Official request for multilanguage versions of Jurassic Park And Back to Future games
That's a request for multilanguage versions episode of the future TT games: Jurassic Park and Back to Future.
It would be really appreciated if the translated episodes could be published along te english ones when they come out.
Thanks.
It would be really appreciated if the translated episodes could be published along te english ones when they come out.
Thanks.
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Comments
I'm not as strongly opposed to subtitles as voice acting for a first version of a Telltale game, but I can't see it not creating months of delays and much increased costs of production, unless they would be some sort of official fan-made translations done by members of the forums or something.
No way Microsoft is going to allow an English-only title on their network.
If most games were localised, I probably wouldn't know even half as much English as I do. Also, the time and money this would take might harm the quality of the episodes as they still have to come out every month.
Though if the publishers did most of the localisation work, I'd be more okay with it.
You can choose the language you can install the games. I have all my Wallace and Gromit games installed in English, because there's little problems with the Subtitles in Spanish which bugs me.
Anyway, if the announce say X-Box, then, Microsoft is going to translate them, just like with W&G. No need to worry about, I think.
Has anything (besides maybe Buzz) ever been localized to Finnish?
El ROAAARO!
And i'll pay some (little) extra cash to have my translated version in a reasonable time (subtitles can be enough). I think the increase of sales due to a wider foreign audience could not only cover the expenses but also incrase the earnings.
But from this perspective TT is completely dumb.
The Deadalic Wallace&Gromit agreement seems just plain wrong... a 2 years old game, without Digital Delivery, and that costs the double of its original price... come on!!!!
To have some profit, episodes have to be translated right during the season, or maybe right at the end of it! Deadalic can be a partner through the translation to leave developers making games; but they have to be quick! After 2 years the hype, the ads (review, previews, specials, ect.) and the gamer's interest are gone far away...
TT messed up also Tales... It's almost an year now without any answer about foreign language versions; many foreign people know that there's a new Monkey Island and wait for a translation.... but if the distributor acts like the S&M Season 2 it will probably never come - see the spanish Atari manoeuvre.
It seems to me that TT prefer to concentrate themself on selling Cups&Buttons on their store, instead of publishing through Digital Delivering any multilanguage material (even the old Sam&Max season 1 is available only in english on the TT Store, even if several different language versions were published all over the world!)
My Dream:
I love TT. I've bought every game they made. But I did so just because I know a little English.
All the foreign potential customers are left alone.
After all these years it seems a well-undestood TT way to act.
The question is: why?
PS: Microsoft will save us all...
They've thought about it, actually. It's just not practical/easy/possible at this time.
Even excluding the missing tilde, it should be "Espanol", not "Espana" (that's the country).
I only know how to do that on a mac, do not ask me how on PC's.
"When the wise man points at the moon, the idiot looks at the finger" - Confucius
:rolleyes:
Right, because it's totally stupid to correct someone's use of a foreign language on a thread about translating stuff to other languages.
At the very least, it shows translation isn't as easy as you make it to be. Even when just naming the countries, you made a mistake like that when it doesn't take very long to check with an automated translator or something.
What I think people don't understand is that doing quality translation is HARD, and extremely time-consuming. There are tons of factors to consider: semantic, cultural, not to mention comedic for Telltale's stuff. Some things simply do not translate, and you have to try to come up with some sort of equivalent in another language. This usually leads to a lot of confused looks from readers, and tends to destroy any attempts at comedy. There's a reason all those adventure games being made in Germany have such unnatural English localizations. To really do it right, you have to find people who are close to native fluency in *both* languages they are translating, and are good writers in the one they are translating to. That is not easy to find.
All that said, it's certainly possible, just not at release. The problem is that there would likely be long delays, and a sub-par product (one month to translate and record an entire game of dialogue well is really pushing it). It seems pretty unlikely that you're going to get a fully localized game before months after release. Really, it's no more abandoning foreign fans than any game from Europe that takes a while to localize is abandoning English speaking fans.
Oh, and what exactly makes your request official? Just wondering.
It's not stupid, and I didn't mean any offence. Sorry. I was just saying that your focus was on the word error and not about the way the problem of tranlsation can be solved.;)
I'm not a translator - and that's why I ask for translations!
Maybe you don't need translations, but I do, as you see!
Do you imagine how much I lose playing TT games with my poor english?
And I'm paying for them, and I play with my vocabulary on the desk and with my finger on the "Pause" key... and after a day of work.
I do that just because I love TT games.
And there are many people that play the games the way I do.
TT took expensive licenses for games like Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, Monkey and Wallace&Gromit... but why the impossible part is about translations?????
Do you really think it's just not practical/easy/possible at this time?
I think that it's a too easy as answer...
After 6 years of games and over 30 single episodes released they cannot say that it's just not practical/easy/possible to create a foreign market.
Their politic about it is vague... Why the Digital Delivery cannot be supported for foreign languages? Why do we have to wait till the "classic" (if not old) boxed version?
The answer: because Telltale messed all up about foreign marketing.
I can understand.
But it's almost an year that TOMI is out. Still no words about IF, WHEN, and WHICH languages there will be in a *possible* localized version.
Are they translating now? Only subtitles? In my language? When will it be available?
Nobody knows. They just said in a 2009 forum post that they are aware of language requests. That's all.
It could even be ok if it takes an year to deliver a great multilanguage translation. But don't leave us in this endless wait. They can say "ITA/FRA/SPA/DE version available in 2011". It will be ok - so I'll take the game on 2011 - but at least I know that I've to wait.
The lack of informations made fan groups creating unofficial-and-often-buggy subtitles, ruining all the market for a possible official translated version and lessening the value of the product.
The problem is that that TellTale doesn't tell anything.
AND telltale isn't a translation agency. They would need to find a good translator for each version, someone familiar with the games and the type of humour.
Not to mention each kind of translation has it's own difficulties. In this case, it would be most akin to subtitles for movies and TV: they need to fit. While of course keeping the meaning, the jokes, and in the cases where the jokes have visual elements or is a foreshadowing, you can't go for a completely different joke either. The foreshadowing part is the reason why you'd need to wait until a Season is over: what if people pick up a joke from a previous episode that you translated differently and turn it into a visual running gag or a plot point?
English is also a condensed language, and at least Spanish and French in your list are usually longer, meaning you'd need to remove something to make it fit. Sometimes it isn't a problem, you use the visual elements and remove what's obvious from the image, sometimes however it's a pain in the ass.
For instance, taking Back to the Future, "Time Machine" in English is "Machine à voyager dans le temps" in French.
I'm sure you can imagine how you'd need to squish the rest of the sentence to make it fit in the same amount of lines. Because you can't have more lines: they're either be too fast to read or they'd appear after the characters have stopped talking.
And you can't turn it into "Machine temporelle" either or something, because the movies have been consistent in using "Machine à voyager dans le temps", even when Clara just says "The time machine" when picking it up that's how it's dubbed.
I am, and that's why bad translations annoy me and I feel the need to correct them
I am totally in favour of translations, honestly. Hell, I'd volunteer for the French one. However they've said before that while they'd love to do it, at this time it's not possible for them.
Even if they do find translators, they have to be able to verify the quality and everything, and since I assume they don't speak all the languages it would be translated to, they're letting each country work on their own translation. Hopefully it IS going to change, and they'll add patches for translations or things like that, but if they say it's not possible for them to do it at this time, I believe them.
Norwegian: "tidsmaskin"
Well, you don't have to repeat the whole thing every single time, when it's established what's being talked about you can get away with just saying "machine" I guess.
Which probably would be the way to go in some of the subtitles. But you can't do it ALL the time, either.
That's what's so great about Germanic languages; you can just smash nouns together willy-nilly. Compound nominal phrases FTW!
I used to be part of the foreign potential customers group, and I really had no qualms of playing the game in English only. Given, games are rarely translated to Dutch, but that's not really the point.
Thing is, I feel a lot of countries are a bit spoiled. Some countries don't even GET translations of their games in their native language, yet they don't complain. All it takes is a basic understanding of English. It's something you at least have to know at the age of 13.
Yeah, that is very cool. But it's not just noun-noun compounds either: My wife wrote her master's degree in linguistics on verb-verb compounds in Norwegian. There aren't as many of them as noun-noun or other compounds, but it's a productive pattern, and a fair share of them are of the adult variety. What's not to love about them?
Incorrectly separating compound nouns into separate words happens to be one of the most common grammatical errors Norwegians make these days. I blame it on bad influence from those dirty, word-separating British and Americans. Won't someone think of the children!?
I do have a problem with literal translations. Many English jokes, puns, and sayings don't work in other languages, so then the translator has to find a native variety. But even when the translator might be good at his job of translating, when it comes to this little bit of creativity he often falls short. Then I'm completely pulled out of the story and left wondering what the original intention might have been.
Another issue is that these days it feels as if we're force-fed translations, as if we aren't entitled to the original text. When you go out to buy a game, you'd better check the language. The games are often dubbed, and without an option for the original. No offense, but when a game takes place in an American setting, with American characters, I don't want to hear some annoying Dutch accent (yes, I'm looking at you, "The Longest Journey"!). Same goes for subtitles: my version of a "Prince of Persia" game has Dutch subtitles only, and I always turn them off because I often don't agree with the word choice. But sometimes I feel the need for English subtitles, because voice actors don't always articulate perfectly. It's very annoying in those cases when it turns out they aren't available.
So certainly work on multilanguage versions to please the people who want them, but also keep the freedom of choice. And please, don't put a price difference on the different versions as is the case for English books over here. Actually being able to choose your language when buying the game online is a good way to go about it. Of course, when it comes to hardcopies in stores, I think there'll always be just one version.
But... English isn't the original language of The Longest Journey... Is it? If you're having a translation, wouldn't you want it to be into your first language rather than another foreign language?
That's one thing that bugs me, actually. A lot of Japanese games come into France through the US, that is, the English translation comes first. Well you'll always have players complaining that they "didn't keep the English names" and things like that. The names are originally in Japanese! Why should they use and English translation rather than a French translation for them? That's silly.
Anyways, I agree about not everyone having the potential to learn English. Even among people who are fluent in two, three or more languages I know people who're just "English-dumb", they just can't learn it. That happens. And some people are bad with languages period.
And I'm also in favour of being able to choose. A lot of European versions have the advantage of being able to choose between several languages, which is nice.
TLJ and its sequel Dreamfall were written in English, the Norwegian versions are translations. I don't know whether it was a business decision on FunCom's part or just Ragnar Tørnquist's (the author and designer) personal preference. I remember reading that he had studied in the UK and the US, so that might have something to do with it.
Interestingly, the Norwegian translation of TLJ was written by Tørnquist himself, but not the Dreamfall one. As a consequence, some of the names of places and people reportedly don't match.
In cases where I need a translation, I often prefer English over Norwegian. At least in movies, TV, video games, the web, graphic novels, etc. English feels much more natural because that's the language I'm used to for those forms of media. Norwegian feels unnatural and forced. I'm probably weird though
For novels, I read in English if that's the original language, otherwise English or Norwegian translations are equally good. In movies I'm very particular about having accurate lip synchronization and the correct voices for the actors, so my first choice is always audio in the original language plus English subtitles.
My point does still stand about English though. I had a friend over once and popped in some Japanese DVDs, with French subtitles. She was all "whaaat? Why do you have French subtitles on? Put the English subtitles on!" and well, there weren't any because it hadn't been released in English yet. She was all annoyed and said that putting French subtitles was "stupid".
I don't get that. French is her first language, too. There is that kind of snobbery about stuff in English, like it's the "ultimate language" or something. Stuff translated from other language should be translated into English, not French, because it sounds better! Movies that have original titles in English that might be hard to understand for the average person will be translated into... other titles in English!
Stuff like that. It annoys me because while I really favour the original language when at all possible, doing that has the flaws of translation (not 100% accurate, stuff lost in translation, etc) AND the flaws of it being in a foreign languages (subtleties lost, possible misunderstandings).
And I'm not talking about people who are bilingual here. I mean, in the case of wanting the whole subtitles in English, okay, she could read it fine, but for the rest it's people who basically want words in English because this way they don't understand them, so it sounds cooler.
It's just stupid and I don't get it. This being said, I feel the opposite is pretty bad too: lots of words were stolen from English recently, coming from memes and other Internet stuff. Some people just make up a French word and try using it, but since nobody else does, they just end up using words nobody understand. Which is ridiculous too.
There may be different qualities of translations as well... I guess it's not a problem for a "big" language like French, but as Norway is a small country there's just not as many good translators available. I'm thinking that an English translation might be more likely to be translated well because there's such a big market for English language content. I'm not a linguist or a translator though, so I'm not qualified to judge.
Yeah, I see that over here too from time to time, it's ridiculous! We also get some weird translated titles, a few good (i.e. bad) examples:
- The Shawshank Redemption - Frihetens regn (The rain of freedom)
- You Only Live Twice - James Bond i Japan (James Bond in Japan)
- Deliverance - Picnic med døden (Picnic with death)
- Europa Europa - Jøde i Hitlerjugend (A jew in the Hitler Youth)
- Loving You - Ung Mann med Gitar (A young man with a guitar)
- Shaft - Bandekrig i Harlem (Gang war in Harlem)
- Die Hard - Aksjon Skyskraper (Operation skyscraper)
- A Bridge Too Far - Kampene ved Arnheim (The battles at Arnheim)
Come on, people. If you can't think of anything good, please just keep the original title.I totally get the "big language" thing. I understand how when not a lot of people speak a language to begin with, even less will translate it adequately. I still wouldn't be opposed to giving the option to choose between the two though. I mean I can't imagine many DVDs not having "English" as an option for the subtitles if the subtitles exist.
Oh, another title: Disturbia > Paranoïak
In case you're wondering, "paranoïak" isn't a word in French. Paranoïaque is, though. It means "paranoid". Now, can you guess why they wrote it with a K instead?
Well, because this way, it's "English"! I'm not even kidding. The fact that the trema is kept should be enough for anyone to realise it's not English by any means. No matter, the spelling looks English, so now it's "cool" -_-'.
I guess the reason why I was so annoyed with her "Japanese ought to be subtitled in English, not French" was that it was anime, and French is the language that carries (is that the right word?) the most anime and manga after Japanese - at least it was at the time. I remember talking about that in my Japanese class. So obviously there are/were much more French translations and, often, better quality ones because, well, sequential art in general just has a better reputation in Europe, it's not considered "cheap" or "for kids" as much as it sometimes still seems to be in North America.
So I was like... what? It just made no sense to me.
Now, I'm in Canada and I watch lots of foreign stuff with English subtitles. I don't feel the need to watch things with French subtitles, but I don't refuse to either, see what I mean?
I do get sad that the DVDs rarely have as many options. Usually there is just English and French. French DVDs usually had between five and ten options, and it was really nice just to give it a try and see what you understood. It's also a good way to learn a new language.
People always say "do it in English, you'll learn the language", but why not the other way around, too? Play the games you've already played and loved in the original English, only in another language. You'll learn, too. No reason why people should only make progress in English
...or Klingon.
That item just makes me dream. Imagine, being able to understand all languages!
I personally dislike the idea of everyone using a single language. I find that learning a new language really opens your mind in many ways. Because the language works differently, your brain needs to work differently too, and that keeps you more... alert, I guess?
I feel if I went back to speaking only one language, I'd lose half my IQ too, or something. No offence to people who speak just one language, that's just how I feel. Language just traps your thoughts, in a way. Culture does that too, of course, but culture and language are intertwined, I don't think you can deny that, they're not one and the same but they influence each other.
Anyway, I think what we should do is pay translators a lot more. And give them free massages.
I have this dvd of "Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children". I know it's originally Japanese. Yet whenever I watch it, I put on the English voices. I don't really know why. Partly because I like to understand what I hear - if I put on the Japanese soundtrack, I'd really have to "read" the subtitles, while with English voices I only have to occassionally give them a quick glance. Also, the version of the game I have is in English, so it's only natural to me to hear them talk in English as well. I once watched it with Japanese voices, and it just wasn't the same experience.
I have "Experience 112" in Dutch, while I believe it's originally a French game. Part of the reason why I haven't finished it yet, is because of the language. Though I probably wouldn't even start playing if the game had been in French only.
An older game, "Der Clou", is actually originally German, I believe. Yet I've only ever played the game in English. Moreso because it takes place in London and all the characters are English. Had it been Berlin or Münich, it would've been only natural to have it in German.
They have to understand that people all over the world are complaining about this english-only strategy. They just don't see them here because they don't speak english so they cannot post their complainings here.
I can give you a lot of foreign forums where people is upset.
Just understanding english isn't enough to enjoy these games, and I also think that they're not a suitable way to learn another language. Games should be about fun, you should enjoy yourself. Forcing yourself to learn another language takes that away, I think. Furthermore, you might be able to understand english, but you'll still not understand many of the jokes, word-games and cultural references. A good translation doesn't simply take an english text/movie/game and translates it 1:1, but tries to carry over as much of these references as possible.
That said, I don't think that it is TellTale's responsibility to make sure that other countries get their translations - nor should it be. As with all other media, that's the job of the local distributors. And it looks like no german distributor was willing to pay the licensing fees for TOMI - yet.
But games are about fun, right?
My father is 58 and he likes adventure games but doesn't speak a word in english.
I'd like to gift Tales of Monkey Island to him, because he played the previous 4 games and he liked them so much...
Do you think that he, at the age of 58, may be capable of learning a new language? Or willing to do that after a day of work?
No, the correct question is : do you know if TT will ever translate their game (and the future ones)?