[Feedback] Polish translation

[szczebrzeszynia]

I feel, that instead of making an F10 report every time there is mistranslation, it would be better to post on the forums to gauge the feelings of other people.

Why not F10s? First, because there is no feedback, second, because I'm at the point where it is getting ridiculous with just how low of quality the translation is, and how often the report should be made.

The main issue- the quality of the translation is meh to bad. Not everything, but a good chunk feels very unprofessional and machine translated, thus mumbled and unintelligible. And Supergiant is supposedly paying for this mess.

The long form text - like dialogues or walls of text from Supergiant are generally translated ok. At least when it comes to grammar and style. The issue is, that the translator for those is very verbose. And I mean VERY verbose. To the point that the text doesn't fit into text boxes. So I started paying attention, while Polish words tend to be longer, the difference is not that bad. It appears that the translator is actively adding flourishes to the text and speech that aren't there. Up to a third of a box can be text that was not in the original, but was added for some reason, most likely stylistic choice. There are jokes that aren't in the text. There are all extra poetic phrases. There's a lot of weird extra things going on with the text.

On the other hand, the jokes that are already there, are changed - like the one Scylla makes about amphitheatres. Which is wild, because it is not an issue with word comprehension, because in Polish big plein-air scenes are in fact called "amfiteatr". The joke is still there, but they used a name for tiny plein-air scene which happens to be called a "seashell" and wiped the big rock concert joke entirely.

Then there is UI text (boons, spell, descriptions, information and so on). It is a mess. It is clearly done by either somebody with really poor grasp of Polish in general or is straight up machine translation.

The biggest issues so far:

• terrible grammar being a straight up copy of English grammar
  
• on top of that there are mistakes that native speakers would sometimes make, but actual Polish translators would not (wrong accusative case possessive pronoun)
  
• terrible word order being copied from English 1-to-1 which makes no sense in Polish
  
• issues with proper writing not adhering to Polish style guide
  
• the translator on more than one occasion doesn't know how to negate in Polish
  
• atrocious issue with choosing adequate words:
  
  • ie calling skull "shells" "seashells"(first google translate suggestion) instead of "ammo shells". Currently it's changed to "czerep", which means "skull" or "potsherd", but I still don't get why somebody tries so hard to be this creative, when we have pretty good name for it already "łuska" or "łupina" depending on ammo size (and imo "Łupina" is better, because it also means "nut shell" or "peel", and skulls look something like that).
    
  • constant use of false friends in translations, what's funnier the English friend often does not even appear in English text, it's like translator knows English words and thinks they mean similar things in Polish, but they don't know Polish words for those things.
    
  • folding themselves in pretzel, because they can't figure out good word in Polish and they go around original wording by adding whole sentences that aren't there.

The worst offenders are night oaths "off" descriptions, but boon or keepsake descriptions aren't much better.

Even the names of five core skills - strike, flourish, ring, sprint, gain are translated in a way they try to keep the convention of 5 core words, but this convention is often broken. I only now, while checking the boons in the book, figured that "engagement ring" is Hera's basic cast, not an extra skill, because it's nice double meaning, but in Polish "finger ring symbolising will to marry" is entirely different phrase and doesn't fit the "circle" meaning of others. I more often than I would like have to switch to English text to figure out what does this or that is supposed to do. There's also constant breaking conventions with boon names - either they are translated as adj+noun or for other gods or set of skills as noun+adj and in Polish it makes quite a bit difference, it is not just a stylistic choice of making it sound "old language in high fantasy".

My feelings so far on whole translation issue can be summed up as "please, stop pooling collective and stop looking for translators online". I have doubts that after the call on Twitter, people who sent their offers to translate, were in majority highly trained individuals. The evidence is there, in the translation itself. As much as I understand that finding translators and coordinating so many languages is hard thankless job, but clearly there are issues with quality control to the point of the translations looking amateurish. I understand asking players to point out mistakes in translations, but it should be something in vein of "there's a spelling mistake" once in a while. If I were to point every weird grammar or baffling phrasing, I would pretty much F10 every boon choice screen. It is obviously Early Access, but Polish translation at this stage is gamma version of Early Access.

Please reconsider on how you approach translations. Players should not be needed to point out basic grammar mistakes.