The Dord of Darien

Musings from the Mayor of the Internet

Woolsey talks translation

This is a couple of years old now, but I only just ran into it today: an interview with Ted Woolsey about translating video games. It’s really pretty interesting, and gives a lot of insight into what translators have to deal with, and why the interkids could not, in fact, do better translations themselves.

Woolsey and the interviewers never address what is, to my mind, the most interesting question regarding translation: is it more important to be as pedantically accurate to the original as possible, or to create a translated script that plays well in the new language? Especially given space constraints, it isn’t always (or even usually) feasible to have it both ways. I personally am always on the side of translations that work as well as possible in the new language, but the opinion of the internets appears to be against me.


February 4th, 2009 Posted by | Games | no comments

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