Why the Hell Sam & Max is not translated to other languages????
BasqueUngryUser
Banned
Im sorry ubout mi level of english, i'll try to do the beter that i can.
Im a basque person, at the north of Spain, here and in most of the world the english is not normalized, so I (for example) cant play to Bone and Sam & Max and understand it at the same time, so i will not never buy your game.
The extrange thing is that the adventure games lovers is one of the people that buy games and not copy them, but in this case this not happen, because WE WILL NOT USE 10€ TO BUY AN ADVENTURE THAT I DONT UNDERSTAND.
The other strange thing is that, in spain are a lot of people that dont worry to translate them the games, with too good quality, and for free. But YOU are too IDIOT to understand it and you encriptized your games (o como se diga).
If you (telltale people) wish be a little intelligent, you have to do a tool to translate the game. :mad: :mad: :mad:
Here are an examples that the spanish people can do to amateursly transletes games like professional work: http://www.clandlan.net/
Im too sad because Sam & Max is an adventure that i have been waiting sind i was i child and i had played the first game, from LucasArts.
What is the reason of all of this? you are only a bussiness people and you dont have respect about your public and about the art that can be the video games? I hope that not, but i think that yes.
Of course all of that i have written here is appllicable to Bone games.
Im a basque person, at the north of Spain, here and in most of the world the english is not normalized, so I (for example) cant play to Bone and Sam & Max and understand it at the same time, so i will not never buy your game.
The extrange thing is that the adventure games lovers is one of the people that buy games and not copy them, but in this case this not happen, because WE WILL NOT USE 10€ TO BUY AN ADVENTURE THAT I DONT UNDERSTAND.
The other strange thing is that, in spain are a lot of people that dont worry to translate them the games, with too good quality, and for free. But YOU are too IDIOT to understand it and you encriptized your games (o como se diga).
If you (telltale people) wish be a little intelligent, you have to do a tool to translate the game. :mad: :mad: :mad:
Here are an examples that the spanish people can do to amateursly transletes games like professional work: http://www.clandlan.net/
Im too sad because Sam & Max is an adventure that i have been waiting sind i was i child and i had played the first game, from LucasArts.
What is the reason of all of this? you are only a bussiness people and you dont have respect about your public and about the art that can be the video games? I hope that not, but i think that yes.
Of course all of that i have written here is appllicable to Bone games.
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Sam & Max is not being translated right now because we're working very hard to complete the games in English. Six games in six months is a lot of work!
Once season 1 is finished, we will figure out the best way to approach localizations. We know there is a very big non-English-speaking audience for these games and we want to make sure we do it right! As I'm sure you know, humor can be very difficult to translate, so it's not like we can just run the games through Babelfish or something.
(For the record, localized versions of Bone are in the works, too!)
I am pretty sure though that you will be disappointed. I am quite certain that a Spanish translation won´t be reality, ever. But hey, you can always learn some English! Actually, computer games and video games in general were a pretty crucial thing when I was learning the basics. You know, when I was eight or nine or something. Best of all, it isn´t even forced learning, you learn alot naturally and it´s actually fun.
wooow, it IS a fast reply!!! thanks.
I hope that it is true, becuse in other case you are squandering a treasure.
To Kunkku:
Oh, yes, it's a great idea that i can learn english, but actually i dont know english it is the reality, and i'll not learn english in 2 days, not even in 2 years, and what the hell, if i learn english is to work, no to play, because it will not be never my mother- language and i'll not never understand well the street talk mode (like dude). I know that Spanish is the 2nd or 3rth language speaked in the world, it is not only spoken in spain. Anyway, if it will not be translated , they can do a translation tool, in spain are people who have a too high level of english and are too interested in translate it.
And if you are not here you can know how many people are who want to BUY Sam&Max in our language.
This might actually add more humor!
See Reference.
Like Emily said you can't just press a magic button and everything is translated into another language. I currently live in Japan and I can tell you that 80% of the time translations from Japanese to English do not go well. Sure I fall on the floor laughing at some of the stuff that is said inadvertenly but I think a company like Telltale would want to release a quality product that is translated properly into your language. This takes time and resources. I am not sure it is viable to translate Sam and Max to your market but I'm sure the good folks here at Telltale are looking into the matter.
Sigh, that almost sounded like a PR statement. Except for the fact that I may have been a tad blunt.
Many songs are translated and they are really crappy regardless of originals. When you listen to english songs, you may like to understand lyrics. But you know, translating is an adaptation. You'll never get the right jokes in an adaptation. Watch a movie like matrix, you can think that's poor philosophy, that's not the debate, but if you understand english, you'll see that the translation, even if it's only in text, doesn't reflect the real problems they told you.
Of course if you don't understand a single word, that's a bit difficult. But as you wrote this post in english, you can understand english. I'm sure I'm writting crappy but heck, people can understand me and that's enough. You don't want to open you up to the most spoken second linguage, that's too bad, I hope for you you'll never met people coming outside spain and america latina. Today, I met three customers from different countries, we communicate in english, even if it's not their first linguage neither mine.
I prefer to be stuck and just try to understand with an old Harrap's, than to have a poor google translation and not funny jokes (try to translate "they're mine, not'chos" in spanish or french (in my case) it's just impossible.
A good example of this approach is the Finnish Aku Ankka -comic magazine (local Donald Duck). There´s people who write the final text based on the rude translations they got from a translator. So, they do not only make a translation, they actually re-write the whole text. They "duckialize" the text to fit into the world of Finnish Donald Duck. They change names, add jokes, wordplays, everything. They do it so well that the "translations" are actually even more enjoyable than the originals and I basically subscribe the magazine just for the dialogue and text. Again, direct translations aren´t possible so why even try?
The best case of a bad translation was probably "agent orange", the herbicide. I bet the viewer was totally confused when he read the subtitles. The subscriber for some reason thought that agent is a secret agent like James Bond and orange is an orange, you know the fruit. So, reading about "agent orange" may have confused a couple of dudes.
I´d love to see a Finnish translation of S&M. But only if it was an extremely good translation. I am pretty sure that either me or Telltale is not interested in making half-assed localizations. Sadly, the Finnish market isn´t probably big enough, even though the majority of people in here have internet connections and the country is pretty technologized. Heck, it might even be a hit if Finns knew that there even is a game like Sam & Max. But with a population of five million I´ll surely see hell freeze before seeing a localized game (any game, except big hits like Sims or something). On the other hand, the market would be a little wider if they made a talkie version. Even the small kids could play it, meaning there would be more people to buy it (with their mommies´credit cards).
Translating is a creative act. I've been translating Psychonauts into Italian with other Schafer-enthusiasts for the last months and trust me: it's a nightmare. Many things simply loose sense or strength when translated into Italian. A lot of words and/or sentences are deeply rooted into the American culture, so it's a hard task indeed.
This doesn't mean that one should give up. It's hard, not impossible. There is an Italian version of "Sam & Max Hit The Road" and it rocks. I know some jokes have been lost, because I've also played the original version, but the result was more than decent. Pretty good, actually. The translator did her best to find an Italian banter-style for Sam & Max which respected the original one. The excellent voice actors did the rest (Plus, Italian is full of long sentences, pompous expressions and polysillabic ravings
I agree with the idea that playing games is a wonderful way to learn English, but it's not everyone's cup of tea.
Telltale is entitled to encrypt their files in order to wait for a professional work, the only thing I ask them is: when all the international versions will be out, decrypt the text files to allow fan-translations in the unlucky countries where the games won't be published.
I'm 23 old. What is the reason of this question? are you thinking "oh, poor innocent"? You have talk without Know. Of course that is not posible to translate with one button, but the spanish language and the english language have the same root, and is more easy to translate from english to spanish than from spanish to english (spanish is older and have more words and expresions) and nihongo is another world, you can't compare this two cases.
ohohoh, you know the anime Gantz? there is a subtituled version here done by amateur people. And its another one version of Advent Children. Maybe this translations are imperfect, but i prefer this than not to can see or play a game.
I cant wait this months and i'll do it, but before this thread i didnt know that the games will be translated.
I have played Bone and the demo of S&M in english, and with the resource of: print screen - alt+tab - open photoshop - ctrl+V, for read the text with time to asimilate, i have read all the text and translated them (most of the text without dictionary), and i can say that i have understand all the jokes, so its not so hard to translate the game (even expresions like "c'mon"), and i repeat, here are people with a tooo high level of english, people who have been living in EEUU or England, and who have done amateur-profesional translations of, for example, Vampire Bloodlines or Chronicles of Riddick, and they cant do a translation of Sam & Max because the code is ultra encripted.
Im agree with you, the italian people who dont know english will lost some jokes, but untill S&M is not translated to my language I WILL LOSE ALL THE GAME (and the jokes of course).
I have to say that my co-language is Basque (euskara), that is the only live-language in the world that nobody knows from where it cames and what dont have any familiar-language, so i can say that i know what is a hard translation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euskara
In the mean time, it seems like some of you here might be interested in one of my favorite books, which happens to be about the complexity and beauty of translation...
Le Ton Beau De Marot
http://www.amazon.com/Ton-Beau-Marot-Praise-Language/dp/0465086454/sr=8-11/qid=1167019849/ref=pd_bbs_11/002-7466378-1152843?ie=UTF8&s=books
I have been forced to buy games in Japanese because they will not see the light of day on North American shores and I've got to say I prefer games to be in my native language. (except for terrible dubs of course). The translations done for anime have a huge following and like you said not exactly accurate. Even with my basic knowledge of Japanese I often notice translation mistakes. If I was telltale it would come down to one thing, money. I mean the company doesn't operate as a charity and I guess they would have to look at your market to see if it is worth it.
Same with translating other languages into english. There are many words for which there is no english equivalent. So when their translated, they end up sounding silly.
And I agree with Alucard, some japanese translations have me rolling on the floor lol
www.engrish.com
OMA ( from Spain
They'd still have to pay to have them vetted. That's why professional translators are preferred here, because in a game, it's almost impossible to do liner notes to explain the joke. It takes vast knowlege of BOTH languages to translate humor
True. Especially considering all the non-standard words Sam uses.
I'm talking about also allowing "unofficial" fan-made translations that people can download for free. That could maybe help sales in countries where no localized version is planned. There are already lots of quite good fan-made translations of old games. I don't see what's wrong in letting that. I suppose the problem with releasing all the texts might be that the entire game dialogue script is copyrighted, or something like that.
Also, I agree that translating Sam's lines can be challenging, but his humour can be more or less successfully translated. The proof is the original Spanish version of "Hit The Road", which was quite good, though some jokes were too different from those in the original English version, but equally fun.
No language is more difficult to translate stuff into, unless you're comparing English to some tribal tongue on the Pacific islands or something.
And to correct BasqueUngryUser, English and Spanish do NOT have the same root. English is an Anglo-Frisian language brought to the British Isles by invaders from the west coasts of Europe. It is a Germanic language, whereas Spanish is a Romance language, developed from Vulgar Latin with influences from Arabic, Basque and Celtiberian.
If you want to be pedantic about it, they're all Indo-European languages, but that's true for German, Russian and Hindi too. I'd hardly consider that a relevant root for modern-day translations.
Also, the rest of the Western world gets so much exposure to American culture through TV, movies, games, etc. that every language in the Western world will have an equivalent meaning, or maybe just flat-out use the English words for the same concept.
"D'oh" isn't an exclusively English phrase in any way and if you translate The Simpsons into any other language, there's no reason to come up with a different word. The meaning is obvious when you watch the show.
Even the vast majority of idiomatic expressions can be translated to every language, although not literally. It's not impossible to do, it's just hard to find people who are bi-lingual enough to do it right
I can give you a great example. In England and Scandinavia there is a proverb, "One swallow does not make a summer."
The same exact meaning of this exists in French and Italian as well, but there the proverb is, "One swallow does not make a spring." (Une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps)
Because swallows migrate and arrive earlier in the southern part of Europe, obviously. So even though the translation is not literal, the concept is the same.
Letting the community do subtitling and localization sounds like a great idea. It's worked with countless projects before because when you have a wide enough audience, there's always someone willing to do the translations. And the easier and more accessible you make the tools for doing it, the more people you'll have participating.
First of all, if somebody finds misstakes, i come from germany.
I bought the complete season of sam & max, but after one hour of playing the first episode, i gave it up - the slang-expressions and the fast speaking of sam and max are making it very difficult to understand the real humour of that game.
So, if you (telltale) eventually decide to translate the games in other languages: please make sure, that this translated versions can be downloaded from your site - and, as in my case, if somebody has bought the games allready in english, with no additive costs.
However, I love this game and the little part that I had allready understand in the first and only hour of playing is great! I'm very greedy to play and enjoy the season in german.
Hmm, I think, I will send this message directly to the telltale-team as well.
I am quite sure that you will not come.:D
What is the correct form? I am from germany?
Im agree with OMA. I dont know the data, but i know that some games after have non-oficial translates, have been sold in a greatest number. If Telltale will translate the games, hey, hip hip hurra. But if someday they decide that it is not aceptable for theyr bank-count, the minimum thing that they can do is to bring us a translation tool. I prefer bad translated jokes than english jokes. The people who dont think like me have the original version.
I repeat, Vampire Bloodlines is translated, and it have much more phrases than S&M.
I am sure that everyone understood it anyway. Hehe.
"I am from Germany" is ok.
There's a big difference between that particular game and any other games, however. Vampire Bloodlines was so amazingly buggy and farked up that the fans actually had to finish the game themselves.
Troika who released it made it look like an internal revision rather than a finished product. You wouldn't believe it actually runs on Valve's HL2 Source Engine, because the graphics are very choppy and soooo slow. There was hardly any graphics optimizations done at all, it was just rushed out to the market.
I mean, even the dialog and menus were misspelled and sometimes had ; or other weird symbols in them. No one had proofread the text in the game.
Bloodlines was just plain unfinished, and since Troika weren't willing to fix it, the community had to.
What happened was that in the process of fixing the dialog lines, the tools were created that made it easy to change the dialog. Incidentally, this also made it easy to create localized versions, because now all you had to do was translate each line separately and anyone could do that, not just the geeks who hacked the textfiles.
So even people who knew nothing about the Source engine or the way that the text lines were stored, could help translate the large amounts of phrases and dialog. It was easy to do.
Again, for telltale sanctioned, and if they provided the means to do so that's sanctioning, they're not going to do it without the ability to vette them, which they'd have to pay for.
It's the same reason why no one has sanctioned DVDSubber for movies with no localized verions
ps
its not like i actually ever sat down and took lessons beyond the minimum level, i would just recommend reading a book and looking up all damn words. hard way to start but not as boring.
I'm really happy to hear that you plan localizations after finishing the first episode. I'm from Germany and next month the German version of Bone will be published - of course i gonna buy it.
But my most awaited game still is S&M. But I will wait until a German version is finish but then definetly buy it. BHV is a very good partner to localize the game. They are known for very professionla voice actors.
So, why not using an existing partnership for localizing S&M?
Very nice would be the voice actors from the first S&M-game, with the voice of Bart Simpson for Max.
So, looking forward to the German version of S&M and sending thx and greeting to the Telltale-Team.
A big fan.
Btw, download Ankh from the telltale-page. This game ist great!!