Dear lord, the English...

Discussion in 'Metro 2033 Forums' started by SpartanKobe, Nov 14, 2015.

  1. SpartanKobe

    SpartanKobe Member
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    Did anyone here notice the awful English in the diary pages and when some of the characters speak?
    IDK why it just really distracts me lol
     
  2. Commissar_Jimbo

    Commissar_Jimbo Well-Known Member

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    There extracts from the actually book which was translated from Russian- which is a hard language to translate into English.
     
  3. The english version is not very well made to begin with. This is the unfortunate reality of adaptations, it's always the case with English to Russian (And vice versa, although this is rarer) localisations in games, books and movies. Ideally you need to play the original (Russian) version, but not everyone knows the language.
     
  4. Bamul

    Bamul S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
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    I find that that translating from a Slavic language to English is easier than vice versa because you are essentially simplifying the message (from a grammatical point of view at least), but of course the essence of the text suffers. Whereas translating from English to Slavic languages has always been more difficult for me, since you have to interpret a lot for yourself with all the extra inflection, grammatical gender, and all that stuff - adding meaning that is potentially divergent from what the original creator had in mind. In any case, whichever direction and language you are translating to and from, sadly there is always something lost in between, not to mention all the context that someone from a particular country has whilst others do not.

    What pissed me off the most when I was playing the Metro games in Russian with Polish subtitles is that it seemed to me as though they translated it to Polish from the English version. They probably did this for all other language versions too since English is a fairly international language nowadays and it's much easier/cheaper to get translators for it in many countries, but with Polish it's really counter-intuitive because the language is similar enough to Russian to get a translation that is much closer to the original. If I remember correctly, either at the end of Kuznetskiy Most or at the beginning of the "Frontline" level in Metro 2033, one of the Red soldiers says something like: "марш, марш на фарш". This is a perfect example of a sentence that could remain pretty much identical in Polish as: "marsz, marsz na farsz" with identical pronunciation and meaning. But nooo, instead in the Polish subtitles they put something completely different - something from the English version. It's stupid and nonsensical.

    Rant over. :p
     
  5. That's what happened. English version is the base for all other translations.
     
  6. Skaara Dreadlocks

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    I think we "Vikings" fall short in terms of language - English is an extremely rich language compared to Norwegian. So when I write, type, read, speak or listen to/in anything that is English, everything gets so much better explained and makes so much more sense and really goes deep down into my understanding compared to when it's in Norwegian. It's such a poor language, and I guess that is because it's such a young language. True, it does descend from old Nordic language or whatever, but it's a very simplified version with different words mumbo-jumboed together from here and there. Whenever I watch a movie, I always have english subtitles, never Norwegian. If Metro2033/LL had Norwegian subtitles, I wouldn't use them, because English is so much better :lol:

    I always knew that russian and polish, amongst many other languages, are much more rich in terms of expressions, but I never really give it that much thought until now. Now I really wanna learn russian and polish :sad:

    But more back to the subject: Yes, I have noticed that there are some weird sentences in the game :rolleyes:
     
  7. DaDeadlyCheese

    DaDeadlyCheese Well-Known Member

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    it's all about those english subtitles and the russian voice acting
     
  8. Skaara Dreadlocks

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    I didn't try the russian vocie acting much, but the short moment I did, it felt like everyone had that stereotypical bad-guy-russian-voice. I don't know if it's just me, but as far as I remember the english voice acting had some more exaggeration and variation compared with the russian one. Either way, the russian voice acting seems so alien to me since I can't understand a word of it (except spasiba, blyat, souka, chyort etc (-probably typed those wrong)) :D