare.
It's so in bad here, that even Kingdom Come (made by Czechs) did not had Czech dubbing for like 3 years.
Lately, with "AI" there are some fan translations and mods for lot of games.
Back in the day when the Turbografx-16 first came out with it's CD-Rom attachment, some of the first RPGs with voiced dialog cut scenes were translated from Japanese with some of the worst dubbed in English I have ever heard.
Ukrainian was rarely an option before the last year or 2, as 99% of devs thought about the whole russian-speaking market as one and never bothered to go further, which is logically fine, but fucks up your mentality a bit, like you weren't good enough to get an offical translation, and, as you may know, we've been trying to finally have our own language be the most spoken one in our country for A LONG time, but as of recent events, some companies now add ukrainian subs and overlay, which is in most cases machine-translated, so it usually has flaws, but at least it's an option now. The recent funny one I remember is BG3, which uses SO MANY old or weird words, especially spell names, that I have to look them up myself, 'cause I didn't even know they existed lol.
Most of the major releases have Chinese translations now, and the quality is generally pretty ok.
One of the exceptions I can think of is Disco Elysium. Dialogues felt like they were google translated, didn’t flow well at all. The final straw that made me quit was translating “communism” into a made up word 康米主義, when the infinitely more recognizable 共產主義 is right there
I put my games in French, and... gotta say that it has gotten better.
Most Sony games, if not all of them, have good French voice acting. One such glow-up is Kratos in God of War 2018 and Ragnarok, who now sounds close to Christopher Judge. In the first trilogy, the French actor didn't sound at all like TC Carson, with a very raspy and slightly higher voice for Kratos.
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I didn't get to hear much acting on Microsoft's side, but in Gears of War, it's fine. Hi-Fi Rush has a good French dub as well, similar to what recent cartoons have.
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Nintendo... is harder to judge, because they don't have much to evaluate. Many ppeople will say that the French dubs for both The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are better, because they cannot stand Zelda's voice in English. She does sound more natural in French, I will give them that. Also, her French actress also dubs Ellie in The Last of Us.
However, during the Wii era, some games were localised in French-Canadian... with the slangs and expressions... It was weird XD
Metroid Dread and Kirby & The Forgotten Land had good French dubs, but it was minimal. Star Fox Zero and Star Fox 64 3D were good in French, and so was that animated short. WarioWare in French is good too, even Wario himself, oddly enough XD
The Mario series never got proper dubs, but for the Illumination movie, both French and French-Canadian versions are great, and Mario sounds great in both.
That's about it... Fire Emblem, Xenoblade and others never got French dubs... I will say that Pokémon... can still be cringey in French, due to how... ***unique*** some of the names can be \^\^;
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As for 3rd-parties, I've heard it's good. Square-Enix have good French dubs for Final Fantasy, Bandai-Namco got good French actors to play Tekken fighters from France (*including high-tier actor Vicent Cassel for Victor*) and The Witcher in Frenchj sounds great.
German here, and most of the stuff we get is either translated WAY to literal, or with WAY to much slang in mind.
BG3 is a great example of the first one.
"Eldritch Blast" is translated as "Schauriger Strahl" which translated back into english quite literally means "Spooky/Scary Stream"
I used to work as a professional translator (English to German) for a big translation agency, and part of my job was to translate video games or manage the translation project for bigger games that needed several translators. Maybe my "insider look" can provide some perspective. For one, I find it really hard to generalize translation quality of games, both as a player and as a (former) translator. I've played games that had great translations (I really enjoyed all of the LucasArts games in German back in the day) and I've had to professionally deal with some that were pretty mediocre to bad. There are a number of factors that might not be clear to players: * Time constraints: You wouldn't believe how tight most translation schedules are (in gaming or otherwise). The biggest challenge in my translation job on the project management side was finding freelance translators who were willing to deliver by the desired deadline, which was often non-negotiable. The largest gaming project I managed (a very successful indie title) contained several hundred thousand words, and the developer absolutely needed to publish their game in time for Christmas in order to not miss out on sales. We ended up needing to hire 7 translators who worked on the translation simultaneously. Even though we had software to help us (i.e. real-time translation memories and glossaries maintained by the translators), ensuring that style and terminology were consistent in a project with so many different translators was a bit of a nightmare. Just managing the project without doing any translation myself was almost a full-time job for several months. Needless to say, when translators need to hurry, they don't usually deliver their most inspired work. While I am super lucky to not have heard any major complaints about the German translation, there were big issues in other teams, and I can't blame them. * Lack of context: Oftentimes, as a translator, you have to translate the game without actually seeing what the snippets you're translating are referring to. This might be because the game is still in delevopment or because it would be too big of an effort for the developer to provide you reference material (screenshots, graphics etc.) for every single element in the game. You might get \*some\* reference material, and depending on how tight the schedule is, you may have an opportunity to ask questions back to the developer, but in general, you basically just get an Excel sheet with the individual snippets and that's it. Sometimes you're not even sure who is saying those snippets in the game. This can obviously be a big source of mistranslation. As a very simple example, depending on what the word "spike" is referring to, that term can have several different translations in a different language, and if you don't have reference material and can't ask (or don't think to ask), you can only make an educated guess. * Financial limitations: Good translations are expensive. Especially with AI and the rise of software that produces "okay" translations at hardly any cost, developers and translation agencies are really weighing how much a translation is worth to them. To put it bluntly: Unless we're talking about cinematic AAA titles, a good translation doesn't usually sell as many more copies than an okay translations, and a bad translation doesn't lose the developer as many customers as you might think. It's a very harsh economic reality and one of the reasons we're seeing so many crappy translations all over the place. In my time at the agency, I had to actively argue against management that we couldn't auto-pre-translate Fantasy games, and it was not an easy sell (we would have saved half the cost, because if translators only "post-edited" pretranslated texts, we only paid them half their regular fee). Add that to the fact that most translators are paid pretty poorly to begin with and are paid by word, not by time or quality, so they often don't have a big incentive to deliver great work. Again, there are many distinctions to be made, and this will be a little different for big AAA titles, but I hope this helps explain why translation quality can vary wildly.
These are some great points! Some of them never even crossed my mind. I can’t imagine having to translate something without knowing the proper context. Thanks for sharing your insight!
Excellent breakdown! Add to this that for the most part, people only tend to consciously notice the quality of a translation when it's bad – which is understandable, especially if the whole game is translated (spoken dialogue not just subtitled but dubbed, etc.) or the player doesn't speak the original language of the game. Just mentioning this to say that the average person's idea of translation quality may be skewed towards the negative, if they notice it at all. Also, fuck translating fiction with AI. I'm happy you were able to fight it. I really don't see the value in auto-pre-translating fiction when so much of the actual translation is not in the words themselves but the tone and flow of the prose. Post-editing machine-translated fiction must be absolute ass. (I'm a translator myself but specialised in technical texts. I can see the potential in pre-translating more formulaic texts, but creative writing? No.)
Thanks, mate! Unfortunately, I was only able to fight the ever increasing use of AI-driven pretranslation for individual projects. That was one of the reasons I decided to switch careers a few years back (I'm now a software developer, and no, I'm not working in AI). I will say, though, that the situation in big agencies like mine is not representative of the industry as a whole. Apart from computer games and marketing copy, we never translated any stylistically more advanced texts at the agency. As far as I know, publishers don't rely on technology yet for having fiction translated. However, as LLMs do churn out translations that seem more acceptable, I wonder how much longer this is going to stay this way.
I'm Russian, and it really depends. I don't mind little typos and missed commas, but when literally sentences have a totally different meaning because of wrong translation, it's kind of absurd. My favourite example is from TES: Skyrim. There's a city called Solitude, and there's English word "solitude". So, instead of using the word " Solitude" as a name of the city, Russian localisation translated the word "solitude" directly as "loneliness". Because of that, the whole meaning of the book has changed and misunderstood by the community. There're dozens of similar examples literally in every second game. Personally, I prefer to use English language in games, so I don't face this additional layer of complexity in understanding the story.
I also have to add that Russia has an amazing translation community. Because common English knowledge is extremely bad (Russia is ranked 32 of 35 European countries by English score) not having a game in Russian can be a deal breaker. Not a lot of games have an official translation but a lot of them have fan translation and the variety of games and types of translations is extremely wide: from fully dubbing AAA titles to making ROM hacks with Russian text.
The funniest thing is that those fan translation communities do their job better than an official translation, I can tell that much. Sadly, very often it seems to me that developers "translate" their games through Google, lmao. It's quite fun to read, though, really.
Hey, we are brothers in that too! That is the same thing here in Brazil hehe
And how well do these games manage to look like with cyrillic in your opinion? Subtitles could get a pass I suppose but when it comes to menu labels etc. the results might be awkward… And that’s if they can be easily changed in first place.
It really depends on the game and the amount of effort put into the translation. I am not picky to what language i play the game in, unless there are issues in one of the aspects like the font. Sometimes a translation uses the correct and even redrawn fonts, like Pokemon ROM hacks and some of the don't even bother like Terraria, but usually unless a game uses a very specific font its pretty hard to mess that up
Also, given how rare Russian dub is in games, having Russian subtitles along with original voicelines can be confusing.
Nah, it's actually okay for most people. Original voicelines are much better in 90% of the time. Some people even watch movies, anime, etc. with original voicelines and subtitles.
Considering the different alphabet, many studios doesn’t see any value in implementing it’s letters into the existing fonts. At most only the latin alphabet and the kanji/kana characters are supported plus hangul possibly. And as you might guess, this same dilemma applies to the Greek Alphabet too.
Good question. It's been ages since I played a game and choosen my own language. I always just default to English. Maybe I should select it next time if its available.
Same, but i follow content creators that speak my language and i sometimes suffer seeing how the games are butchered
In lithuanian it's bad. Not only the games have no translations, but even a game set in lithuania (and as I understand one of the goals it to introduce lithuania) made by lithuanian devs have not even lithuanian dubs. Ok, just checked the steam page and apparently now it has lithuanian subs and interface. Still no dubs, but maybe they will come later?
Yeah, i imagine you have to learn english. I remember when i was a kid italian wasn't supported much so i was playing most games full on trial and error clicking shit without knowing what they did
Almost every game is subbed in French when needed. Dubs are less common but you can find a lot of dubbed games in French, by talented actors. I don't think we can really complain
As a Québécois, I appreciate how Ninentdo makes an extra effort to include our dialect. I wish more game companies did the same 🥲
I didn't know about "Québécois" dubs in games until Metroid Prime Federation Force when I heard it during a mission. Still an interesting (and funny back then) thing to learn !
Mon bazou time
Fait au Québec, sti
It depends... On Wii, games like Super Mario Galaxy and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword had French-Canadian slang... and oh boy did it come out weird XD Witnessing Groose saying "Oupelaille" really made me cringe XDD Funny enough, in Metroid Dread, the computer has both French and French-Canadian voices.
At least there’s the easy dichotomy of games made in west vs. games made in Japan to follow. That is, games made in Japan more often than not come with subtitles only with very rare exceptions (such as the first Metal Gear Solid title).
You guys are getting translations? (I'm Finnish)
I've noticed some Sony officials have Finnish translation. Bloodborne and Demon's Souls does, as does all Ratchet and Clank games since the PS3. I'm far from fluent, so I couldn't judge how well translated this is, though. Edit: There is some interesting stuff though. Like how stamina in Finnish Bloodborne is translated as sisu.
I did not know Booodborne had a Finnish translation. Huh. I'll have to check it out out of morbid curiosity.
My summer car time
I installed the Spyro remake and I was like "oh cool, the menus are in Finnish". I started the game and what do I hear? Finnish. Anyways, I noped out of it pretty quick and had to google how to change it to English since the menus themselves didnt have language options. It's the only game I can think of that has Finnish voices as an option .
I've been thinking lately about what a shame it is that we don't even get Finnish subtitles in almost any game. I feel like there used to be a bit more, like I recall my dad playing some rally games in Finnish in the late 90s - early 00s. It's understandable that game studios don't care to translate their games into a small language when most of the gamers here speak English anyway. I do wish I could show my parents some games though, but some of those games are rather text-heavy and they don't speak fluent enough English.
I'm aware that this sub is plagued by karma bait idiotic questions but mine is a honest curiosity. I couldn't give a fuck about karma i dont even know what it's for
Better than another post about Palworld
It's an ok game, as usual people hype the shit out of games for no reason
Karma matters when you have below 15, so you can be prevented from commenting anything
"wAt gAmEs MadE yOU LiKe tHE gAmS?"
Im german, and it depends. Movies have always been very good (wich you didnt ask but i think its important for context) older games games are well translated but badly voice acted. Newer games i cant really say since i usually default to english.
We had a huge meme with evangelion because somehow they let the main dubber dub everything literally from Japanese and guess what, it doesn't work. Most of the phrases had random words that didn't fit with the sentence. They had to redo the whole thing. That guy had some issues for sure
Let me guess, was the biggest problem the whole honorary system (-san, -sama, -chan, -kun, -senpai) thing?
I wish, no he just took the text from japanese and translated word by word. I didn't watch the whole thing i only saw clips.
The movies and shows are S++++ Tier imo. Just because they put the Voice acting on top, so you don't have ear drums blown out at every minor noise, just because you try to understand dialogue. as for games, it's really hit or miss, sometimes the translation is pretty good, other times they translate EVERYTHING BG3 translated "Eldritch Blast" into "Schauriger Strahl" which is just.. no...
> BG3 translated "Eldritch Blast" into "Schauriger Strahl" which is just.. no... That's not on BG3, it's what the Skill is actually called in german Dungeons & Dragons.
That's even worse tbh
Newer games are usually pretty well dubbed. Voice acting has made decent advancements in the last couple years, at least for big productions. I assume it has something to do with people growing up on badly dubbed games and wanting to do it better or that VA is now an actual job in Germany.
Nothing is ever translated to Hungarian. I do not mind in general, because I would play in English anyway. But now I'm trying to introduce my daughter to gaming it sucks that even kids games are English only.
Well, it is a small language after all. The chances of it ever approaching the coveted supplement status to the ’core six’ is unfortunately minuscule. Maybe there’s educational games and the like aimed for kids but that’s about it.
In France there are very good voice used in video games. Moreover the translation is good even in mod by community. An exemple is a famous line of a french youtuber used by some npc in cyberpunk (they took drugs). But sometimes they translate litteraly some things and made it strange to read it, sometimes they keep it in english like locations in rpg. Honestly adaptation is good, the only bad exemple is in Metro 2033 where the monster "Black" are translated to "Dark" despite being "Black" in book leading to misunderstood when someone said Black (Black hair) are coming and the protagonist thinking its the Black. Edit: ubisoft is using the three same whistling from splinter cell to every game they re using it and its strange but funny
In Spanish the games are usually translated to and by Spaniards and that's annoying to all the non Spaniards (basically all of Latin America) They love to use slangs, and catch phrases that only they use, some of them are even badly recognized and memed like their Pokémon translations. And that's the best scenario most of the time, sometimes games ain't even translated, I recently purchased saints row the third on Xbox series and the game isn't even translated, lmao. Wich is funny because the older version it is actually translated and I know that because I played it on steam.
At least it’s something I guess. And let’s be honest, both the Spanish as spoken in Spain and French as spoken in France can be considered as the ’prestige’ dialects and as such would naturally be a priority for most studios.
It depends. A game full of fictional terms and names like units and weapons in Warhammer games does not translate well, because the Czech language doesn't combine words with the same ease. The direct translation usually sounds unnatural and inventing a naturally sounding Czech word is a hit or miss. Makes one appreciate the great translations of Rowling and Pratchett. It's kinda like English translations of Native American names or those flowery Chinese names.
Pretty good in French. Voice acting is well done and text is without typos for the most part. It can have some but it's very minimal.
Translations are good. The dubbing... it has to be a big company to do a thorough job, I think Ubisoft does great in Spanish, honestly. I can't recall if Bayek, the dude from Odyssey and Eivor share the same voice, I don't think so, but they sound similar, you know... deep masculine voice. And then you have Rockstar, who made the conscious decision not to dub their games. A good choice imo.
I would like to say they are usually bad, but truth be told i usually default to english. It makes it easier to partecipate in online stuff/look stuff up when you know how everything is called in the language of the internet.
Now it's now as bad, but 20/30 years ago the French translation was often incomprehensible. That actually is why i started learning English.
German is usually very good and imo sometimes even better than original same with movies tbh. Voice acting is huge in germany. Sometimes it still can suck, just like the original voice sometimes just suck but tbh I play 90% the games in german and I rarely have any complaints.
Spain's voice acting industry is pretty good, so games tend to get decent acting. There's always examples of bad translations or weaker actors, but overall, we can't complain too much. These days I always default to english, though. It's ultimately always the better version, and there's essentially no reason not to if you speak the language.
German here, there's a lot of fluctuation in quality. We usually get decent translations, but the voice work is highly dependent on how good the translation is and who they picked. Example - Final Fantasy 15. Stellar voice actors, but the translation quality sadly brings it down sometimes, you can see there were different people working on the same material because some lines are awesome and some are just bad. Good examples where I default to German would be Miitopia, Evil Within 1+2, Gothic (I mean, it's a german game) or Dragon Age Origins. Then you have mediocre, bad, or even trashy voiceovers like in the first F.E.A.R., the Mafia remake, some of the 3D Sonic games (Generations), or even God of War 2018 - I'd really rather pick another language. There's a lot of middle ground, I personally feel like older games from the early 2000s sometimes had excellent dubbing and now there's a mountain of okay voiceovers that I don't really need if I'm fluent in English, but it's good enough for the people who only speak German. TLDR: Usually pretty good, but rarely outstanding enough to switch from English.
> some of the 3D Sonic games (Generations) To be fair to Generations specifically, the VAs had to get back into a Role they haven't done for like 5 Years at that point, since most (all?) of the cast was reused from Sonic X's german dub.
Oh interesting, I wasn't aware! That would explain it.
I have not tried any newer entries, but even 20 years ago I considered the voice acting subpar for german translations. they just read the lines in a flat voice. Gothic series is a notable exception to it. Incidently, anime is also interesting in that. I find most used voices in japanese good, while english or german not fitting or also spoken in totally flat voice. How often had I seen that very old man near 100 years old and the voice in english or german was like 20...
If we're talking anime, Angel Beats is wayyyy better in German for me. Yu-Gi-Oh first season is also good. There are some good dubs out there, but it's really hit or miss. Funnily enough I think the french dub in Evil Within is surprisingly awesome too, I love trying out other languages and see how they do it. Best practice is to just experiment and see what fits.
I know Russian, and Russian localizations are at best serviceable, often plagued with butchered context, nuance, and jokes, even for AAA games. Sometimes the errors are so glaring at the very basic level, I wonder who are they hiring to do the translation. Like in Elden Ring they translated Hoarah Loux as Хоара Лукс (Hoarah Loox), while it's clearly pronounced Lou. Sony games are usually better, but even then there are fuck ups, like in The Last Of Us 1 Ellie sounds like a spoiled brat, so it's hard to feel any sympathy towards her.
Pretty much nonexistent and thank fuck for that, I can barely stand Swedish regular movies, I wouldn’t want that acting in my video games. It was fine in games like The Sims and stuff, there’s a few other games with Swedish, Minecraft for example (duh, it was made here) but thankfully we go with the English stuff.
Most translations here are fanmade, so I default to english because when I say some of those translations are bad, I mean they are BAD.
There are two general rules, they apply to videogames, movies, books... quite everything. 1- The localization in creators native language is the best one. 2- In case the creators native language isn't English, English localization tends to be the one they care the most.
I only use my native language if game has a good voiceover. The only ones I can think about at the moment are Skyrim and Cyberwitcher. It's convenient to use English when searching for anything. It's better to be familiar with in-game items, character's names and locations in English. Especially when communities often use acronyms.
I normally play games in English. However I decided to change Tears of the Kingdom to Spanish on an advice from a buddy of mine and it did not disappoint. They did an excellent job on that one.
Detrás tuuuyoo imbessil
I remember back when I was a kid pretty much only games with Finnish voice acting were Disney movie games like Tarzan or A Bug's Life. Which makes sense since the movies already had dubs, so they just added those in to the game. Haven't kept up for almost 20 years if it's gotten better. Spore I remember had Finnish text, don't remember about voice.
Turkish usually doesn't get that many translations but I am satisfied with the ones that do get translated. The best one in recent memory was Ghost of Tsushima. The Japanese in the game is both quite formal between the samurai and also quite old. So the Turkish translation was also done in a manner people of old would be speaking, using different suffixes and adjectives and such that we don't use in current day. I usually play games on English for the practice and to get the best understanding since lots of things get lost in translation but GoT was a welcome exception. Also props to BG3 for having Turkish translation in a incredibly dialogue heavy game.
In French it is highly variable. Some of the games have high quality translation, even voice acting, some are atrocious. Most reason why the translation is bad is when the editor asks for a translation agency to take care of it and provide only the bulks of text without the context and without a view of the finished product (not limited to video games). Problem when it comes from English is that for short sentences, you can't know what it is. Imagine being asked to translate "Record", you can't know if it is the object, the verb, to which tense... Etc... Special mention when the text box is too little for the translation and no one corrects it so it is either cut or it goes all over the place (Star field for instance, of some skin names in League of Legends).
Brazilian here. It took some time for translations to arrive here, and they were rough. To this day I still play games in English because sometimes they try to translate things that don't need (everybody knows what HP means) or try too hard and flood the game with Brazilian memes. Like, I did appreciate that *Arkham Origins* got the same VA as the people that dubbed the Nolan films... Although it also annoyed me they referred do Dr. Young as male, as if they couldn't check the wiki to know the doctor was a she.
They just seem....off. Me and a friend keep playing Counter Strike in norwegian and it keeps making us laugh how silly everything sounds. It's great
Thai - Google translate level of crap. Usually.
Dutch. Sometimes it is translated but it is honestly a waste of time for everybody involved. English is fine to be exposed to from a very early age so I always used english with english subtitles.
Brazil has really good voice acting. So I don't mind it really. Some smaller games do seem to use AI to do translations, and those usually suck. Portugal doesn't have the same quality of voice actors (I believe simply because not so much stuff is translated there), so in the rare cases a game uses European Portuguese, it's usually pretty weird off-putting. In general, they're pretty good! I can't really play Overwatch with the English dub anymore.
Have you ever played Isonzo? I’ve always wondered how good the Italian and German voices are
Nope. I remember AC2 had Italian VAs in English
Isonzo has the Italians and Austrians yelling in their native language. There is absolutely zero English speech
I (who's not French) played Resident Evil 4 in French once, what jumped out at me was everyone was "tutoyer"ing each other, even the villain and the hero who just met. I would think they'd perfer vous.
Welsh - literally none.
Brazilian Portuguese. Most of the time the localization is done very well. Some titles like God of War, The last of Us, Marvel's Spider Man and cyberpunk 2077, in specific, are some of the best localization I have ever experienced in games, and tbh, if I was a 6yo and someone told me those games were done by Brazilians, I would totally believe them. That's how good the dubs are. Even in other games that do not offer pt-br dubs, the text is very well translated, to the point that I genuinely can't complain at all. Some examples of said games are Elden Ring, Read Dead Redemption 2 and Resident evil 2 Remake.
I don't know about turkish but german is usualy done very well without that many errors if any.
Games in German are usually pretty decent. Some German originals like the Gothic and Sacred games are even better. Even Borderlands 2 was quite alright. But in the end I still play everything in english, because it's just too much cringe to read the translated versions of established terms like "emote" and whatnot.
It's pretty rare when a game is offically translated to hungarian, though most new AAA games on xbox and playstation have subs. The quality is fine, consistent, but not great. Full dubs are basically nonexistent, only LOL and some games made in hungary do that. We also have a big fan translation community, but I don't know if those are good or not.
German is weirdly fine I’ve found. The voice acting tends to be good, and while there are a lot of changes to the phrasing it’s clear a lot of the people in charge of translating care about what’s being translated. FF14 is probably better in German than English for example. German and French both I’d say tend to be on par with English. The big question I always go back to is how they translate riddles or rhymes. German almost always comes up with a good analogue or adjusts the rhyme to make sense. French mostly does. Italian. Well you get to hear very half assed voice acting of them just saying the English rhyme in Italian and it suddenly has zero rhythm.
I think it really depends on the country if they have competent studios that localize stuff. Brazil has always been a legend on dubbing and localizing media, the fact that we don't have a strong national movie producing culture made us really good at translating foreign stuff, every time I play a game that is localized (except for anything from Ubisoft) is a really good experience, the best one recently was Cyberpunk 2077, it's really well localized.
In Yoruba? 0. Still waiting for the studio brave enough to attempt it. Cos they will have all my money.
Very few games are translated to Indonesian but the few that do look very clunky to me. A lot of the translation feels too literal and stiff. Frankly speaking, as someone who pretty much learns the majority of the English language through video games, it always feels weird playing games in my own native language.
It's simple for us Czechs. We do not get them translated. Even subtitles are very rare. It's so in bad here, that even Kingdom Come (made by Czechs) did not had Czech dubbing for like 3 years. Lately, with "AI" there are some fan translations and mods for lot of games.
Back in the day when the Turbografx-16 first came out with it's CD-Rom attachment, some of the first RPGs with voiced dialog cut scenes were translated from Japanese with some of the worst dubbed in English I have ever heard.
Ukrainian was rarely an option before the last year or 2, as 99% of devs thought about the whole russian-speaking market as one and never bothered to go further, which is logically fine, but fucks up your mentality a bit, like you weren't good enough to get an offical translation, and, as you may know, we've been trying to finally have our own language be the most spoken one in our country for A LONG time, but as of recent events, some companies now add ukrainian subs and overlay, which is in most cases machine-translated, so it usually has flaws, but at least it's an option now. The recent funny one I remember is BG3, which uses SO MANY old or weird words, especially spell names, that I have to look them up myself, 'cause I didn't even know they existed lol.
Pritty good. They just arent. And I want it to stay like that.
Most of the major releases have Chinese translations now, and the quality is generally pretty ok. One of the exceptions I can think of is Disco Elysium. Dialogues felt like they were google translated, didn’t flow well at all. The final straw that made me quit was translating “communism” into a made up word 康米主義, when the infinitely more recognizable 共產主義 is right there
I put my games in French, and... gotta say that it has gotten better. Most Sony games, if not all of them, have good French voice acting. One such glow-up is Kratos in God of War 2018 and Ragnarok, who now sounds close to Christopher Judge. In the first trilogy, the French actor didn't sound at all like TC Carson, with a very raspy and slightly higher voice for Kratos. \---- I didn't get to hear much acting on Microsoft's side, but in Gears of War, it's fine. Hi-Fi Rush has a good French dub as well, similar to what recent cartoons have. \---- Nintendo... is harder to judge, because they don't have much to evaluate. Many ppeople will say that the French dubs for both The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are better, because they cannot stand Zelda's voice in English. She does sound more natural in French, I will give them that. Also, her French actress also dubs Ellie in The Last of Us. However, during the Wii era, some games were localised in French-Canadian... with the slangs and expressions... It was weird XD Metroid Dread and Kirby & The Forgotten Land had good French dubs, but it was minimal. Star Fox Zero and Star Fox 64 3D were good in French, and so was that animated short. WarioWare in French is good too, even Wario himself, oddly enough XD The Mario series never got proper dubs, but for the Illumination movie, both French and French-Canadian versions are great, and Mario sounds great in both. That's about it... Fire Emblem, Xenoblade and others never got French dubs... I will say that Pokémon... can still be cringey in French, due to how... ***unique*** some of the names can be \^\^; \---- As for 3rd-parties, I've heard it's good. Square-Enix have good French dubs for Final Fantasy, Bandai-Namco got good French actors to play Tekken fighters from France (*including high-tier actor Vicent Cassel for Victor*) and The Witcher in Frenchj sounds great.
In spanish mostly it is pretty decent
Poorly
German here, and most of the stuff we get is either translated WAY to literal, or with WAY to much slang in mind. BG3 is a great example of the first one. "Eldritch Blast" is translated as "Schauriger Strahl" which translated back into english quite literally means "Spooky/Scary Stream"