Le Gaming Question about Translations

[Retro Doomer]

Ah, my dear compatriots of the gaming realm, have you ever encountered a translation of a Game into your native tongue so woefully (badly) executed that you found yourself exclaiming, "To hell with this," and instead chose to indulge in the original language of the Game in its unadulterated glory?

 

[Clippy]

I have to go with 'other'. When I was a kid translations into my native language (both official and unofficial) were about as common as an honest politician and by the time they started becoming a regular occurrence my English was good enough for me to no longer need them.

If anything, the fact that games were in English served as a good motivator for me to learn the language.

 

[ciro64]

I downloaded this NSO snes games pack once that came with a lot of games but a lot of them were translated to russian or brazilian. I didn't even needed those because I understand english, but alright.

Then me and my cousin started playing E.V.O. and the text formatting was just horrendous. There were many times where you simply couldn't understand what was being said.

In order for those roms to work in the NSO app they need to be converted to a specific format, and the only convenient way to do that was to resort to a cryptic software. After many tries, it didn't work.

Then I had it! I opened translated rom that was in that weird NSO format directly into a hex editor, identified where the game code began and replaced it with the code from the original. Worked like a charm!

To rub salt in the wound, a good brazilian translation of EVO do exists. They just didn't picked that one.

 

[deh]

Not yet but I must also say I play most games in English rather than German.

 

[Strategist's iconStrategist]

The few Spanish translations I've played have been pretty solid. The Terranigma Spanish language localization is a thing of beauty.

 

[longestseason]

The most recent example I encountered was the Contact spanish translation. Whatever the characters were saying barely made sense, and it was bad enough to the point I didn't want to bother with it anymore and stopped playing. If I ever go back to it, I will definitely play in english but I doubt it, the game wasn't that interesting to me in the first place.

 

[Evaccaneer Doom]

Other:

Started playing games when these types of localizations died down, opting to be as accurate as possible or use subs.

Despite this, I still know of these translations (I will purposely play USA Yakuza 1 over any other version purely FOR the voice acting), it’s just that it’s optional and I mainly prefer playing original versions with more content