I want them too! :P

Don't forget about me! ;) If there's no chance of the English version ever coming out, I'd obviously rather buy the German one and play it with English subtitles applied.

I knew it was too good to be true. Here is a sample of a translation that I got:
Sadly, this is machine translation at its "best" :(

Unfortunately JoWood is still undergoing Insolvency (Bankrupt) proceedings. It's sad they got their hands on this instead of a different Publisher...

And oh man, if that is the translation... that is just terrible. :(

You can forget Jowood, it's finished. I do not see any light for them. I have already ordered the german version, because I am tired of waiting. We do have old and new subtitles in english both very good, which will do the job perfectly!

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.

There will be no more talk of making or distributing English translations for this game. It sucks that the game may not get released in English, but unless it's sanctioned by JoWood, we need to respect their legal rights. Sorry, but that's the way it is.

Any further discussion on this particular topic will be deleted and/or the thread closed.

Ok, I respect that, so I will not be posting about translation of this game anymore.
(however, if JoWood if bankrupt, I doubt it will send lawyers here ;) ).
Anyone who has German version can translate the game privately for his own purposes and not distribute it - I assume translating for your own purposes is not illegal, otherwise watching a foreign movie with foreign subs would be illegal, because you would be translating the subs in your head :P

JoWood has filed for insolvency, but the company still exists, and its properties may still have some value.

But sure, whatever people do privately for personal use is a whole different matter. I'm just slamming down on any further nudge-wink hints of "private" offers to share existing translations.

I wasn't picking on you personally, by the way, Simplex. You were just unfortunate enough to have posted right before me. ;)

I wish you were right, but I think a lawyer specialized in intellectual property law would have to make an assessment.

From my perspective I can say that there was a huge Polish site which published fanmade unofficial Polish translations of foreign TV series and movies. They were sued by a Polish movie distributor but in court they were found not guilty.

If unofficial translations are illegal, then I guess that all those sites with movie and tv subtitles like www.subscene.com, www.addic7ed.com are illegal too. First time I'm hearing about it ;)

Simplex your talking about movie but in this case:
 

"
Re: BouT englische Texte

Excuse me - somehow I took it for granted that you'd speak german given that you've translated all ingame texts of a _german_ game. Now that I learn that you don't I'm even more curious about how you managed to create the english version of all the texts & dialog! :O

I'm one of the programmers involved in creating the game so I know that all the data is easily available in a pretty human (and machine) readable format and easy to modify but my first guess was that some work-in-progress data from the official localisation had gone into the wrong hands! I just thought I'd drop you some lines to let you know that you really impressed me there... Curious to see what my collegues have to say about it when I'm back from vacation. It's great to see how much effort and enthusiasm fans put into creating walkthroughs, reviews, posters or even english subtitles. :o)

So thanks for that nice surprise and rest assured - an official translation is coming! I'm really impatient too but on the other side I'm glad they (as the developer we have only provided the tools but are not involved in the localization) don't rush it. Part of what made Bout a success in germany is the quality of the dialog, the humor and the great voice acting... there's so much to mess up when not localizing it properly.^^

Cheers,
Thomas
"

It was on 2009 and since then i didnt hear from them about any legal translation or privecy or anythingl ike that.

Maybe im wrong here but specific in this game i dont see any translation problem with the law. " It's great to see how much effort and enthusiasm fans put into creating walkthroughs, reviews, posters or even english subtitles"

Maybe in movie its something else. Maybe the publisher of this game Jwood thinking something else. But its on youtube since 2009 and more then 3000 ppl viewed it and downloaded the subtitles. Im sure if it wasnt legal or something they were asking me or youtube to remove it.

But again maybe im wrong.

I think you may be right. If JoWood had any substantial copyright claim, they would ask youtube to remove the video. Which they did not.

Bout, perhaps you could contact with that developer Thomas who wrote to you and ask him about "proper" subtitles?

Simplex ill try:
 

Ill try to contact him and ask him about it.
Maybe they have it im sure they are and maybe somehow we can even buy it from them i mean the official subtitles maybe a group of ppl and buy it.

Or maybe they will give it for free if the game wont get release anymore.


Ill ask him.

Great, thanks. Let us know if you learn anything.

Apparently I was stuttering earlier, so this thread is now done.

We were previously asked by the game's original publisher to remove all links to an illegal translation once already, and we're not going through it again just because some people think they're entitled.