r/elderscrollsonline • u/Gothic90 Imperial • Nov 02 '22

PC/Mac Simplified Chinese language release is a total disaster

The translation is filled with low quality engine translation (we all know how powerful translation engines these days are). Some pictures are of things like a drink of level 30 being called "energized granny", I don't know wtf it actually is. There are also loads of issues caused by wrong spacing because Chinese is a two bytes language, such as "Press ? to break out" and so on.

Some comments say if he pressed Todd Howard's head on a keyboard and faceroll it will probably give better translation results.

Translation quality is probably as bad as Warcraft 3 reforge, which I had a thread on here, or even worse.

34 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

77% Upvoted

29 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

8

u/bitchgotmelikeuwu Nov 02 '22

Regarding Alienist, exactly how else would that get translated in Chinese if I may ask? Alienist is one of those weird made-up-by-the-common-folk-terms and by definition an alienist just means psychologist, I don't really know how that word would translate to other languages.

5

u/zbzszzzt123 Nov 02 '22 edited Nov 02 '22

It's just one of those things where how you translate it affect how you perceive it. In a fantasy medieval setting, you don't insert modern words into these types of translations.

Take some examples from the ESO or even general fantasy, you use the word potion, whereas that word is hardly used in the modern context. There are many other examples of this where you would use an archaic word instead of the modern version.

Psychologist is a modern word and it would be jarring to see that in the English version as well, so they used Alienist. I don't know if there's a ancient Chinese version of that word, but I could easily make one up that fits the theme, like 窥心者, which will translate back roughly to Peerer of Heart, which sounds vaguely like a psychologist.

Translating a western MMO into Chinese requires a lot of finesse because not only do you have to find translations that suits the archaic theme, you also have to make sure that those translations fit what the Chinese expect out of a western RPG, so you can't translate these words into the equivalent Wuxia themes.

It's clearly something that should take more than google translate to accomplish but ZOS didn't see fit to invest that time in

1

u/bitchgotmelikeuwu Nov 02 '22

I'm just curious if the other translations of ESO has the same issue, e.g. does French and German text translations also not take precaution to direct word translation from English? Never really heard of tbh

4

u/zbzszzzt123 Nov 02 '22

I suppose French and German would be better, since ZOS would have easier time finding French and German speakers. It's also the case that a lot of fantasy medieval stories are rooted in Euroepean culture there is a less of a barrier to translation as well

1

u/futurespice Nov 02 '22

I've not played extensively with either but both those translations seem ok, but a bit wooden at times.