Quote:
Originally Posted by Jaesun
Unfortunately JoWood is still undergoing Insolvency (Bankrupt) proceedings. It's sad they got their hands on this instead of a different Publisher...
... ich glaube, er verliert langs
And oh man, if that is the translation... that is just terrible.  |
This is straight from Yahoo babelfish, I just checked.
Original German sentence: "er ist nicht mehr der Jüngste. Und auch wenn er es nie zugeben würdeam seine Trinkfestigkeit."
Babelfish/The translation I got in the PM: "It... it is not any more the youngest one. And even if it would never admit it... I believes, it loses slowly its drinking firmness."
This translation is completely worthless. Even I know that "er ist" means "HE is", not "it is". Also look at "I believes" - WTF is that? "Drinking firmness" - hello? No one proofread the text after machine translation, looks like.
The second translation I have is even worse, it is the same babelfsh, but many words are not translated at all - I think this happend because some german diacritic characters were lost during copy-paste and babelfish could not recognize them, and ignored them. For that fact, this translation is even more worthless than the previous one, take a look:
" He... he is not any more J à ¼ngste. And also if he it never admit w à ¼rde... I believe, he slowly loses his drinking firmness."
Two words were ommited "Jüngste" and "würde": - as you can see the umlaut character "ü" is garbled, so babelfish ignored it.
Just for kicks I run this sentence through Google Translate and to my surprise it was much much better. I don't know if it was "faithful" translation, but at least it was something that resembled normal English, see for yourself:
"He is not the youngest. And even though he would never admit it ... I think he is losing his drinking ability"
Nice, huh? Especially compared to that unintelligible garbage from Babelfish.
If there is anyone here who knows German, perhaps that person could comment on the quality of Google Translate output. For example I see the word "slow" in the German text ("langsam") which is not in the Google text.
I suppose that someone who knows at least basics of German and has a loooooot of time and patience could feed the German lines into Google translate and then back to xml files.
Or perhaps there is a way to "mass translate" text using Google translate - for example uploading the xml files to a server and then using "translate webpage feature".
That's a real stretch, but perhaps we could organize a group of people that would be interested in seeing English translation of the game and donate money to a person that would be willing to do the translation (no idea if it would be legal, though).
One thing is positive - from what I see, there are absolutely no technical hurdles to translation. There are XML files (which are not even packed, not to mention encrypted) which contain all the texts, along with very useful context information - like which character is speaking and to whom he is speaking, e.g.: "<asset id="spokentexts__seq_atomarer_erstschlag_st_1" direction="zackig" speakerref="characters_gnom" status="Vorschlag">"
So if anyone ever decides to make a translation, it should be a breeze from the technical standpoint.
EDIT: Sorry if I was being too harsh on this machine translation, but I really had my hopes up and thought that maybe it will at least be understandable. But from what I saw, it is just a straight Babelfish machine translation without further human improvement. Someone who put all these texts through babelfish surely did a lot of work and this is appreciated, but I'd rather learn german myself than read this translation
EDIT2: and here is why a machine will never be able to translate it right. One word from the example is "Trinkfestigkeit" these are two words joined together. "Trink" usualy means "drink" and "festigkeit" means....
20 different things.
But if you are a human then you can google and find this:
http://www.proz.com/kudoz/german_to_...estigkeit.html
Then you would know that it is not "drinking firmness" but "ability to hold your liquor" so the Google translation is actually not bad.
