4 ms·
Depends on the kind of translation style. I guess the goal of a game translation like that is not primarily to do a faithful translation, but one that fits the
by atoav 4y ago
Depends on the kind of translation style. I guess the goal of a game translation like that is not primarily to do a faithful translation, but one that fits the target market.
This must not necessarily be bad, and can sometimes be a chance. E.g. the German translation of Donald duck pocket books has so much more depth and literary quality than the english originals that the translator herself has her own memorial and grammatic term in Germany¹.
Translations that make things worse are the rule, but it is not impossible to create translations that makes things better, especially if the text quality in the original is lacking involuntarily itself.
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¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs
- bombcar 4y agoThe various translations of the Asterix comics have to undergo similar machinations, because they basically have to invent new puns to replace the ones in French.
- masklinn 4y agoThat issue famously occurs for Discworld translation, and very much separates the good translations from the bad ones.
- masklinn 4y ago> I guess the goal of a game translation like that is not primarily to do a faithful translation, but one that fits the target market. An other issues especially for older games was technical limitations: the devs might have squeezed the game content to fit within e.g. cart limits, and the translation would be bound to that regardless of the langage’s “density”. A similar issue occurs with comics / mangas: speech bubbles might be tight fit for the original and require significantly altering font and size for translations to fit. Not to mention sfx.