5 ms·
The nes had plenty of real examples where poor translations made the game harder or made secrets obscure and hard to find without a guide. Castlevania 2 and Adv
by grawprog 6y ago
The nes had plenty of real examples where poor translations made the game harder or made secrets obscure and hard to find without a guide. Castlevania 2 and Adventure of link come to mind.
Actually, i'd say most text heavy games translated from japanese on the nes suffered from this problem and made those games way more confusing than they should have been.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoSure...but I don't feel like we're comparing apples to apples here, since I explicitly mentioned text-light games and you brought up the most text-heavy, RPG like entries in the respective CV and Zelda series (of that generation). To boot, Simon's Quest also had the atrociously bad idea that NPCs in the game can lie to you and give intentionally incorrect information, making the translation effort that much more confusing.
- kevingadd 6y agoIf a low-quality machine translation is sufficient to make those games playable because they're text-light, I question whether that's actually any better than having a human who knows the language spend an hour swapping the text out instead. You'd be surprised how often machine TL will muck up things like menu options or item names. The appeal of automated TL makes way more sense if it means saving hundreds of hours of localization work (not that it does...)
- johnnyanmac 6y agomostly because it would take more than an hour and involves a translator interested. I sure can't speak Japanese (yet), but I have enough technical chops to spend a few hours getting something workable out with this alone. Then from there maybe I can trigger Cunningham's law and get the attention of someone who knows what they are doing. Sounds like a win-win for me.