I am trying my best not to sound like a whiner.
I am a veteran gamer. I have been enjoying video games in my own way since the noughties. I have also spent an uncomfortable amount of money on games and early-stage NFTs (I mean CS: GO skins).
I am Chinese so it would be a huge delight to see quality Chinese games, even more so when those games were enjoyed by people all over the world.
Then I discovered that some, or most of the Chinese games are so poorly translated that some of the sentences do not even make any sense. Please refer to this clip by NeverKnowsBest: 一个英国人眼中的中国游戏出海翻译水平
It pains me to see this and I can't help but wonder, why?
It took me some time doing some research and another few years doing localization for video / mobile games to finally come up with something close to an answer. And it's three-fold:
One. English is an entirely different language from Chinese.#
For one, English would emphasize nouns while Chinese emphasizes verbs. Take these sentences for example:
| English | Literal / Sequential Translation | Proper Translation | Back Translation |
|---|---|---|---|
| I’m a vegan. | 我是素食主义者。 | 我吃素。 | I eat vegan food. |
| You are an incredible dancer. | 你是个很棒的舞者。 | 你舞跳得很好。 | You dance incredibly. |
| He takes great photographs. | 他能照出来很棒的照片。 | 他拍的照片很棒。 | The photographs he takes are great. |
Hope this will give you a clue as to how English is different from Chinese: we construct sentences differently. Fundamentally speaking, we think differently. When it comes to complex sentences and clauses, this difference might prove catastrophic, leading to ambiguity or even misunderstanding. This is also one of the main reasons, at least to my understanding, why AI still can not handle English-to-Chinese translation tasks very well. Their translation is understandable, just not native or fluent enough.
Bear in mind, this is just one of many differences between English and Chinese. So for Chinese people, learning English would mean adopting a significantly different mindset. I believe the same goes for English (even Indo-European language) speaking people learning Chinese. They would find Chinese difficult as we would English.
This inherent gap between the English and Chinese languages sets a much higher bar for their translators. It's difficult to produce quality translations when you have to switch your mindset every 2 minutes.
Two. The nickel-counting and the insensitivity to quality.#
You may wonder now, however colossal the difference between English and Chinese may be, native English speakers hardly translate any sentence into nonsense. Therein lies the rub: Chinese video game producers / publishers seldom hire native English speakers because Chinese translators are a much cheaper alternative, albeit most of the time, less effective.
It's a phenomenon rarely seen in other parts of the world. Most clients would require that the translator / localization specialist be a native speaker of the target language. But in China, I've seen so many clients hiring Chinese translators for English to Korean translation. Yeah.
I used to find this baffling until I spent a significant amount of time talking and an even more significant amount of time haggling with clients that I finally realized: they just want it cheap and they don't care / can't tell if you just handed them several spreadsheets of nonsense.
This hurts people who love translation or games. This puts a dent, if not a crater, in Chinese games. It may take some time to educate every decision-maker in the industry in China that quality translation is hard to come by, deserves a hefty price tag, and most of the time, will repay you a hundredfold.
Three. And I can't believe I'm saying this, many Chinese game writers do not make sense themselves.#
I have worked with several mobile game producers as an English copywriter / reviewer and I have spent a troubling amount of time on, wait for it, reviewing Chinese texts.
I still can not wrap my head around why so many native Chinese writers could write something that doesn't read well or doesn't make much sense, or worse, contradicts their last paragraph. Here are several examples (removed of all sensitive or identifiable information):
- The protagonist was hiding in a corridor when the King entered the library, a small room with only one entrance. In the next line, the protagonist was watching the King behind bookshelves.
- 'They destroyed the beehives, where the honey was stored.'
- An upstart has a bow made of solid gold.
- Stepping into the cave, they saw an elevated stage. There were three items on the stage, one of them was a slaughterhouse.
- A highly intelligent detective found an intact footprint on the floor of the Grand Central.
I used to treat these with anger, then sarcasm, then indifference. Now I'm writing on a weekly basis to raise awareness of this matter.
I may still sound like a whiner but hey, you've made it to the end. At least that amounts to something. I guess I'll see you in the next post, which, much to your surprise, will be the fourth chapter of my 'Boardwalk Empire' fanfiction!
P.S. I just noticed I haven't written anything blockchain / Web3 on this on-chain blog, but all in good time.