The Czech language is so s****** up in this game

[martin.duchoslav]

Not going to be complaining about the game itself, which is excellent on many levels in my view, just about this particular aspect. I am Czech, so let me comment on some of the most striking language weirdness/mistranslations the authors committed making a Prague v2.0.

1. Mramor Pilsner – well, I doubt it very much that a sane Czech person would call a beer brand that. Mramor means "marble" in English (marble furniture...). Beer brands are typically named after Slavic gods in my country, so we have a "Gambrinus" or "Radegast" beer etc. Whoever thought that "Mramor Pilsner" is a good idea for a beer brand probably lost their marbles back then:-).
"Svobody Beer" – correctly "Svoboda Beer or "pivo Svoboda" in Czech. "Svoboda is an equivalent to "freedom" in English and again – nobody sober would call a beer this weird.

2. "Dávný čtvrť" – because of a complex case system used in Czech, we would never say "dávný čtvrť" but "dávná čvrť" (This is called "congruence" in linguistics; the governing constituent dictates basic grammatical categories to the constituent being governed). Well, we probably would if this made sense in the first place because "dávný" means "bygone, long-time, ancient" in English and again, nobody here would give a quarter such an unlikely name.

3. "Hlvani" or "Hlavni", a misspelled variant of "Hlavní", meaning "major, main" in English. There is "Hlavní nádraží" in real Prague, an important public transportation hub.

4. The "Nezadávejte" sign found in metro stations is a literal translation of "do not enter" but in connection with keyboard typing, not in relation to "not being allowed to walk in/past". In this context, the correct wording is "nevstupujte".
"Authorised personnel only"is translated word-for-word, the correct formulation is "Nepovolaným vstup zakázán".

5. District/metro stations names. Prekazka, sometimes misspelled "Prekaska" means "an obstacle" in English. It is beyond absurd for a Prague (or Czech for that matter) quarter/district to bear a name like this. Whose idea was that? Google translate's:-)?
Poutnikova (a metro station name) does not make sense semantically, it means "pilgrim's",

6. Miscellaneous typos (or the wrong use of Czech grammar), such as "visoké" rather than "vysoké" ("napětí" or voltage), "suvenírmi" rather than "suvenýry", ("obchod se suvenýry or "souvenir shop"), "auodily" (correctly "autodíly"), "samoobsluze" (locative/dative case of nominative "samoobsluha"), "provede se prohlídkU" (accusative case) rather than "provede se prohlídkA" etc.

6. NPC names. Drahomír, Irenka, Alexej Volner, Marcie Sedlak (Correctly Marcie Sedláková) and many others that I have not been able to remember now. Rather unlikely names, not used very often, and they sound kind of bookish, somewhat funny.

7. "Chlupatí *ricks". A phrase uttered by one of the NPCs. "Chlupatí" means "the cops" in Czech slang. I wonder why use a combination of Czech and English in this particular case. It sounds totally out of place.

8. Ruzicka station. Correctly "Růžička station" or "Nádraží Růžičkové" can be heard pronounced "roozika" throughout the game. The correct pronunciation is "roo-zhi-chka". BTW.: the name means "a little rose" in English. On a similar note, the name "Václav" (Koller) is mispronounced "Veklaf" rather than ['Vat:slaf].

9. Útulek complex, sometimes misspelled "Utulek". This word is seldom used in relation to people, far more frequently to animals. A better alternative would have been "Úkryt" ("asylum", "shelter") or "Útočiště" ("refuge"). Either way, we would never say something like "Útulek/Úkryt/Útočiště complex" because it is an anglicised way of saying "komplex Útulek/Úkryt/Útočiště.

10. Soft drink translates as "jemný nápoj" in the game, the correct version is "nealkoholický nápoj" or simply "nealko". Another instance of a word-for-word translation.

11. My favourite: Hotel Narikala (correctly "Naříkala"). In English it means " Hotel She Was Crying or She Was Crying Hotel" and makes absolutely no sense in Czech. But I LOL'd real hard:-).

...and many others I cannot recall off the top of my head just now.

As I mentioned, the game plays awesome for me and I especially like its level design, atmosphere, side quests and the exploration aspect but more often than not the mangled Czech detracts from the overall experience I have been having with it (40 hrs in and counting). It looks like the devs decided to put the many names through Google translate to make their work easier, but the downside to this approach is a suffering ear and eye for someone speaking Czech.

It contrasts with a well-dubbed Czech spoken in metro stations and in some places in downtown Prague but then again you overhear police officers speak English with a Russian accent, which makes you cringe... kind of "helps" ruin the atmosphere instead of helping to build it if you ask me. This puzzles me all the more that the devs were apparently able to hire professionals to do a Czech dubbing for their game (I even recognise some prominent Czech voice actors here), while failing to bring in somebody to do some basic proofreading and make all the necessary language and factual corrections. It would almost seem as if there were no Czechs living in Canada...

[CERNASMRT]

Oh, I almost forgot... PICUS.. hahaha! is almost like "píča" in the Czech fourth case lol
(which is p*ssy)

[gwynbLeidd]

Originally posted by CERNASMRT:

Originally posted by brkckL:

Hey, I'm here. I'm a linguist myself (Major=English). But I'm curious about other languages too. So, when I heard the way they pronounced "Růžička", I was like "Isn't that supposed to be pronounced as 'roozhichka' 🤔".

Also I didn't understand why Vaclav is pronounced as "Vat:slaf" ? Do you pronounce "C" without the caron/háček as "TS"!

Ahoj! Jste Cech? odkud jste v CR? ja Bydlil jsem v praze na "Ipak" and taky v Caslavi..

Oh, no.I'm not Czech, just a guy who's interested in languages.

[Ñ]

That was an interesting reading, thanks. I couldn't bear playing Rise of the TR for that reason. At one point i just closed the game and never started it again. It looked way too absurd and broke immersion.
I don't understand why's that so hard for devs to hire native speakers of a language if their game is not set in an english speaking country, damn. Or if that's way too hard or exmensive, then at least hire one or two guys who'd just run through the game and point out the language related mistakes in signs and all that.

On a side note: as a russian, i can confirm that russian is absolutely correct and natural in this game. (well, it's only spoken by a couple of thugs and a weapon dealer). Kinda stupid

[Berghain]

This thread is fantastic. Thanks for sharing all this information with us.
Always cool, as a non-speaker of the Czech language, being able to see the game through the eyes of one who is!

[raziel66]

You know what I liked the best? In Koller's bookshop, there's one poster concerning book rentals. It reads "jemný" which is a completely wrong translation of the word "fine" (a financial sanction if you return the book late). "Jemný" means "soft" in Czech. But the worst is probably the RUZIKA station and VAKLAV... my ears still burn from those a little bit. Fortunately, those Czech-hired dubbers do a good job at fixing those issues when talking.

Edit: Oh and also, the cereal boxes are sooo wrong...

[CERNASMRT]

Originally posted by raziel66:

You know what I liked the best? In Koller's bookshop, there's one poster concerning book rentals. It reads "jemný" which is a completely wrong translation of the word "fine" (a financial sanction if you return the book late). "Jemný" means "soft" in Czech. But the worst is probably the RUZIKA station and VAKLAV... my ears still burn from those a little bit. Fortunately, those Czech-hired dubbers do a good job at fixing those issues when talking.

Edit: Oh and also, the cereal boxes are sooo wrong...

I love me some
"Skritek Cereal " LOL

[Mnemonic]

Originally posted by Ray76:

On a side note: as a russian, i can confirm that russian is absolutely correct and natural in this game. (well, it's only spoken by a couple of thugs and a weapon dealer). Kinda stupid

Because they used russian voice actors for all non-english characters. That's why most of the Czechs in the game speak with russian accent :)
Supposedly they weren't able to cast czech actors because there aren't enough old actors who can speak english - only younger actors do.

[Mnemonic]

Originally posted by CERNASMRT:

Oh, I almost forgot... PICUS.. hahaha! is almost like "píča" in the Czech fourth case lol
(which is p*ssy)

Yeah, the name sounds funny to Czechs and the fact none of the game characters makes any reference to it is a missed opportunity :))
But to their excuse, the name is inherited from the previous game, so the devs couldn't change it even if they cared.

[OVERWATCH]

Originally posted by kokoroyer:

I just wanna know what uyobok (almost definitely misspelled that) means. I know it's what they use to refer to augmented people, but like, the actual translation.

Uyobok is a very harsh word for a person that annoys you by its looks/ the way he/she talks/the way he/she behaves and etc. or has done something wrong and you want to punch him/her. Its acctualy Russian word.

[Fransens]

I guess the had troubles finding voice actors but come on. This is Eidos we are talking about. And it's not like they can be oblivious of the fact that PC gaming is huge, especially in europe.

It's one thing not to get a full cast of czech voice actors for the Prague bit, but are they seriously thinking that there wouldn't have been 30+ folks from the Czech Republic that would have jumped at the opportunity to prove-read obvious stuff like street-signs, station and brand names.
This boggles the mind.

I mean I bet if they just asked on the steam forums here or on twitter/reddit they would have crowd-sourced all that proof-reading in less than half a week.
But as always, Tripple-A game developers are like Hollywood ...they live in their own little bubble while making games/movies that continiously makes the rest of the world facepalm at their ignorance.

Come one Eidos, all it would have taken was 1-3 one-page newsletters to your fans to get in touch with a couple of guys like the OP. That is basically one beta key you could have given out to make the game better for all the players of an entire country. Doesn't take a rocket-scientist to know when and how to ask for help. But if you insist on doing stuff you have clearly no idea about you just make yourself look like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ idiots. Which hurts all the more if anybody stops to think about how easy it would have been to not have a problem like this.

You make a game set in Prague? Get a local on board. Stop giving us watered down versions of culturally complex nations just becasue YOU have little to no experience with them.
It's a global age and all you had to do was f*cking ask.

Tripple-A companies my ass. You sell globally so work globally too. It's only a skype-call away most of the time.

[Hexx]

The Czech language is really bad in this game. The non-sensical signs, the weird names, the clunky phrases translated simplistically from english, all the grammar errors. For a native speaker it just looks and sounds stupid and breaks the immersion of the game. It's a shame that they didn't hire a native speaking guy to go over these things and apparently used google translator instead (it really looks that way).

[FireFox]

I'll give you an A+ on taking things too seriously.

Originally posted by Mnemonic:

Using google translate is outright amateurish. One would expect AAA game production to have the budget to hire a native speaker to proofread the textures. I love the game, but these mistakes are literally all over the place and it really ruins my experience.

[FireFox]

Originally posted by CERNASMRT:

Oh, I almost forgot... PICUS.. hahaha! is almost like "píča" in the Czech fourth case lol
(which is p*ssy)

Picus It's not from Czech. It's actually Latin really from Roman mythos. Picus was the first king of Latinum.

Funny how studying ♥♥♥♥ actually helps you learn something.

[IvanavI]

If they used so much Czech, I thought they'd bother recruiting at least a native speaker, if not a proper linguist. Being Slavic, but not speaking Czech, most of it sounds right to me and now I'm a little disappointed (I noticed Vaclav being mispronounced, but I think it was done by non Czech NPCs so it's actually kind of realistic).

As for PICUS, such coincidences simply happen. My mom's old company had a customer, a certain Mr Jebsen Pederssen, which, in Serbian, sounds like Fu*ksen Fa**otssen, or even Fu*kyou Fa**otssen. There was also a "legendary" remark that was made live on national television years ago, when a football commentator, angry due to the percieved referee's bias against our national team, said: "Well, Mr Pederssen, you do deserve your last name!"

[Hexx]

Originally posted by IvanavI:

I noticed Vaclav being mispronounced, but I think it was done by non Czech NPCs so it's actually kind of realistic.

Actually the NPC was "Václav Koller", which is a Czech name (sudgesting some German family origins? "Koller", not unusual) and he unfortunately does not know how to pronounce his own name (+the thick stereotypical russian accent). There's more though, the OP pointed out a lot of it so I will not repeat it. For a native speaker these things look silly at best.

The game itself is solid if you ignore all the silliness with the language (often you have to try really hard though).