Hi everyone,

I'd like to start this topic mostly for those who aren't native english speakers and do play games like TES in their native tongue. Since I'm from Germany I like to play games in german although I do understand english, too.

When Oblivion came out, it was fantastic but by the time some players learned that the voice acting wasn't that great as it could have been. Some critics came up that the the voices were reused to often.

Except from this, there was also some criticism about the translation into other languages, e.g. german. There were (too) many abbreviations in the menu as well as some text and voice that wasn't translated that good.

I'm not sure how players from France or Spain see this point and if they did a similar experience when playing the game in french or spanish but I think there should be a bigger variation of voices as well as some more professional translation. It wasn't really bad in Oblivion, but when those things occured, it had a slight disturbing influence on the game atmosphere and game experience.

From my point of view Bethesda can make a big difference in Skyrim by improving in that point. There should be more different voice actors for TES V. I can imagine that Skyrim will be somehow bigger then Oblivion regarding the content topic and I think its hard to keep the game experience at a high level when you will do it with just a fistful of voices.

For the translation of the ingame texts and speeches Bethesda could also improve its work together with tranlation studios. Germany has a long tradition and experience in this by translating movies and TV series from english into german. Also Bethesda could involve either german community or otherwise experienced people that can put oneself in the situation of a fantasy RPG player and into a fantasy world.

Maybe some others here have an opinion on that too and will tell it here. I'd like to know what you think about this?

Thanks & Regards

You say exactly what I was thinking when reading about the dragon shouts.
I mean, it sounds awesome with that "dragon tongue", and you could translate the words for yourself to get some background story. But thats a point where i think it gets a bit complicated.
This language ist grammatical still english (atleast i think it is) and in that it would be some sort of translating the dragon tongue into english and then into german (in my case) and that qould be a bit to complicated so I that Beth maybe deletes this option and just gives us a ingame-subtitle which says whats writen and that deletes this immersion.

Actually it was catastrophic, e.g. Weak Potion of Healing was "translated" to Schw. Tr. d. Le.en.-W.. After a while we figured that this should mean Schwacher Trank der Lebenswiederherstellung. These awfully aberations were forced by the really low number of maximum characters in item names. Sure this was implemeted to better display the menu on consoles but not every language is as short as English. But this is no real excuse for these aberations, e.g. the above could have been written as Schwacher Heiltrank. This would have been the exact translation and would have even been shorter than the Englisch name.

Another point is the somethimes inadvertently funny pronunciation of Tamrilic words. When the speak them different in German than in English they should stay with one variation. Some words got up to four different pronunciations, e.g. Skyrim was pronunced as Skyrim, Skerim (trying to get the German pronunciation to something English), Skürim (there is no sound representing a ü in English) and Himmelsrand (the German translation for Skyrim).



At least Zenimax Germany asked us (aka my home forum) for a list with translation errors in the German version of The Infernal City. We've started a complete translation dictonary for Tamrilic words and hope that it will be used.

http://www.scharesoft.de/joomla/almanach/index.php/Tamriel-Almanach:%C3%9Cbersetzungsreferenz



I think this is inevitable. Otherwise the localisation must change the meshs and textures. This wasn't done before for sings or so. At least I can cope with this. Daedric and Ayleidic texts from Morrowind and Oblivion had also be translated to English and from there on to German.

I'm from germany, too, and my solution will be: import the game from UK.

I played Morrowind in german language, and then downloaded the english Version from Steam, because I lost my original CD (I got it as a media insert of a game magazine, once).
The difference of quality was shocking. I also only own a german Oblivion and the voices are really (!!!) bad.
I'll never turn back to playing games in German, if they were made in a different language, originally.

Games like Red Dead Redemption do it the right way: speech in English (with optional subtitles for the ones who have trouble understanding it) and maybe some ingame texts for items, menus etc. localized.

German player here too. I will simply bypass the annoying translations by getting the English version of the game to begin with. Let's face it, the English voice actors tend to be a lot more convincing than the German ones, not just for Elder Scrolls games.
What really ticked me off about the German Oblivion was that they pronounced Oblivion like a German word. It just sounded so wrong and worked completely against immersion. Couldn't they have just called it "Das Vergessen" or something? And the "Skürüm" thing was laughable too. Another problem was that the emphasis could vary extremely between two sentences in a dialogue (first sentence spoken really friendly, second sentence really harsh), this was most obvious in elf females to me.
I don't think more actors would solve the problem if the actors still sound so unmotivated.

I see where you're coming from (no pun intended) since I dealt with weak voice overs and stupid translations before (knows translated as "nariz" which actually means nose etc.) but honestly if you understand English you should just get the English version. More money is invested in the original English voices so they sound better and more believable. Some of the awesomeness is always lost in translation (text and voice) so I always try to get my games in English.

Haha, so true! And the beast voices were just horrible! Wasn't it a female Khajiit who said the Skürüm thing? So it's double fail xD

I'm not certain if I will buy an English version. As moderator in a German forum it tends to be a little problematic not to understand the German translations

BTW: The correct translation for Oblivion (as used in Morrowind) would have been Reich des Vergessens.

BTW2: I found the translation of Morrowind really good. I played the English version and the German voice actors were better IMHO. The translation of the texts was equally really good. Most of the time they used old forms of words what really helped the immersion.

That might be an option, but not for everybody. I know that the original game is often the best one to use, but some players aren't that way. It's more a psychological thing to hear and read your mother tongue in a game and not to translate every word in your head before understanding. It can kill a lot of the atmosphere when a content appears where you first have to learn the meaning of it. Can be quiet disappointing for those people that do not have so much knowledge of the english language.

Personnally I'd like to see the game shipped multi-lingual so that everyone can choose for himself/herself what language to use.

a bit off topic but i dont think this is limited to just bethesda. sometimes when watching movies with friends will watch one in french or spanish because the voice overs are so god awful it makes everyone crack up laughing. the french men always sound high pitched and whiny and the spanish guys sound just like the ones you hear in mexican soap operas.........always out of breath and talking really fast with awkward pauses. its just hilarious. the same issue happened with the stalker games and their english voice over counterparts.........they were just as bad. in fact they were so awful that many people preferred the original russian voice actors and just read the subtitles.

I understand your worries about the translations and think that beth should do their best at creating a German-friendly game.. But the fact of the matter is that everything is revolving around the English language, and the dragon shouts, along with npc responses (voice actors) will simply pale in comparison if the past attempts at translation bear any resemblance to skyrim. I truly believe that it's worth the trouble importing it from the US or UK(might be cheaper). That's definitely not the way it should be, but hey..

The dragon language alone will suffer in German. It's meant to rhyme in dragonic(?) AND English at the same time. I don't think it's in the cards to get it to rhyme with any Other languages, personally. As I sad before, I think the trouble of translating it yourself is the best way even if there is a German version. Plus if you import it, it won't be censored right?

I'm a fluent English reader and listener (writing or speaking is another topic...). In my experience I switch from translating after about 5 to 10 minutes. After this time I think in English. Really fascinating every time



Would be cool, but won't happen. The voices will need to much space on whatever medium the game is distributed.

/EDIT:



TES games weren't censored in any way. Oblivion has a lesser (?) rating in Germany than in the US

I don't give so much on it if the game is censored or not but that's not the point. You're probably right when you say that the dragon language will be difficult to translate into german (or french or whatever), even more when it should rhyme. But think of the german language, it is maybe difficult but for nearly everything there is more than one word in german. That is the difficulty to master such a translation process. You cannot only take a book and look up the most common translation for a term. You have to have knowledge about the target language, too. That's why I thought of involving more experienced people into this.

I know what you mean, only that it just takes a second or two for me.




Why not? It hardly would make the game more expensive and a disc or two more in the box won't hurt anybody. See Oblivion (which had a lot of spoken words). I have two voice packages in the Oblivion Data folder (Oblivion-voices1.bsa and Oblivion-voices2.bsa). Together they are about 1.6 GB in size for the whole game including the addons. Even if the size would be a bit more you surely could put two more languages on a single layer DVD, up two three or four on a double layer DVD to install optionally.

Living near Germany, I sometimes watch German tv.
Im always a bit shocked that in this day and age you choose to dub tv, instead of airing it in English.
Ever seen the A-team in German?
Its hilarious. So terribly awful it gains a sort of cult status.

So yeah, I think it is only natural that a dubbed tv series or game is of lower quality then the original.
I have read some of the translation issues on the UESP wiki and some of those are rather unforgivable, to the point of gamebreaking. (Vampire quest asks for an ingredient that due to a translation error, does not exist.)

On the one hand I feel that since English is lingua franca these days there wont be too many people that dont speak it.
So a lot of people would be better off with the original version.
That being said, people that do play in other languages have a right to expect a certain quality, at least to the point where it is not actually game breaking.
Translate it well, or not at all, but no more shoddy worksmanship please.

Personally, I'd like the games, and SOFTWARE in general to be ENGLISH ONLY.
That is the language of computers. It was good when everything was in english. And no, I'm not a native english speaker.
I hate this whole localization thing, I hate the synchros, the same when they sync movies.

Imagine just how much time and money would be saved if they didn't have to do all this - and all that would go into more and better game features.

Then imagine how much is LOST in translation.

Lately I played Two Worlds 2 - and there was a funny dialogue where the developers made fun of THEMSELF, because TW1 was in OLD english (with words like "thee" and "mayhap" and "forsooth") - so in TW2 the hero talks to a guy who answers everything in old english, and the hero doesn't understand a word then answers with "I don't have time for this [censored]!".

Now in the german version of this game, this funny part is totally screwed, because they can't use the implied joke, since in TW1 in german EVERYTHING was in normal german language just as in TW2.

This of course applies to everything else. Think of Mr.&Mrs. Smith - when Brad Pitt must kill a guy named "Lucky", he goes to play poker, and kills him. When Angelina asks "How was it at the poker night?", he answers "I got lucky!" - which is a double meaning, it could mean he won in poker, but also that he indeed GOT Lucky (killed him).

You know how this is in the german version of the movie? He says "Ich habe Lucky erwischt". But there is no double meaning here! It's lost. It only means he got Lucky, but not he "had luck". For this he should have said "Ich habe Glück erwischt" which then screws the whole thing.

Just imagine HOW MANY of these moments germans NEVER experienced because of the [censored] synchronisation!! I know, because I am in Munich right now, but hell no, I would NEVER buy a localized game.

Probably that is one of the most challenging aspects of localization and I think you're right. But there are ways to work those things out an a high level.

I always want to watch movies and play games in the language of origin, don't care if it's French, German, Japanese, Korean, Swedish... as long as it has subtitles I'm okay with it.
But somehow I'm allergic to Dubs, it feels like it ruins everything and even English spoken movies with Dutch subtitles give me shivers every time I notice a translation error or when a joke get's lost in translation.

With JRPG's these days it's all voice acting and usually it's impossible to get a Japanese version with English subs.
I literary gave up on JRPG's just because I can't stand anime characters speaking English. Maybe I'm OCD about it, but it just sounds wrong.

Ever watched http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persuaders! in German? In Britain it was a relatively unsuccesful tv show. Because of the dubbing the German and French version were really blockbusters.



You just ignored the around 4 billions of people who do not speak English. As example in Germany Oblivion was very succesful with the teens (12 to 16). They just doon't had engough time to learn English good engough.

So please no reasons like "Everybody speaks English. If ot it is his own fault."



And exclude all children and older people from computers forever.

I learned english BECAUSE of computers, and with the help of them. So, if you are interested in computers, you will automatically learn english. 2 flies with one smack.

I know the persuaders:)

But, please do not quote me out of context.
The lines I have printed under the one you quoted already clearly state I am not ignoring 4 billion people at all.
English is lingua franca though. I was born in 1977 and learned English from tv.
There was so much English and American tv. that by the time i was eight, I spoke English.
These days that must be even more the case?

There will always be people who do not speak English (well enough) for a game as deep as an elder scrolls game. As I said, I think they deserve a decent translation.

Oblivion and Morrowind were rates 12 years +. Do you claim that a 12 year old child would be able to understand something like the Sermons of Vivec or the Mysterium Xarxes?

/EDIT:



No offense intended. I understood your sentence in another meaning.

*shrug* My first version of Morrowind was in french. The acting, bar one of two voices, wasn't that good, and there were too many bugs in my version anyway. I ordered it in english, and did the same for Oblivion. It's better anyway, it was difficult to talk to you people with a Lore-vocabulary in french.

I understand why people would want a localized version though. I don't.

I think that would be a great solution. Dragon Age 2 is going to be released in Germany in the dubbed version and includes the english one, so evreryone is happy.
Even if it wouldn't fit on one disc, than they could do it like Fable 2 and 3 did. That the english voice output is downloadable, wouldn't be a problem either.

My Son is twelve. if he cant understand the Sermons in English, he will not understand them in german or albanian (our mother tongue) either. That's because he is TWELVE.

RPGs shouldn't be for children. At least the "rougher" ones shouldn't. A rating of 16+ would be Ok.