The Quality of Chinese Localization Is Unacceptable

Feedback and Suggestions
1

I am very disappointed with EHG. I am a Chinese content creator, and I previously held a very appreciative and supportive attitude towards your games. Whether it’s the current playability of the game, future trade modifications, or most importantly — your official commitment to Chinese localization.

Everyone was excited about the official Chinese support, but in the end, what you delivered was a translation that’s nearly unplayable, lacking any standardized terminology, and completely feels like a sloppy machine translation. This is devastating in ARPGs. Path of Exile’s localization, provided by Tencent, often encounters situations like “What exactly does this equipment do?” Diablo 4’s Chinese localization also caused a lot of misunderstandings on certain equipment, but neither comes close to the translation quality you’ve provided, which can’t even be considered “human language”.

Let’s start with the game’s login interface, which is where players can immediately spot translation issues. The central “Online Game” was translated as “Offline Game”, yet the actual “Offline Game” below was translated correctly. This clearly hasn’t undergone any quality checks.
https://imgur.com/a/FwU4vss
“Solo-self found” was translated as “Already Found”. Players encounter so many translation errors even before character creation, not to mention the content that follows.
https://imgur.com/a/Fp4NR4I

There are just too many similar issues. The above are just the most minor examples. Imagine if even the simplest main menu translation is this poor, how would the translations of equipment attributes and unique effects be handled? Offering Chinese localization was supposed to be the best way to welcome new players, but with the current translation quality, can new players even play the game normally? In the end, they still have to rely on community localization.

I’m not sure who was responsible for your localization, or if there were any issues during the communication process. However, based on the results, this localization team not only lacks any ARPG experience but also seems to have a dismissive attitude towards EHG. They should be held accountable. I believe EHG had good intentions, but the end result is truly very, very poor.

I am speaking on behalf of other Chinese players who love Last Epoch, urging the development team to review the quality of the Chinese translation.
The best advice I can offer you right now is to formally adopt the community’s translation, which is already quite mature. Everyone understands that small development teams have limited resources for localization. Given the current unsatisfactory situation, collaborating with the community is the best option.

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2

I believe in some other games, Grim Dawn for instance, certain localizations were handled by members of the community. Just to avoid issues like this, perhaps?

3

Yep, GD’s Chinese localization is pretty good, it also maintains by community.
Last Epoch already have a strong community localization but EHG decided make a “more formal” one , turns out they screwed up.

4

Honestly, I kind of expected they would of reached out to the community translation projects already going on for these localizations, it’s such a common thing nowdays, and EHG prides itself on being community focused so much, not sure what happened here.

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5

After talking with the Chinese community, the below idea will not work, at all.
Simply there’re too many errors.

If you want to be heard, leave a comment in this post instead.

Posting the problem on this forum should be helpful but most of the people who depends on a locale don’t normally navigate into the English Official forum or discord.

As an effort to help this situation, I have made a post on one of the more commonly used forum in Taiwan to gather more similar problems:
https://forum.gamer.com.tw/C.php?bsn=35693&snA=203&tnum=1

Meanwhile, I don’t know where the Simplified Chinese community normally hang out. If you could also link to something similar to what I posted above that should be helpful too.

EDIT: I have made a thread on the official discord too
Discord

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6

Chinese is really hard for westerners to understand. And they don’t have unlimited money. You’d think taking Tencent money would come with some connections to good localization, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s affordable.

If you think you could do a better job, you should send them your resume. Maybe you can assist them with fixing some of the mistakes in the localization on a freelance basis.

7

I think the point was Chinese community has been trying to say why don’t you adapt our already using Chinese mod while EHG refused and said it was hard to QC a community locale project.

It turns out the official one is worse.

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8

My dude, the post is literally ‘we did a better job, please reach out to us, what you have is literally unusable’. Take a breath and read through it once more lol

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9

A broad declaration that the community did better work and then asking the company to accept it is not a formal channel or someone working with the company. I’m suggesting someone go to them directly and work with them so they can claim the work as their own. In professional circles this would be the more accepted way to go about something like this.

I hope that helps clarify what I was suggesting and why. Thanks.

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10

The community isn’t professional, they dont need to act professional. The professional side is the company that put out a localization that is worse than what the community already did for themselves.

You don’t need to defend ehg here. Most likely they contracted it out, and just didn’t have anything in place to quality check it, and basically got scammed based on what op is saying. The easiest way to resolve this, in a way that the community it effects will benefit from the thing specifically for them, is to reach out to them, as the other way hasn’t worked. It’s not complicated.

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11

What they should do if they would like the result they want is to behave professionally. I’m also not defending EHG here, necessarily. Like I said, you would think them knowing Tencent would give them a way to have this localized effectively. But I have no idea what it costs or if they would help them with those costs. I’m neutral on this particular issue. All I decided to do was give a helpful suggestion. Sorry if that was confusing in any way.

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12

Hey mate, I hope you understand where we are coming from too. OP simply raised awareness to EHG about how poorly the localization was in a FEEDBACK forum.

The told us, in their patch preview, to leave feedback on the forum, too.

Meanwhile, you are suggesting we should make a board declaration or submit a resume while lecturing us how difficult it could be westerner to learn Chinese.

It was OBVIOUS that they out sourced the translation to someone and we, the Chinese fans base, felt like they got scammed.

Trust me when I said a lot of people were looking forward to this localization. We saw how poorly Garena handle POE’s traditional Chinese translation and when EHG said they would take care of it, they didn’t. This is disappointing but we are still hopeful and thus the thread.

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13

I understand. However, if members of the community are bilingual and this is something they could help with, maybe someone in the number of those people would be interested in actually assisting them directly.

It’s just a suggestion. We like to be helpful around here rather than just complain or criticize. I hope there’s something done about it positive in the end that the community is happy with.

14

Here is a list of stuff with problems:

  • Terminology are not standardized across the board
  • Terminology felt like it was translated by someone who never played ARPG
  • A lot of the transcript felt like it went through google translate
  • Grammar mistakes
  • English showing in some places
  • Korean showing in some places
  • Affix are done with replace all functions leaving a lot of random spaces in lines
  • Log in button show as play offline
  • When modifying filter, categories are show in English but affixes in Chinese
  • The above remain even after you change client back to English
  • “Goodbye.” was in English
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15

Same problems with the Russian translation. Unplayable atm . Grammatical errors, lots of mistakes, lower-uppercase letters chaotic usage, lack of consistency, ugly font. I’d like to report those translation mistakes but there’re just too many of them

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16

The French translation is poorly done as well.

  • The story translation is acceptable (even if i have noticed mistakes and strings not associated to the english voices)
  • The item descriptions are from good to very bad because literal translation (in english a description could be X Y but in french it must be Y X to be correct… and nothing is done on this)

Globally I have the feeling that this translation have been done by someone who realy don’t care about it…

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17

But you may find that you get further if you act in a professional manner when dealing with a company, especially one that may be taking the view that they “should” license/pay for the translations they use. I don’t know, I’m just trying to come up with ideas as to why EHG didn’t use the community version. If the community version would be difficult to QC (presumably due to the lack of relevant language skills in EHG), how would a translation from a 3rd party be easier? Other than they would have legal recourse (a rework/refund/etc) if the work turned out to be sub-standard.

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18

Voting you up friend Traveller.

Hopefully there’ll be a statement from EHG regarding the translations (multiple of which are reported to be sub-standard).

It’s a shame the quality process didn’t catch this stuff earlier (the Russian one is really weird as I’m fairly sure there are Russians who work for EHG).

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19

we either view ehg as a company that has a community focus, or we view it as a company that to bring forward ideas for how to improve thigns, we need to send of resumes. Which is the context for my point, obviously outside of that context this is a silly comparison, but that just goes to the original thing im responding to, we shouldnt expect community things to need to go through official channels, offering up services and stuff, to get improvements done in sensible ways, that’s absurd.

And moreso when it comes to something like locaslisation, theres been somewhat of, maybe not a precedent, but a lack of suprise when localistion has been a collaboration with communities, for a pretty long time now. So sure, acting like you’re some professional entity might make it easier, but it shouldnt in this case, especially not with a community focused team like ehg are. Localization isn’t a gift ehg are giving, it’s something they’ve sold the game on, communities that arent english speaking as a first language don’t need to send in resumes to point out its bad and they can do better, they can just go ‘hey btw, it sucks, our community effort is way better than this, reach out if you want, it would be an easy way to get this good’.

20

Yup, I can confirm! The french translation is… not good. I know it’s supposed to be a work in progress, but it looks like someone just put it in google translate and used it word for word without any consideration.

Anyone that speaks french could spot it instantly.
“+12% augmenté dégâts de froid” or “-3 Sort Coût de mana”
The word order is wrong on most affixes. Some uniques don’t have a consistent terminology, or have confusing phrasing. The lore bit on uniques is butchered uninspired robotic translations (what have you done to Ravens’ Rise ?! :frowning: )

I strongly advise any french player to continue to play in english.

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