Thread: Translations
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Old 02/19/2005, 08:42 pm   #4
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As a sidenote on translation, I'd like to say the following :

My mothertongue is french, and when I was younger, I wasn't able to understand english, at least not a the level necessary to fully enjoy a game, so I played the official french releases of the games.

Later, as my english skills improved (but it is still far from perfect, as you probably noticed ) I replayed my favorite adventure games, but in english this time .
I realized that many jokes and subtle references were lost during the translation (often due to a lack of understanding of the whole picture from the translator, plain lazyness, or impossibility to translate a joke properly (mainly jokes made on words))
I am not going to give you a full list of those mistakes here, but as an example I will just mention that in MI3, during the naval sword fight, the insults have been translated straight to French, hence losing the Ryhming part which is so amusing.

Too bad foreign distributors often see a translation as a marketing benefit and do not put into it the same dedication that the creators of the game did...

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