Nogard Ekin
   |
Posted - 2007.10.31 14:05:00 -
[1]
Hello everyone!
Since I'm one of the rare people who had the lucky chance to gather some background in the video game industry I'd like to make everyone a little aware of some things.
I think it's a really good idea to have a topic where we can speak our mind about the German translations and point out mistakes. But I also feel that many of you, and especially Tarron Sarek, have no idea how translators or in the case of EVE localizers are working.
Localizers don't play a game and put the text live into it, neither do they get screenshots of anything, that they fit with translations. They might get a bunch of strings in a document without any connection, the best indicator they usually have is a so called string-ID, which in itself is very cryptic.
You laugh and complain about the translations "How could they put this and that there". The thing is, they don't have one string that reads for example "Copy" they probably have 3 or 4, or in a game as big as the EVE universe it might even be 10. There is most likely no indication whatsoever where this string will be used; clearly in some kind of user interface, but the translator has to decide between the verb (for some words even the adjective or tenses) and the noun for German EVERY SINGLE TIME, the same goes for imperative or infinitive of a verb. Of course that's a source of mistakes.
Another thing that you have to pay attention to, before you criticize the quality of the translations, are variables, meaning changing parts of texts. We had here the example of "Bester Preis auf Region". With is little logical thinking you will notice that "Region" can only be a variable, so the string would be something like "Bester Preis auf *location*". "Auf" works with stations. "In der" might work for regions and stations, but for solar systems for example it would be crap as well. You might realize that it's not easy to find something that fits everything.
Last but not least, you should know, that it's not the job of the translator to run through the game and spot mistakes that need to be fixed. The people who do that are called linguistic testers, and I assume CCP doesn't have such. Therefore this feedback place is probably pretty welcome from CCP's side.
Also speaking from my experience I assume that just saying "in the XY-window, there is a crappy translation" won't help them to fix the problem, even if they checked here.
The best way to help them would maybe be to just give the fully and correct English spelling and/or the fully and correct German spelling and explain the problem.
By the way, if those translators are so horribly bad as most of you tell here, why hasn't anyone mentioned any mistakes outside the user interfaces?
|