This forum is very international, so I might as well ask since it's on my mind. Would also be an interesting discussion. In English, I often hear of poor localizations and occasionally I do come across weird language that's technically accurate, but not in a natural way speakers would use. Other times, I hear that the Latin American dub is superior. Then there are outright bizarre localization choices that completely change the tone of the game for censorship reasons, like German versions of games where everyone is a cyborg.

So I pose this question: For those who have played a game in multiple languages you understand, how often do you find the localizations to either be generally good with no quirks, the localizations taking some liberties but still making sense, translations that are straight but still understandable, and outright garbage you might as well be playing in the native language? I, of course, ask this question from an Anglocentric point of view, but it doesn't mean it's limited to games released in English, it could be French or Japanese games in Spanish or German, etc.

I'll also ask for any discussion tangentially related to this topic.

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/is_the_soontoberemade_witcher_still_worth_playing/post33

Something to get you started.
Technically you should start with idbeholdME's first post, but this was the best regarding topic.

I usually don't play games in multiple languages, but one example that comes to my mind immediately is "Wasteland 2".
I was one of the backers for that game on Kickstarter, and while I was not involved in the localisation (they asked for people from the community to help translate and I applied and even got accepted, but didn't find the time to
participate), I expected the localisation to be good, I mean - they asked native speakers, so how could it not be first rate, right?
So I started the game and chose German as the language in which I wanted to play the game.

Well, I think I made it five minutes into the game, before I switched to English (and I consider myself lucky that I'm able to do that. I pity everyone who has to stick to the abysmal German translation).

In general I have to say, whether a localisation is good or bad, depends a lot on who does the translation, and how well that person knows both languages.

Idioms are one prime example whether a translation will be good or not.
Does the translator know the idiom in both languages?
If not, you end with something like the German version of one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels (I don't remember which one, or what exactly the idiom is...but I will immediately notice, once I read that story again*), where the translator translated an English idiom literally to German - which makes zero sense.
(*it was something like "and Bob's your uncle", which makes zero sense in German, unless you know the English idiom and do the reverse translation from the German "und Bob ist dein Onkel" to English - which requires you to know both languages, of corse)

In "Tucker and Dale vs Evil"...the German localisation is abysmal. Starts with translating "Rednecks" with "Blödmänner" ("Hinterwäldler" would be a much better fitting translation)...and doesn't stop there.

On the other hand, there are movies like "If you go down in the woods today", where the German translatioon is almost word for word following the English original...a great example of a localisation done right.

So again: the main factor when it comes to good localisations is how good the translator knows both languages, the original language and the target language.

If s/he knows both well - the localisation will be good. If s/he knows only one well...or maybe even both only so-so, it's most probably not a good omen for the translation.

Just one more thing: in games, it also depends on whether a person who does the translation, knows the scenario, or the particular scene, in which the text/dialogue they translate, plays.

Though that goes especially for voice-overs. Certain scenes demand certain emotions, but if all you've got is a sheet of paper with the written text on it - and no directions as to what the scene is and what it is supposed to express - the localisation will always suffer.

I found a guy on YouTube who posts long videos on DOS RPGs, although he doesn't do any voice overs, just demonstrates that, yes, these games exist. The channel is also from Germany and while they generally do the English versions, they slip in the German versions here and there, and these demonstrations tend to do the intros. '90s games with narrated intros aren't all that great when they're in English, I can only imagine the quality of the German VO from a native perspective. I can hear how flat the lines are done.

A few more voice-over localizations:

Doom 2016
Witcher 3

Can't comment on the Doom one aside from lel.

Witcher 3 though, Geralt is hit or miss with the voices in the first scene, but everyone in Russian and Portuguese sound a little off but I don't speak either to know what I'm talking about*. Japanese one though the dubbing doesn't fit the animation. The others fit even if the lip syncing is off, but the Japanese direction makes it seem like it should be more animated than it is, or the voices should be a bit more subdued. But I'm also of the understanding that Japanese requires more vocalization in standard speech.

*Or any language other than English. Please comment if French or German Witcher 3 has bad VA and that the Russian and Portuguese VA is top tier.

I've played the SaGa 2 and 3 remakes, both in the original Japanese, and in the fan translations.

The SaGa 2 translation has a lot that I disagree with, the most egregious example being how they ruined a bilingual joke. At one point, in a classroom, there's an NPC who says, written in katakana, the English words "please do not this game..." (notice the grammatical error). Note that, in Japanese, the verb goes at the *end* of the sentence, so this can be said to be the sort of mistake a Japanese learner of English would make.

In the fan translation, they "fixed" that line, so it reads something like "please do not play this game", ruining the joke. (My understanding is that the original SaGa 2 did use this phrase, but in the remake they modified the joke to reflect that the NPC was learning English. Final Fantasy Legend 2, the official release of the original, rewrote this entirely as something like "HELLO! HOW ARE YOU! I am learning to speak English. ... How come you can understand me?") It also doesn't help that the game hardlocks when you try to soft reset it; the unpatched version doesn't have this issue.

There's a couple things I've heard about certain indie games' Japanese translations:
* Undertale's Japanese translation is apparently really good, particularly considering that the game makes use of wordplay that's not easy to translate. For example, Papyrus talks in old-style vertical text, and Sans's font is apparently the Japanese equivalent of Comic Sans.
* Celeste's original Japanese translation was apparently awful, containing language that would be considered offensive. Fortunately, EXOK ended up hiring the same firm that translated Undertale to Japanese in order to give the game a better Japanese translation.

Ah, I don't even pay attention to lip sync...
The German is bad. The translations in those scenes make sense and are good... but the delivery... no emotion whatsoever. You can almost imagine the VA reading the lines!
The Russian is a curious case. First 2 scenes are indeed top tier, but the last - Ciri & the little girl - no.

Keep in mind though that these are just 3 scenes from a very very large game and I'm not a native Russian or German speaker so this is just my subjective opinion re: VA.

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Dunno if you read my comments in the link I posted #2, but what I remember from the first Witcher game - Gernan was indeed very very bad; Polish was the best, what with being original and all; Russian was good.

I am fluentd in both English and French and all things considered:

- Whenever I can understand it, I experience content in its language of origin which is English most of the time

- If the original language in not English nor French, I tend to favor English dubbing anyways as English is the more popular language and likely to receive greater attention in the dubbing (unless I hear otherwise)

- Obviously, if I'm watching content that was originally in French, no dubbing is necessary when I watch it in French so I can't comment there

That being said, I have very rarely (I think I can count it on two hands) watched content originally in another language that was dubbed in French, but not in English. My overall impression of those occurrences was that the French was of very good quality and very clear, spoken by people who were obviously very fluent in international French. However, it sounded a bit fake, as if the people speaking were acting as opposed to speaking naturally.

Before I was fluent in English, I watched a lot of French dubbing as a kid, but unfortunately, it has been quite a long time and I don't really have a natural hear for accents so I have no precise recollection of the quality of the dubbing.

The translations leave things to be desired, 99% of the time. The main question is, how much do they leave desired.

For example, the Czech voice over for Warcraft 3 was one of the best. Even replaced most of the English idioms with Czech equivalents and such. But there are still several "huhhh???" moments here and there, obviously stemming from the fact that the voice actors/translators had a lacking understanding of the world and its minutiae.

If you want to sample it yourself, here is:
Reign of Chaos (all cutscenes) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py6GXb5ja9o
Frozen Throne (all cutscenes) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIm0wIVOREo
Interesting thing about the czech voice over is that Blizzard is completely ignoring it, because Czech is not one of the Battle.net supported languages, so it's missing from the Reforged re-release and it officially does not exist to them.

As for subtitles, there is a massive difference between obvious machine translations and actually good subs. Machine translations can lead to some pretty hilarious stuff but get the job done, usually. Decently done actual translations are usually fine, fan translations are the best.

The main problem with subs in general is the language they are based off of. If the original source is English, then it's usually fine. But take the already mentioned Witcher for example. The Czech subs (and I'd assume all the other languages too) are obviously based on the English voice over instead of the source Polish, meaning they all contain the missing stuff/inconsistencies/changes introduced by the English voice over. In this case, even machine translated subs would be preferable, as they would be more accurate

Some games came to my mind.

Pathalogic. A very, very, very text based game that had something of a cult following in Russia, but was virtually unknown in the Anglo-sphere precisely because of the difficulty in translating a heavy text based game. The description pretty much says it:

*Brand New in-house English script: For the first time ever, the game has cast off the major issue that had previously disallowed international audiences from accessing it.
*New content: A certain amount of text that had previously been cut from the international version of the game have now been restored
*Newly Included Fan-Made Polish translation thanks to the hard work and generosity of Jakub Derdziak & Aldona Derdziak.

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Ceville. A german point-and-click adventure.
The jokes in the original German are actually very funny. =) (Your taste may vary.)
The English dub? ... yeah, those jokes don't carry over. At all.

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A few nitpicks I have come across.

The legendary S.T.A.L.K.E.R -- 100 rads. A bar and a safe haven deep in The Zone. When you enter it the bartender says: ''Hello, Hello.''
A lot of players are bugged by it to the point some think it's an audio glitch. It's not. It's a cultural thing on certain circumstances to say ''Hello'' x2.

A better translation would have been: ''Welcome, welcome!''

Witcher 3, again... ;D

Unlike the original I played the 3rd part in English.
When you wander around some guards tend to whistle ''pĒm parEĒEm''.
It always bugged me. It sounds exactly like an 80's pop song! What the hell is something like that doing in a medieval fantasy setting!?
Then one day it hit me like a ton of bricks... it's ''PaM paRRam'' !!!

I, metaphorically, humm that tune every second day!!!

Jokes are almost always cultural or language related.
That's why you can't simply translate (most of) them into another language/culture.

Heh, that is actually correct!

Which brings up an interesting issue -- many games of the point-and-click genre have ''humor'' as their top selling point. (Monkey Island; Day of the Tentacle; Sam & Max just to name a few.)

And virtually all of them have translated dubbing!

What is even more interesting - none of them have Russian dubbing. Full Throttle even has a review complaining that a localized version for the game exists, but is not available here.*

But Memoria is the strange outlier where only Russian is available as an alternate language. (???)

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Would be interesting to know how the dubbing/translation is in those games.

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*Yes. I am aware that there are several games on gog that lack localized versions which otherwise exist.

I (almost) always play in English, even if a Spanish localization is available. This avoids awkward translations and less-than-optimal dubbing (it used to be better a couple of decades ago, or perhaps I'm just getting more demanding). Games based on a fixed story usually have an at least decent translation, but those of a sandbox nature tend to be very sloppy (I looked once at a Paradox game in Spanish, switched to English and never looked back).

Indeed, but for a large portion of jokes and idioms, a cultural equivalent exists in many countries/languages. But this is where machine translations fall short and you can easily tell whether the localization was done by a human or not.