The Witcher - EE Review @ 1UP

magerette

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1UP contributes their take on the recently released Enhanced Edition of The Witcher in this extremely short review, giving it a "B" and seeming mainly taken with the language fixes:
...we must offer many blessings upon CD Projekt for the tweaks they've made to the Enhanced Edition of their debut role-playing game, The Witcher -- the best of which is the ability to mix and match voice and subtitle languages. I went with the original Polish voices with English subs, but you can choose French with Spanish, Czech with Czech, or whatever strikes your bilingual fancy. This little tweak alone does wonders to ameliorate (or at least mask) the bad acting and writing in the original version, and it represents a stroke of simple genius that all overseas game companies should consider...

More information.
 
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Only the overseas game companies?

It seems to me that it should be something that *every* game companies should consider.

A bad translation from english to another langage hurted the sales of more than a game in the past.
 
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quote:
A bad translation from english to another langage hurted the sales of more than a game in the past.
:end quote.

well its not really about translation.
because translation is inevitable - you have to translate either voice either text for subtitles.
however - an option to choose a language for a voice over in combination with subtitles in your mother tongue allows to avoid bad voice acting.
if you choose a voice over in a language which you don't understand, then it greatly reduces chances that you will get annoyed at bad voice acting.


I, for example, do know two of the available languages fluently - Russian and English (both foreign languages to me).
and I tried the game with voice overs in both of the languages.
I really don't understand what are English language speakers complaining about - voice overs in Russian are just much worse.
or to put it in another way - I cant detect any problems with English language voice overs, and i was greatly disappointed with Russian voice overs (because I would have preferred Russian for this particular game/setting).

p.s. of course i realise that my mastery of these two languages is not perfect and what may seem good to me, wouldn't necessarily satisfy a native speaker.
 
Yes, I agree it's not really about the translation, it's about having the different translations easily available.

I wish I could more frequently have both the english and the french version of a game. Or, as you said, have the subtitle in french while listening at the voice in english or vice versa. Presently, for most game we have to decide at purchase time which one we would like.

Especially now, with the DVDs and high speed internet connection widely available, it's not as much a problem as it was back then to offer language packs.
 
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