Sweet hell, the translation...

[MrEntity]

The English translation is bad. Like, really bad. I would say it was a C grade attempt if I was teaching an ESL class. This is a "translated" video game being sold for money so I have to give it a D at best. It would maybe have been acceptable in the 90s. It's mostly understandable, but it is not properly written. I genuinely think whoever they paid to translate it just passed it through Google Translate then went home for the day.
I can't even comment about localization or anything at this point, but I'm an hour in and there are so many grammar problems and vaguely nonsensical sentences that I feel disinclined to continue in this largely text-based game.
My current hypothesis is that either they didn't hire an actual English translator, or the translator they hired deliberately misled them re: ability with English.

["Lai"]

This was already explaines or talked but I think we'll get to see more about this topic in the future.

Yes it's not perfect but it's still enough to understand and enjoy the game.

[sevenfoothamster]

In this day and age with the number of translators and translation software out there, a lot of the errors are simply unacceptable:
1) Lebsa is sometimes called "Rebessa" at random during certain scenes.
2) The grammar is especially unnatural and was clearly NOT checked by ANY native speakers.
3) There are a lot of very clear indicators that they didn't just have one person working on the translation. The aforementioned "Lebsa/Rebessa" problem, for example, but also the fact that some of the stats are inconsistently translated ("Mind" gets called "Brain" a few times. What counts as an "etiquette" skill isn't really abundantly clear.)

They needed an actual native speaker to look at this and make adjustments. And I can tell you for a fact that 300,000 words wouldn't be that expensive to pay for given how lowest-common-denominator the industry is now that ChatGPT is a thing.
Or hell, just use ChatGPT. It's still clunky but it'll at least turn out coherent content if just asked to make corrections.

[Nexus]

I'm convinced some of you completely lack the ability to understand anything unless it is 100% grammatically correct. The translation is fine, there's a few things here and there, but its completely legible.

[Unn4m3d (♥AUT♥)]

I mean it's not that great,but it's not as awful as some make it out to be. You know what the game is trying to tell you, that's the important part.

[Sey]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Nexus:

I'm convinced some of you completely lack the ability to understand anything unless it is 100% grammatically correct. The translation is fine, there's a few things here and there, but its completely legible.

My feelings exactly. I've run into one sentence that took time to understand, but otherwise it's fine. I do have a chuckle when I'm exploring and the button is 'Advane'.

[The Nue]

My take would go somewhere between Nexus and the OP... As Cleircat points out, it's definitely not machine translated, or it'd be distinctly more garbled. It was definitely translated by a human being. But, as SevenFootHamster says in point #2, it also probably wasn't a native English speaker... which is super fair.
If you don't know someone willing to undertake the considerable work involved, you gotta pay someone to do it typically, which is probably not within the reach of a small team like this. You're fortunate if you've not seen it, but there are a LOT worse-translated games carrying an "English" translation stamp on Steam.

That said, I wouldn't say it's a non-issue either... even if I'm pretty universally able to sort out what is being communicated, the garbling sort of dashes my imersion to pieces and I've found myself skimming by reflex... which is a shame, cause I can see shadows of a good story underneath it.

My suggestion?
If there's anyone it's really bothering that also has the time, maybe get in touch with the devs, volunteer to proofread the current translation. Active patching is still going on, they'd probably be grateful for the help.

I feel no shame in refunding a title too mistranslated to enjoy, and while this isn't near bad enough to qualify for me, different people have their own thresholds... I imagine the creators would understand if the rough adaptation leaves it not a title for you.

But personally I feel like there's a great game here if you can get past the Engrish, so maybe someone with the time and passion could help polish that aspect up so it can reach more fans that'd enjoy it.

[MrEntity]

Just to jump back in here with a clarification on my original knee-jerk (and a few drinks in) opinion:

The translation isn't atrocious. It's mostly understandable. It is, however, bad. And by my opinion, genuinely bad. There are constant grammar issues, there are inconsistencies in the wording of stuff (even the names of basic stats), a lot of the sentences are consistently awkward or bizarre in structure, many of the noun or descriptor choices are odd, and it is regularly simply not pleasant (and sometimes not easy) to read. This would not matter nearly as much in many other genres, but "now read this" is most of this game, which means the translation is an integral part of the experience.
As others have noted, no, it probably wasn't just pushed through translation software. However, as others have also noted, I very much doubt a native English speaker ever touched this game. Or even a high-grade ESL student. And saying "well it's better than Princess Maker" or etc. is just an indictment of Princess Maker, not a justification for this translation.

Now, this may affect me more than it affects others. I finish reading a novel every week on average, and a work of non-fiction every 2-3 weeks. I read a lot. I'm also writing a book. I am highly geared to notice and object to poor use of language. It instantly sends me into "editor mode" or "learn from this mistake mode" or whatever (to paraphrase Stephen King from his book 'On Writing' - "Read everything. Pay attention. One truly bad novel will teach you more about how to write well than reading ten great novels will"). I can't not notice or walk past bad English anymore. Hell, there are books I looooved in my teens/early 20s that I have difficulty even getting through on revisits these days (Sword of Truth anyone?).

TL:DR - I'm hard-wired by practice and presence to be more highly cognisant and critical of bad writing than most people, probably. The translation in this game, for me, is an irregular, but consistent, series of "how did anyone capable of speaking English let this get past the QA phase?" moments. (I don't think there was QA on the translation.) It constantly breaks my immersion and regularly irritates me. I do not think it is acceptable in modern gaming for a largely text-based game to have a largely half-assed translation. At least pay an editor for a once-over.
I would be interested to know how well it was translated into Japanese and Korean (or whatever the other translations I originally noticed) are.

[Glue]

I guess it depends on your standards whether being able to vaguely get the gist of it is "good enough" or if you actually want a well-translated game that is fun to read and brings the plot and characters across well. There's a huge difference in experience to me between a sort-of-functional translation where I can parse it well enough to understand what's going on and a translation that properly immerses me in the world and characters and brings the intent of the original language version across.

Things like inconsistently translated character names or stats are a pretty clear sign that they didn't really put much thought or effort into the translation because that at least isn't that hard to make sure is the same across the entire text. I understand that there's costs involved in getting a qualified human translator on board, but it's really a shame because the game looks cute and polished in other aspects (although the number of bugs suggests that the devs aren't programming experts either)

Also lol @ the suggestion to work for free to improve the translation because the devs couldn't be bothered to hire someone to make a decent one.

[Shylaar]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Magwitch:

It's not great, but it's not completely terrible. The Princess Maker games are MUCH worse than this.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Michael Scott Paper Company:

It's better than the Princess Maker translations they've got on Steam, though that bar is the absolute lowest. It's passable here and doesn't detract from the game really.

Comparing it to the official Princess Maker releases really doesn't mean much when most of those were borderline unreadable due to how badly translated they were, I think it was 3 where I myself made a post in the forums outlining how ♥♥♥♥♥♥ the script was.

As for this game, Glue has the right of it, a game focused on characters like this needs a decent translation to carry it, not a badly written one where every few minutes you have to stop and puzzle over what a line is even supposed to be telling you, as was the case in the demo.
Hell, the dev's post in the other thread is so badly written that I honestly have no idea what it's even trying to say, aside from claiming that it isn't machine translation.

As for the argument that it's a small indie team, well that's nice and all, but it doesn't stop this from being a game that they're charging for, which should meet a minimum of quality. If they didn't have the money to fund a translation they should've released it in Chinese first, and then used the profits from that to fund the English release with a proper translation, instead of going for a simultaneous release. The game seems to be very well received in the Chinese market.

There's no scenario where defending bad translations like this is a reasonable thing to do; even if you think it's "not that bad", you still don't have anything to lose from the translation being made better.

[Rai]

Depends on the person I guess. I don't even read half of the text in the game, a quick glance and I get the general gist of conversations as well as which dialogue is important or fluff. Character motivations and backstory are presented pretty well in key visuals so even without the text, the presentation alone makes it easy to understand.

[Battler]

Even if it is a machine translation, it is sufficiently edited. And for a game like this, it's more than enough. After all, most of the dialogues are smalltalk about nothing. It's not a visual novel after all

[Monolith]

It's possible that the dev got scammed by the translator they hired. Common practice in Asia.

[MrEntity]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Shylaar:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Magwitch:

It's not great, but it's not completely terrible. The Princess Maker games are MUCH worse than this.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Michael Scott Paper Company:

It's better than the Princess Maker translations they've got on Steam, though that bar is the absolute lowest. It's passable here and doesn't detract from the game really.

Comparing it to the official Princess Maker releases really doesn't mean much when most of those were borderline unreadable due to how badly translated they were, I think it was 3 where I myself made a post in the forums outlining how ♥♥♥♥♥♥ the script was.

As for this game, Glue has the right of it, a game focused on characters like this needs a decent translation to carry it, not a badly written one where every few minutes you have to stop and puzzle over what a line is even supposed to be telling you, as was the case in the demo.
Hell, the dev's post in the other thread is so badly written that I honestly have no idea what it's even trying to say, aside from claiming that it isn't machine translation.

As for the argument that it's a small indie team, well that's nice and all, but it doesn't stop this from being a game that they're charging for, which should meet a minimum of quality. If they didn't have the money to fund a translation they should've released it in Chinese first, and then used the profits from that to fund the English release with a proper translation, instead of going for a simultaneous release. The game seems to be very well received in the Chinese market.

There's no scenario where defending bad translations like this is a reasonable thing to do; even if you think it's "not that bad", you still don't have anything to lose from the translation being made better.

Yeah, pretty much this.
The difficulty involved in parsing the dev's response in that post is (I think) pretty indicative of how good the translation is ever likely to become.
My main gripe, though, is: there is an "English translation" qualifier on the Steam store page for it. And not, like, a community-suggested tag to tell you what the game is like - it's a legit "the devs think this is fully and properly patched to English" tag. There probably needs to be some sort of oversight on that, even if it's just as small-time as a community tag for "poorly translated".

[Elfie]

OP clearly haven't seen games with bad translation. This one is actually pretty decent. Yes maybe some wordings may sound weird for native English speaker, but overall it is good.

[Terran]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Elfie:

OP clearly haven't seen games with bad translation. This one is actually pretty decent. Yes maybe some wordings may sound weird for native English speaker, but overall it is good.

Going off of your own English, I'm going to assume that's why it seems "fine" to you.
No offences intended. Not everyone was born in an English-speaking country.

I will hope that the developers improve their translation in the future.