Quote:
Originally Posted by Fien
A good translator specialized in for instance subtitles (and of course a native English speaker) should be able to do all that, that's their job.
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Yes, that's what you'd expect, but it's clearly not the case or there wouldn't be so many script editing/polishing jobs of this nature. I don't want to undermine the great work that so many translators do, but you have to think about the time involved with the work. The original language dialogue may have taken months to write and a translator will be lucky if they get weeks to do the translation. Often they are working "blind" without seeing the lines in the context of the game because the game is probably not at a finished state when the translation is being worked upon. Then you have the weirdness of in-game text and dialogue and how it's presented to the translator. Sometimes it can be very easy to lose track of the order of lines when multiple answers are available or context-related sub-scenes are interjected. Someone translating subtitles for a film will have a much easier time of it, probably get more time to work on it and will likely have the finished film to work with.
