[SOLVED] In-Game text-translation (german) is horrible

Hello Stardock Developers,

i've bought Ashes of the Singularity and started it today. (with german language).
The Intro Videos are pretty good localized but the german campaign in-game texts are really terrible. Many sentences makes no sense. I Need a lot of phantasy to understand what the games want to say to me. I've stopped playing the game already in Episode 1 on 2nd planet (Rigel) because the Translation is sooo worst.

pleeeeeeeaaasseee fix it with a professional translator (with a native Speaking Person, not with Google Translator!).
I really love your game but i dont want to play it at this state. :/ 
I hope for the next Updates to fix the in-game text localization.

80,601 views 11 replies
Reply #1 Top

Wie immer ist es furchtbar ;)

-manchmal sind es keine Sätze

-manchmal ist es ein Satz, welcher aber absolut keinen Sinn im Deutschen macht

-manchmal ist die Wortwahl äußerst gelungen ;)

Reply #2 Top

That pains me to hear.  We would be much obliged if someone familiar with the game might be willing to help us in this area.  We sent Ashes to a firm that specializes in game localization. But we have no native German speakers here.

 

Reply #3 Top

How exactly can we help you? I'm not a professional translator, my english is just good but far away from being perfectly :D
The best way would be Building a small Team of Germans which talking proper english, including a english talking Story involved Stardock Team Member for some Special Questions. Translations could be discussed on teamspeak or skype while beeing in game and creating words and sentences in the right context and could be posted at a internal Forum section to share it with the full translation team.

I would support the translators by quality checking about Spelling, Grammar end sense of Texts with Access to a interal forum section for translators to post errors there.

I know a really good english teacher which translated already the most Texts, News and technical articles for the international Sea Shepherd Conservation Society into german, maybe he could help but i'm not sure if his Computer is powerfull enough to run the game. He lives around 300km away from me in germany.

It's a shame that you've paid a Company which is specialized in game localization and they made this bad in-game Translation Texts. The complete german translation should checked up again!

Here is a perfect example about the REALLY BAD Translation! It's the first message Block you can see if you start playing the campaign on Rigel.

Show it any german and they will stunned about the low Translation quality. These "professional gaming localization Company" tooks the translation directly from a full text translator liike "Google Translator". No sentence makes sense. I've never have seen this before in any game. I am destroyed on the ground and certainly not exaggerating here.

Reply #4 Top

I agree these translations makes absolutely no sense.

 

[Update]

It is much better if you would use a company which speaks natively the language in which the text should translated in. So you can ensure that the final text is understandable with the disadvante of maybe not having the right substance but it is understandable.

If you use a company which natviely speaks your language we maybe have the right substance but nobody in the other language understands that if the translator are not really natively trained.

 

For example a translation like this:

"Out here, your relative inexperience is acutally an advantage." -> "Hier heraus, ihre relativen Unerfahrenheit ist eigentlich ein Vorteil."

A native speaker would probably say:

"Hier draußen ist ihre relative Unerfahrenheit eigentlich von Vorteil." (even the accentuation of "Out,here" could be preserved)

 

The hole translation is like this with sometimes more problematic and sometimes right sentences.

Reply #5 Top

Wow, if it is as bad as you guys say I wouldn't touch that company again. Try a different company and then ask the community to have a look over it. For the translations to not make sense, ouch.

Always try and get a native German to look at it. When I studied Chinese with native speakers from China we started to use the BBC's Chinese website to look at the news. But we kept finding grammatical mistakes and sometimes the way words were used were not the way a native speaker would have used them. We figured the articles might have been written by foreign born Chinese, but I stopped using the site as a resource. Don't get me wrong though, they were nothing like as bad as this work seems to be but it did make me more aware of this kind of potential problem.

Reply #6 Top

Okay guys, i've played some more campaign missions with the terrible german translation and there was the most stupid translation ever! It's a small example what about we talk in a massive scale.

Correctly would be:
DREADNOUGHT = SCHLACHTSCHIFF (correctly german translation)

But the game translated it so:
DREADNOUGHT = GEHIRNWAL

GEHIRNWAL means in english BRAINWHALE!

It's a stupid combination of Brain and Whale. WTF?! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Were the employees of the localization Company drunk?!
Not even Google Translator made the mistake!

Reply #7 Top

Quoting toca83, reply 6

GEHIRNWAL means in english BRAINWHALE!

The translators got something right.

Brainwhale is what is says in the original english. Gehirnwal would be used in mission 3 when referring to the Substrate Controller dreadnought (It shouldn't have been used anywhere else).

 

Here are a few extracted lines from the English mission 3 text file (UIText\Mission3.csv):

Mission3_T3_1 Mac: I have no idea what that is. It looks like a giant...brain whale?

Mission3_T4_1a Mac: This one is pretty far off, though - if you don't already have Artemises ready to go, the Brainwhale will be long gone.

Mission3_T4_1d Mac: This ambush site should be easier to beat the Brainwhale to. You do have an Armory or two, right?

Mission3_T4_3 Mac: Keep an eye on that Brainwhale headed your way.

Mission3_Obj_Brainwhale Defend against the Brainwhale

Reply #8 Top

really??? lol okay :D i've never could imagine ^^ it sounds a little bit stupid and funny, NEVER heard that word before! :D
and unfortunately it's not possible to switch language in game easily. Have to reinstall the game by switching the language on steam. But thank you for the path of dialogue files, i will take a look inside.


[EDIT]
I actually read all files. It seems that some files or parts of them were forgotten to translate (just automatically translated placeholders)
And i can see there are a lot of sentences which are wrote in Quotation marks "like this" and a lot of sentences are without. One time i got a error in this style "Mission1a_T4_1" in any Mission, not sure where. Is the lack of Quotation marks the reason for that?

Later i will post in which files and maybe in which Lines i see the forgotten german translations for you! I'm reading every line right now.


[UPDATE:]
HERE ARE THE WRONG FILES / LINES
These Lines or complete csv files are not well translated. It seems that These german Texts are taken from a automatically translator as placeholder. If these Errors are corrected, the whole Translation Looks pretty good!

Campaign_Deluxe.csv          complete file
Mission1.csv                        Line 29, 30, 31, 34
Mission2.csv                        Line 15
Mission3b.csv                      complete file
Mission5.csv                        Line 12; Line 55: "diene" should changed to "deine"; (Line 31 and 35 (?), please read my question below first!)
Scenario_Assault.csv            complete file
Text.csv                               Line 937
TutorialText.csv                   Line 39 "Sobal" should changed to "Sobald"
UnitText.csv                         Line 71 (incomplete description)


I've one question about Mission5.csv:
In Line 31 & 35 is the talk of a blossom thrower. The german translation means a flower thrower / bloom thrower.
Is that really correctly or is a quartz thrower meant?


Just for Information: The german UnitText.csv has a line more, it's inserted at line 38. The english file doesnt have the value

SS_1_Guardian_Name,Wächter

 

Reply #9 Top

Hi all - Thank you for the feedback! We'll get this fixed up for the next update. :)   Please feel free to PM me directly for anything localization related. 

 

re: quotes use - Any string that uses commas within it needs to be surrounded by quotes.

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Reply #10 Top

thank you guys, you fixed the german localization Problem very fast. There are a few small Details to Change but i know you do it very fast.
Thats the reason why i wrote my big german fanboy Review on Steam for you :D
http://steamcommunity.com/id/toca/recommended/228880

please like it to push it to the popular Reviews. There are just english Reviews on top.

thank for your great work and hope you will Keep up your good work for a Long time because i believe that AotS has a very big potential. I LOVE THAT GAME! I waited for years for a new RTS Highlight. I know it's not perfect (btw which is it?) and i know you will work on it.


EDIT:
i have give the game a max. 10 Rating on metacritic.com :)
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/ashes-of-the-singularity/user-reviews?sort-by=date&num_items=100

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Reply #11 Top

Thank you for the assists, Toca! :)

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