Arthur Bruno, I warn you!

[Haaznahnuf]

Originally Posted by durruti

hahahahaha... no. people would have an easy time acquiring a language of the same language family if they bothered, took an open approach to learning. not gonna happen in the land of "les boches"...

Indeed. He who studied more than one european language knows that learning italian is similar to learning spanish to a northerner, and that swedish is akin to german for any southerner, if only by hearing. To a westerner, nearly all slavic languages feel alike.


Back to the topic, what was the timeline for TQ translation ? Was it performed by professional translators, or by hard-pressed professional translators ? I am asking this because if dialogs and voice-acting were well done in french ( though the voice-acting could have been more "localized" with stronger eastern accents), the mere text files (equipment and creatures) contained some (very few) mistakes.

To assess the level of mistakes (not that critical, by the way), I give some examples hereafter.
[en]helmet --> [fr]heaume
>>> Look stange, as "heaume" is a big closed helm now.
[en]alexandrian helmet --> heaume d'Alexandre
>>> (= Alexander's helm) in stead of heaume alexandrin
[en]thracian --> [fr]thracian
>>> in stead of "thrace" or "de Thrace"

In french version, leggins and grieves, and armbands and bracers, have their price messed up (the better armor, the lesser price), except (if I recall well) for ActIV.

[en]Lamian --> [fr]Lamian
>>> In french, the mythological beast Lamia is "Lamie".
[en]Anouran --> [fr]Anouran
etc
>>> This doesn't follow the normal construction rules for a species or a nationality. This is not a mistake, but it could have been discussed at least : Lamien, Anourien ? Stepping from the english version could have led to "Lamies" (as the beast) or "Anoures" (as the frogs), or even further to "Batrachos" or "Hommes-grenouilles" (Frogmen) .

It looks as if translations have been performed out of spreadsheet, without gaming.
What surprises me is, that with so "many" patches, and one extension, nothing was reported or corrected (I mean, they are only text files packed in an archive).
IMHO, all these mistakes and "could have been better" translations may be avoided by a survey of the work (the B Team by Yggdrasil), including in-game experience to check consistency.
If translation is started during Beta, we'll can hunt the mistakes down before the whole is submitted to the approval team, and before release.