Penumbra Overture - other Languages

[tacc]

also I hate google-translating posts, please avoid doing that.. :/

You said yourself "Games are best in their original language.". And my post are best in their original language too.

You didin't seem to care that some people don't speak perfect english.

[NeatNit]

ok, let me try to rephrase that

Games are best in English

better!


lol

ok really though. I may be contradicting my previous posts a bit, so ignore that, k?
It all depends on the quality of the translation. If there wasn't even the slightest attempt to translate idioms to similar ones in the other language, then the translation is going to get you really out of the mood and atmosphere. Which, as we all know, is just about the worst possible thing to do to a horror game.
It also matters, for a fully-voiced game, that the dubing is of good quality. They usually make it too loud, use bad microphones, don't emphasize it right etc. from my experience (usually more voice-acting problems than technical problems). Which is what brought me to the conclusion that the original voice is always going to be the best. Because when it was recorded, they cared.

Honestly I can't know how it is in different languages, so I might be wrong here and there might actually be people who care more when translating to german. I don't know.


As for your post - do you first write your posts in your mother tounge and then translate them to English? I know I don't!

[Skaruts]

One thing I noticed about having plenty of contact with english language is that ppl will tend to learn it better and it may be useful for them in the future.
I live in Portugal and almost everything here is subtitled, so the english or french or german is kept there and we will always hear how it sounds and will always learn a bit here and there. I have many friends who don't know english, but they still have some basic understanding that they have grasped from music or films because of this.

However, if your talk english, or basically any other language, to a spanish person, there's a great chance he will will say "perdoname... no english". This happens because spanish ppl, just like some other countries (brasil too I think) have everything in their own language, no subtitles, they actually change the voices to be spoken as they understand them. If you happen to find a person who knows english you may notice his accent is very poor, because of the little contact he has with that language. Often happens when I hear Brasilian ppl speaking english I notice this, they speak english as if they were speaking portuguese, thus making it sound a bit absurd at times.

I think it's a good thing to get used to either subtitles, or to learn other languages and practice them. And I also think that things usually sound better in the original language to begin with...

Idioms, or common expressions, are another story. They can only be translated by who has good training of a certain language. By training I mean a lot of contact with foreign ppl that may have provided the translator with some knowledge of common expressions, and the translator can identify them with the equivalents for his language. And still, American expressions may differ from British expressions, this is why I think having contact with them is most valuable for that. I happen to have had the luck of working in a hotel and spoken english so much with ppl from so many diferent countries, I think I learned a lot more and it was fun in that way.

Often I see translations not very coherent about this... Only on TV, because there it's really professionals doing it.

[Caterpillar]

Well you see, in all languages there are things called idioms. They are phrases that cannot be translated into other languages for fear of making absolutely no sense. For instance, Clarence uses these a lot (Daddy popped his clogs, etc etc). Even someone who knows a lot of English may not understand games, movies, or literature with a bunch of idioms.

Also, if every game was in its native language, people who don't know German would be missing out on Far Cry. People who don't know Russian/Ukrainian would be missing out on STALKER, Metro, and Cryostasis. I doubt someone like Grodz Andrey, who uses a translator (I think), would be able to understand Amnesia or Penumbra without a Russian localization.

Also, Italian is the super-language. Everything is so musical in it.

Not everything
I bought the collection with the 5$ discount, is it possible to find the italian subtitles file?

[spukrian]

I have seen more than one german person posting on a forum about the german translation, when he can clearly understand English well enough.

The reason that Germans do this is because.. well, Germans are reasonably competent in English. Lets take French people, just as an example, they might not be good enough in English and thus cannot ask about a French translation in an English speaking forum.

Also Skaruts hit the nail on the head. <- That´s an idiom.

[Felix Atagong]

I buyed the game from the Humble Indie Pack, but i cant find other languages, only english. Where can i get the other languages for this game?

Being the bloke who made, years ago, the Dutch version of Penumbra 2006 Tech Demo, I recall that it is enough to open the English.lang file with any text editor and to translate every single sentence into the language of your choice.

Example:
The line that says:
<Entry Name="DescFuseArea">These look like industrial fuses.</Entry>
should become, in Dutch:
<Entry Name="DescFuseArea">Dit zijn industriêle zekeringen.</Entry>

Do this for the 1130 lines of text in the game.
Save the result as as Dutch.lang in the config folder.

Although I didn't try it you have to change the language parameter in the default.cfg file as well.

Of course the spoken words will still be in English, but this can be altered as well. Just listen and note down every ogg file (with Audacity for instance) and record Red's voice in your own language. Save the results as ogg files and use (evidently) the same naming conventions.

It's a lot easier than getting past the zombie dogs!