The spanish translation is an utter mess

[Psyrgery]

Been a long time Shantae fan (but not fan enough to notice the Kickstarter campaign on time when it was announced, d'oh) I was finally able to grab it today upon release with much pleasure after so much time waiting.

I've only managed to play for a short time (just enough to beat Risky Boots) and oh my god, I can see that none of the funds from Kickstarter were invested in the spanish translation (it seems our french neighbours aren't faring much better either). Characters' genders are constantly swapped, words that change from being translated to untranslated at will, sentences translated word-per-word from english resulting in a total nonsensical wreck, expressions that make no sense at all... Sadly, this trend seems inherited from previous Shantae games, as the Pirate's Curse (which I currently own in Steam, Xbox One and 3DS retail) was also riddled with this kind of errors but geez, I can state that Half-Genie Hero has the most translation errors per minute any Shantae game has ever had.

If Wayforward so wishes, I can offer myself to help fix the huge amount of translation mistakes this game has. I mean, they are very basic and can be fixed easily, I've already translated other indie games (and I've been credited for doing so... well, just one game :D) and it should not be too difficult to accomplish...

[diarandor]

After less than 1 hour of playing this game, I completely agree: the Spanish translation is shameful and bad as hell (no offense intended). I guess that the translators did not have the context for the translation, but if that's the case, it would have been much better not to translate the game instead of doing this mess. Some of the mistakes of the translation that I have seen include:

1) Genders that do not correspond with the ones of the characters. This happens again and again and again and again in the translation, and it is too annoying, especially when Shantae is referred to like if she were a dude.

2) Many expressions that are translated literally, word by word, should instead be translated by giving the equivalent expression. The result of this is usually a nonsense, like a text written by a monkey throwing bananas to the keyboard. I think the same happens with translations of jokes (and I am not joking!). The translators SHOULD make necessary changes (and invent something different when necessary) instead of translating, word by word, the expressions and jokes.

3) I have also seen a few minor misprints, like missing spaces and some spelling mistakes. But I won't complain about this.

My advice for the devs: the translators of the game SHOULD have and know the context of the dialogs of the game (they should even play the game, if necessary, to know the contexts), otherwise they cannot write decent translations. (Maybe I am wrong and the translators already had the context; but if that was the case, they would have done a terribly bad work.) By the way, the game is awesome! ;)

[BROLY 32]

Same thing for the french translation.
But at least we got them, most indie games don't even bother at all nowadays. I'm sure the community is gonna help them refine it all.

[Geobardi]

Yeah, it seems they used google translator instead of hiring real people to do a decent translation in spanish. I had to play the game in english.

[tonk82]

It is beyond awful. I ended up switching to english :/ seriously, one of the most unprofessional translations i've ever seen. It barely even makes sense.

[Arxabin]

Originally posted by BROLY 32:

Same thing for the french translation.
But at least we got them, most indie games don't even bother at all nowadays. I'm sure the community is gonna help them refine it all.

I could not disagree more with that statement. I've seen this time and time again, but it is NOT the community's job to fix the piss-poor translation that an allegedly "professional" translation house has made for money. You know what is going to happen next time? The same as with the last two games: they are going to hire those bozos again, because we keep sucking it up and eating their garbage that a handful of users in this forum have already improved on in a few days.

It's not an exageration, DIY translations has scammed Wayforward. I own countless indie games with passable translations. Shovel Knight made me cry with how good the localization is. So don't give me that "at least they translated their indie game". No translation would have been better than this joke, it only makes them look bad. We have to make some noise. I have send them emails on two ocassions on the matter, receiving no answer. I know some users here have had the same issue. But it is absolutely neccesary to let them know that we will NOT settle for such a low level of quality when it comes to translations.

I may sound a bit bitter, but I swear I'm tired of seeing this over and over.

[BROLY 32]

Well, I agree that if they paid someone to do the translations, they definitely got scammed.

[diarandor]

@Arxabin is right. AND WE, ALL THE COMMUNITY, MUST MAKE MORE NOISE ABOUT THIS TO STOP THIS TYPE OF SCAM. We should not tolerate the scam that the company called DYS Translations ( http://dystranslations.com/ ) is doing. If we do nothing, this is gonna get much worse in future games.

DYS Translations claim in their website that their service is given by "qualified native speaking translators", that they make "fast and accurate translations in multiple languages", and that "every completed DYS Translations document is double checked by an editor before we deliver the finished document to you". Of course, anyone who has played the game can confirm that THIS IS ALL A LIE, they are probably using google translator or unqualified people who are not native of the corresponding languages.

Why should it be tolerated that a company (DYS Translations) is being payed for a service (a translation of quality) that they are not giving? Why has to be the community who fixes these cr.appy translations for free while DYS Translations is getting money? This makes me furious! All of us should be furious!!!!
（╬ಠ益ಠ)

[N-G-Neer]

Hello, everyone ! Allow me to chime in if I may. I'm the guy that started the french translation thread. Along with other members of the community, I've been referencing errors and other oddities found in the french version.

I also happen to be in touch with the company responsible for the translation, DYS Translations. They asked me to help clear things up and I'd like to give some additional info I just received from them.

First of all, they are working on fixing the different localizations of the game. WayForward has given them an "after the Holidays" time-frame, while DYS wants to fix it as soon as possible (the bad quality of the translation being damaging to their reputation.)

Second of all and most importantly, someone by the name of timehero from the French thread dug a bit into the localization files and found a line saying something like "These are Google Translations. Replace with official translations later". Now what is very important to know is WHO wrote that line.

From what I've been told by DYS, WayForward was in a bit of a rush to launch the game and included Google Translated subtitles WITHOUT telling DYS about it. I don't have proof either way aside from what I've been told by DYS staff themselves, so draw your own conclusions here. In the meantime, I suppose it is fair to at least give them the benefit of the doubt until we hear from WayForward's side of the story.

So, so far, the swapped genders can be explained by the fact that DYS was given the translation work while the game was still in development. I don't know if they had a test build to work with or just a bare text file, but it's easy to see how genders could be ambiguous in some cases, especially in French. I speak from personnal experience, as I'm currently working on translating INFRA. If I didn't know the lines by heart, I'd be hard-pressed to guess the genders as well.

As for the non-sensical parts, we can assume it's been Google Translated by WayForward.

So, there you have it. I hope that clears some things up. Main point is, let's put down the pitchforks for now until we know whose butt we need to poke for this blunder :P

[Psyrgery]

Originally posted by N-G-Neer:

Hello, everyone ! Allow me to chime in if I may. I'm the guy that started the french translation thread. Along with other members of the community, I've been referencing errors and other oddities found in the french version.

I also happen to be in touch with the company responsible for the translation, DYS Translations. They asked me to help clear things up and I'd like to give some additional info I just received from them.

First of all, they are working on fixing the different localizations of the game. WayForward has given them an "after the Holidays" time-frame, while DYS wants to fix it as soon as possible (the bad quality of the translation being damaging to their reputation.)

Second of all and most importantly, someone by the name of timehero from the French thread dug a bit into the localization files and found a line saying something like "These are Google Translations. Replace with official translations later". Now what is very important to know is WHO wrote that line.

From what I've been told by DYS, WayForward was in a bit of a rush to launch the game and included Google Translated subtitles WITHOUT telling DYS about it. I don't have proof either way aside from what I've been told by DYS staff themselves, so draw your own conclusions here. In the meantime, I suppose it is fair to at least give them the benefit of the doubt until we hear from WayForward's side of the story.

So, so far, the swapped genders can be explained by the fact that DYS was given the translation work while the game was still in development. I don't know if they had a test build to work with or just a bare text file, but it's easy to see how genders could be ambiguous in some cases, especially in French. I speak from personnal experience, as I'm currently working on translating INFRA. If I didn't know the lines by heart, I'd be hard-pressed to guess the genders as well.

As for the non-sensical parts, we can assume it's been Google Translated by WayForward.

So, there you have it. I hope that clears some things up. Main point is, let's put down the pitchforks for now until we know whose butt we need to poke for this blunder :P

That's awesome! Thank you very much for the heads-up!

[LVL99]

This thread prompted me to check out the German translation as well. I can confirm that most of the previously mentioned issues appear in German as well, including grammatical agreement errors, out-of-context phrases, literal translation, inconsistent item names and even the player being addressed alternately in an informal and formal manner (why so polite all of a sudden?).

I usually play games in English, so I cannot really tell how bad this one is compared to other games' translations, but it's definitely pretty sloppy. Let's wait and see who to cast the blame on. But as pointed out before, it's a really bad idea to not have the translators play the game (ideally, they should even be able to play it after the text has been fed into the game to make adjustments where necessary).

Originally posted by N-G-Neer:

Second of all and most importantly, someone by the name of timehero from the French thread dug a bit into the localization files and found a line saying something like "These are Google Translations. Replace with official translations later". Now what is very important to know is WHO wrote that line.

Yep, there are 28 mentions of Google Translate in data/shantae_common.pak and one in data/localization.pak.

[ntbxp1]

Include japanese as one of the language what is messed up.
I'm waiting for japanese translation mod for this game.

[Barquillapo]

Are the company working to fix the translation? I only ask to save money if no.
In the current state it is as if the game was only translated into English.

[Arxabin]

That's what worries me the most. Have the translators said anything? Did they make the changes they promised? I haven't heard anything so far.

[Zixinus]

Originally posted by ntbxp1:

Include japanese as one of the language what is messed up.
I'm waiting for japanese translation mod for this game.

I have not seen any mods for the game and the game is not supposed to be moddable. It can be hacked, but there is no mod support.

[N-G-Neer]

Hey, everyone ! Little update : I've heard back from DYS Translation. They're ret2go as soon as they receive a green light from WayForward.