Developed by ZeniMax Online Studios and published with the assistance of Bethesda, the MMORPG game “The Elder Scrolls Online” officially launched in April 2014. After 8 years, it finally updated the simplified Chinese language system, from the user interface, character dialogue subtitles, props and equipment texts, etc. Chinese culture. However, many players entered the game with excitement, and when they saw the content of this official brief, they were instantly poured with cold water.
Before the official release, it said that this official Chinese contains complete dialogue content, subtitles and UI translation, “providing a more immersive gaming experience”.
You come to translate the translation, what is “kill the spider web. Ordinary?”
What does it mean to be able to fight?
It didn’t take long for players to find dozens of errors and bugs in Chineseization, as well as missing characters.
In fact, for ordinary players, seeing these strange translations has long been no surprise, and they can even make up their own minds to imagine what the original sentences mean. However, for an official game that has been waiting for 8 years and has been released with great fanfare, this is how it is done? No wonder it was disappointing. In the end, let’s not pay attention. Many angry players rushed directly into the steam comment area and swiped “rnm, refund!”
As for why it caused such a great emotion, the following comment may summarize everyone’s thoughts to a certain extent:
In fact, many people have always believed that, compared to these “official” translations, those who have disappeared are the more memorable existences.
Think about it too, with the advent of the genuine era, the first choice of players has become the official Chinese that comes with game manufacturers.
Although they also miss the original era, netizens also have a series of questions: So why don’t these big companies directly cooperate with those “civilization groups” to produce high-quality localized content?
Where have all the sinicizing gods in the past gone?
History of Chinese Game Sinicization Groups
Just like the sinicization groups of movies and American dramas, in fact, even in the history of world games, the process of sinicization of games in China is a very special existence.
As early as the era of red and white machines, a company called Fuzhou Yanshan Software began to localize the FC game “Tank Wars” and launched the Yanshan tank series.
However, it is not so much a sinicization as a replica, but even if it is just the sinicization of the simple text in these menu bars, this game that is popular all over China and sells 30 million copies has also made many people see the need for game localization. sex.
However, with the introduction of various games, the inexperience of many Sinicization groups has also been exposed, and many jokes have been made.
It is said that when China’s Tianren Interactive introduced “The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind” to China, it used poor machine translation, including translating “What’s your name” into “What’s your name”, which caused the game A large amount of text inside cannot be read and understood. Internet rumors claim that Tianren Interactive mistranslated the title of “The Elder Scrolls” as “Old Man Scroll Bar” (literally translated from English “Elder Scrolls”). These were later confirmed to be rumors, but there are still many people in the Chinese circle who call the Elder Scrolls series “Old Roll”.
Early game sinicization group
In addition to the online games introduced by the original, players have begun to set up various localization groups based on their own interests. The more well-known ones include the Chineseization group of Jianjia who has translated “GTA”, and the ACG Chineseization group, which specializes in the Japanese “Reverse Referee” series. Football Manager’s burst panel and more.
However, with the increasing number of Sinicization groups, many problems have emerged.
First of all, even if most of the sinicization groups are not profitable, the sinicization needs to unpack the in-game text, which is still illegal.
Fortunately, the translation of the works by the sinicization groups is entirely out of love and does not gain any benefits, but this non-professional situation has caused a large number of people to flow, and each sinicization group cannot maintain stability.
And the finished Chinese works, of course, have to be published somewhere. In addition to the websites of each localization group, the largest concentration in China is the 3DM website.
But traffic brings benefits, and benefits affect quality.
Until later, as players who downloaded the sinicization update provided traffic to the game websites, the interests began to crush the original intention of the sinicization groups. In order to avoid crashing with other people’s games, many sinicization groups would first talk and occupy the pit, in order to maximize the Let the players download their own patches first, and there will be nondescript results of machine translation between some Chinese groups. There have also been a lot of infighting problems in the Sinicization group, which are extremely noisy.
The Sinicization Group in the Steam Era
Since websites such as 3DM have made the Sinicization group form infighting, and there is still the problem of piracy. Some Sinicization groups who do not like this kind of culture think that perhaps the current form is incomprehensible. Now that Steam has gradually become popular, they thought: Since the genuine version has become the general trend, can we take the initiative to contact the manufacturers and provide them with localization services?”
For example, the well-known “Whispering Studio” on Steam has risen in this way.
At the beginning, they tried to send an email to the producer of “Xulima: The Gods”, and launched a crowdfunding in China, raising more than 10,000 yuan, and they really made it happen. .
However, Qingyu Studio also said that in fact, the sinicization of a game is far from being as simple as imagined.
From the initial text analysis, trial play, translation, and finally polishing, proofreading and testing, if the volume of text is about 300,000, it will take about 4 months.
“Playing Terriers” is not impossible to appear in the Chinese translation, but it needs to be analyzed in combination with the character profiles sent by the manufacturer.
For example, can you imagine the fierce and domineering Lord Kui in “God of War” saying “Je Jue Son”?
More importantly, there were many folk localization groups in the past that did not have a testing link, but for a localization company, testing can be said to be one of the most critical steps, and it is also a manifestation of being responsible to players.
Take the other “Disco Elysium” they translated as an example, the translation work of Qingyu is not a one-shot deal, but also needs to be coordinated with a large number of text updates after the game is launched, and even helped the developers to discover a lot of the original language. sick. . .
Many people think that as official Chinese becomes more and more popular, there is less and less space left for folk sinicization groups.
But they don’t think so.
In his opinion, the quality of the folk sinicization group is often unstable. The folk sinicization group can produce high-quality products. If the translator encounters the fields and games he is proficient in, he can complete a very high level of sinicization, but the translator’s own mobility It is extremely difficult to serve a fixed organization for a long time, resulting in large fluctuations in the quality of different groups or the same group in different periods.
For example, Haitian Studio, which made the Chinese version of “Cyberpunk 2077” (Dianyu Rebel 2077), as a professional independent studio, they also completed 100,000 dubbing sentences with high quality and quantity. Such workload and cost are also unbearable for many folk sinicization groups.
W Jun believes that the poor localization quality of genuine era games is related to the fact that the entire industry does not pay attention to translation work.
For manufacturers, as long as the game is fun enough, even if the translation quality is nondescript, is this game not a problem to sell?
In the final analysis, if you want to translate a book or a game well, you need to have a deep understanding of politics, culture, economy, history, and even what the author thinks, thinks and feels. A classic translation can even be called The second author on this work.
But for manufacturers, compared to development and original painting, localization is often a relatively marginal job, which also leads to the ability and knowledge that an excellent translator needs to have, which is far behind the remuneration he gets.