Well, at least there is one now, kind of. The quality leaves a lot to be desired, both in terms of grammar/syntax and readability as well as consistency.
One example that jumped out at me was “Blitzresistenz” for Lightning Resistance, but “Feuer Beständigkeit” for Fire Resistance. a) That should be one word, not two, and b) whether -resistenz or -beständigkeit is going to be used, it should be used uniformly so as not to confuse players. Another is using “Die Gesundheit” instead of just “Gesundheit”. In this case the article rules are similar enough to English for a comparison: you’d say “Health +x” and not “The Health +x”.
Edit: Speaking of health, life regen shards are called “LP-Regeneration Splitter”, which would be fine if HP/Health were universally translated as “LP/Lebenspunkte” rather than using LP in some places and Gesundheit in others. I’d be very confused if I were new to the game. Also while I understand the need for Splitter (Shard) to be separate and uniform for programming and consistency reasons, making for example the more correct Regenerationssplitter impractical, I suggest using “-Splitter” (dash, no space) rather than " Splitter" (with a space) universally to show it’s part of the preceding word.
Those were just a few examples I noticed in the short time since I started playing the localization. If you need volunteers to improve your localizations I’d be glad to help with German, just get in touch via PM or Discord (same name, I’m on your server).
i’m still playing the game in english, like in all arpgs. one thing that stood out while playing with the german translation for a few minutes was that uniques got a translation as well. i really dislike this with most community content and data bases being in english. i imagine it is really painful for players using their native translation to communicate about items outside of the game or searching for info with every translation using their own names for uniques.
I noticed that, too, although translating named items wouldn’t be a problem if we had an option to display the English original name in grey parentheses next to it. IIRC Grim Dawn has this option and it would be great to have here, too.
The more I play, the more errors I find. The only way I know what a lot of abilities do is prior knowledge of the game from the English version. I think the best/worst one so far is translating “Charges” (Flame Ward tree) as “Gebühren” (the kind of charge you pay at an ATM) instead of “Ladungen”.
They don´t cross-check if the translation make sense. That´s why a community translation is always better, when no professional translator is available (or too expensive).
That’s why I never use german translations in games they are always terrible. I would rather play a game in spansih then german while i don’t understand a bit of spanish outside of ordering beer.
I’m german and if I was a new player i would refund the game because of the localization because the wording is choosen so bad half the game makes no sense anymore.
German isn’t made for gameing try to fit “Abklingzeitreduzierung” anywhere ^^. Most german translations tend to use stupid words that are the right translation technicaly but make no sense or sound terrible to german speaking people. Well at least to german speaking people that read stuff above a BILD entry level ^^.
Yeah, to make things fit into a game that was originally written in English, and where the space left for words in the menus is often just enough for the English wording, it can look terrible. Like “Nekrotisch” under Resistances in the character menu right now, with the final h on another line.
In the translations I’ve helped with I always try to stay away from large compound nouns for technical game terms, like using “Reduzierte Abklingzeit” to utilize the space intended for Cooldown Reduction.
But duuuuude, those are the best most German-ish German words, when you cram an entire sentence into a single word (by apparently just removing the spaces).
You are right, but honestly, “Abklingzeitreduktion” is a bad example.
“Cooldown reduction” isn’t shorter.
The main problem is that a technically correct translation often sounds weird.
It’s always difficult with specific gaming terms, so it’s necessary to invite native German players(!) to translate everything in a “smoother” and more natural form.
There are established gaming terms for all languages I guess. I only know it for sure when it comes to german because almost every hack and slash game uses the same words for the same stuff and even then it sounds wierd.
Just to add a few more bad translations:
Loading Echo → “Echo des Ladens” (would mean something like “Echo of loading” - should be translated as “Echo wird geladen”)
Entering Cultist Camp → “Eingabe des Kultistenlagers” (would mean something like “Write Cultist Camp here” - should be translated as “Kultistenlager wird betreten”)
Yeah, i and some other folks back in the day suggested in the GD Forums that it would be cool to see the English Names as well, and the Fan-translators did a really neat job to put it into ( ), 'cause at one hand it cool to have Weapons,- Skills and such in your Language as well, but also - especially these days on the Internet where you’ve way more ressources and access with english sites, or simply talking with people around the world, it’s great to also know the english names so you don’t have to look it up every time.
I think it was Guild Wars 2 which also had a neat solution where via holding a button you can shift to the OG English texts (and if you let go to your set translation).
