Simplified Chinese Localizaion Problems

[lysinelai]

I have thought about where to put this feedback but since there is no localization feedback category or anything like it, I think it might just belong to "General". 

I am a Chinese player on the Simplified Chinese client. With the Fortuna Update I had a great time and enjoyed myself a lot in the Vallis. However, I have some concerns regarding to the Simplified Chinese Localization. Especially in this update, we noticed that a lot of localization have a kind of unpolished feel in it. To clarify, this doesn't stop for us from understanding the game, but there are some minor mistakes and traces of google translate, which give a strange felling when reading those sentences. In addition, some of the translation is just plain transliteration and drops any meaning behind the word, which is one of the different approaches Simplified and Traditional Chinese translations take in general, while Simplified Chinese translations more often try to find a meaning behind a seemingly meaningless word (which is a lot of the case in Warframe) and express them through words, Traditional Chinese users tend to be more tolerate to simple sound translation. This has become a topic and gained some attention in the Simplified Chinses players. To understand what happened, I have talked to a translation volunteer (I am an admin of the Simplified Chinese Warframe wiki and know him personally) and discovered that Traditional Chinese Customer service staff who had been supervising the Chinese translation in general has been insisting that Simplified and Traditional Chinese should be as close as possible and has been overwriting translations from the Simplified Chinese translation volunteers.Looking at the results, some of the overwritten translates are somewhat unpolished, some go against Simplified Chinese reading habits and some are outright mistakes. Some Traditional Chinese words even "slipped" into Simplified Chinese client, for example Lovetap in Simplified Chinese client reads "爱擊" while the same word should be "爱击". A good example would be the translation of the Orb Vallis itself, Traditional Chinese translation is simple sound translation "Aobu Valley" while the Simplified Chinese translation means "Orb Weaver (namely the mech spiders) Valley". However Traditional Chinese staff said he "wasn't sure the Orb in Orb Vallis is the Mech Spiders" and denied the Simplified Translation and unified as "Aobu Valley" across Simplified and Traditional Chinese. After Simplified Chinese volunteer consulted DE localization staff who confirmed "Orb" is the mech spiders, the Traditional Chinese staff replied "It is already being implemented, no use changing that" and refused to change.
This is doing harm to the Simplified Chinese translations as many translations are forced to be the same as Traditional Chinese ones. However due to different reading and writing habits between the two userbases, it is causing Simplified Chinese user to have a slightly inferior experience compared to past updates.

Another problem about localization is that sometimes the localization teams are reluctant to change things that are already implemented. However, due to the fact that the translation volunteer doesn't have access to the future contents, they are forced to take less risks on translation. Sometimes mistakes do occur, but the translation team appear to be reluctant to change already implemented content and often refuse to change things unless it was terribly wrong. This makes the localization seems pretty dull at some times compared to English orginal version which is more lively and vivid.

I have written a lot but I hope I had expressed myself clearly. But this problem has become more common especially since the Fortuna update. Though I'm no professional translator I am working on a huge translation project that is the warframe wiki, so I know something about Chinese Translation of Warframe, and I am very concerned about what Simplified Chinese translation is like right now. The difference between Simplified and Traditional Chinese, like the different variants of English, is far more then just some simple color-colour thing, a lot of words, phrases, speaking habits are vastly different from the other, for example, meter is called "metric foot" in Traditional Chinese while it is "meter" in Simplified Chinese, and when you want to make the two translations as close as possible, a lot of problems can occur. The Simplified Chinese translation team should be given some more freedom, because they know better than those who don't use it. It shouldn't be restricted and tied to the Traditional Chinese translations, or it's will lose the point of having 2 language versions.

Considering the lack of Chinese forums and the language barrier, contact between the Chinese player base directly between the dev team has been more difficult, but this problem is not just my problem, it is affecting the game experience of mainly the Simplified Chinese users and should be addressed. Thank you very much for reading all this.

[QuaereVerum]

yea and there're still mistakes in the text about kitguns and other new things.  I don't think the translators did it well this time.

[SiegeModuleII]

I've been discussing this issue with this lysinelai and a volunteer on a Chinese forum(namely TieBa) these days.

The overall impression about Fortuna update, for me, is excellent. Having good Simplified Chinese translation is a bonus. I've already finished the mission Vox Solaris so pardon me for not able to provide many concrete examples, be it positive or negative. 

The first funny thing is that (Temporary),in Chinese (暂), in new weapons. I have no idea whose idea it is, but having brackets telling everyone "this is not done yet" is certainly not a good idea. I' m ok with you guys changing the names and translations of weapons, mods and even warframes, but having such a label is like serving half-boiled food to us who looks for 'hard-boiled' dishes. Very weird.

And the mixture of traditional and simplified Chinese. Yes, I could understand them. No, I found them irritating. In China, particularly in mainland, traditional Chinese is not a working language, although many people could make sense of them, they need to do a little translation of their own, from TC to SC. It may seem good enough for people in Hongkong or Taiwan, but let's face it, they have their TC version, and we are in SC region. A combination of these two languages would inevitably cause confusion, if not repulsion, in games. Dialogues are not technical terms that could be solved with termbases and structural texts, they are an important part of the game and its story, as in this game, part of the art. Sad to see it is not taken seriously.

Not to mention the wrongly written characters. It's like eating an apple happily and then find half a worm in your mouth and the other half in the remains of the apple, you get me?

Unlike them I am not part of the translation volunteers nor the wiki admins, just a MTI student interested in this game. You guys have been doing a good job for the past several years. And I don't know what is wrong this time. Maybe you're just busy with all the debug stuff or are adopting a different view towards simplified Chinese translation, but I just want you to understand that this time --this new localization work-- did not work out as it should be. The quality is not satisfying, as I see it, from the perspective of both a player in Simplified Chinese region  and a student of E-C translation.

Hope everything goes on well with you guys and hope to see a better translation next time.

 

Edited 13th Nov 2018: Good to see that the (暂), i.e.(Temporary) gone. Keep up the good work.

Edited November 13, 2018 by SiegeModuleII
(Temp) is gone.

[HK3049]

Agree. I am a Chinese now studying abroad. The language custom between Chinese(simple) and Chinese(traditional) is a lot different.

This time, the translation is not as satisfying as it was. I  noticed that a secondary weapon called Hystrix in English was translated into Chinese(simple) with the exact meaning it has---a kind of animal. However, in Chinese, it has a word meaning pig. I mean, in the Chinese language, the meaning or word ''pig'' is usually considered as abusing during a conversation, unless you are talking about the animal as the word suggests. If we are going to name something, the word or meaning ''pig'' is never the choice. 

That's only a few for examples. We have distinguished Chinese simple and traditional. So let each team do their work to provide perfect localization experience. We would rather read English than have something that isn't matched with our language custom. TRANSLATION IS IMPORTANT FOR CHINESE PLAYERS, PLEASE DON'T IGNORE THIS.

 

Edited November 13, 2018 by HK3049

[HK3049]

Another thing I want to mention is that there aren't much reply or support because the majority of Chinese players are not that good at English or having problems accessing the forum. So,  who posted this topic can be considered as a representative.

[PurpleDawn]

There are many differences between Chinese Simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese.Usually there are two Chinese translations of English movie names, one is traditional Chinese and the other is simplified Chinese.

This is because the translation of traditional Chinese is very strange in simplified Chinese.

Edited November 11, 2018 by PurpleDawn

[BANSHEE_PRIME]

agree

[lysinelai]

UPDATE: I started a poll on Google and asked Simplified Chinese players to express their feelings about the localization of this time and after 1 day, a total of 53 players responded. Considering that Google is entirely blocked in Mainland China, this number is not small, and all responses came from players with valid in-game ID.

Here are the results:

Players also noted there are many translations that go against Simplified Chinses reading habits and are causing an uncomfortable experience while playing.

Having a good translation is a bonus to players that live in regions that do not speak English as their mother language, and a good translation is a luxury, we don't take it for granted and we are grateful to whoever was doing a splendid job of presenting Warframe in a way that we can all comprehend and enjoy. But this time things are different. We could have got a better translation and we all knew that, but due to various reasons the results are not as good as it should be. We hope that in this way this problem can be addressed and give Simplified Chinese players a better experience.

Please. We need your help.