found in translation
A few days ago I dusted off my copy of the Mass Effect trilogy. At least metaphorically, because I only own a physical box for the second installment. But I got tempted by "Legendary Edition," which includes all the DLCs and additional content that is available for the games. And because I'm a completionist, it seemed to be a good deal. This is not an ad.
I had a blast. The game is still one of the best space operas in gaming that you can run on a modern setup. The world, the characters, the pacing are all still exceptional, as they were more than a decade ago. Even the graphics aren't that bad with tweaks to the lightning and upscaling of the textures. If you haven't played it yet and you're a fan of soft sci-fi (where "science" is actually more like "magic in space"), I cannot recommend it more.
But one thing seemed a bit odd to me, and with every visited planet and quest completed, I felt this feeling becoming stronger and stronger. I usually play text-heavy games (and RPGs used to be like that) in my native language, which is Polish. My reading comprehension is quite high, but some of the nuances elude me. Sometimes I encounter an obscure word, which forces me to look it up in a dictionary. That might be fun in the short term, but for an afternoon with a game that I'd like to understand thoroughly, gets tedious pretty quick. And believe me, both sci-fi and fantasy RPGs can get pretty heavy with hermetic terminology.
Back to the point. I've started to notice major discrepancies in the tone of dialogues. What was a sarcastic remark by Wrex in the original dubbing ('It would be faster to kill them') in Polish text suddenly became an explicit expression of bloodlust. Characters that used stronger wording were an exception in the English version, but in the translation everyone quickly started throwing insults you'd typically expect in a pub at 2 AM, not during a semi-formal meeting from the mouth of a distinguished captain. It not only broke the immersion, as I've been hearing an obvious difference between what's spoken and what's written, but also heavily altered the presentation of some of the NPCs.
It saddened me a bit. Poland is famous for its swearing, which I do not enjoy. Mass Effect was released in 2007, same year that another RPG saw the light of day: The Witcher. While it wasn't a commercial hit worldwide, it succeeded in Poland. Enormously. And it introduced some of the most vulgar characters to the gaming community, like Talar the merchant, to name one. There's a long tradition in Polish media of using swearing as a means to make your story appear more mature and a character more fleshed out.
That's not a major issue for me now. I can just pay attention to the words that are spoken and ignore the dissonance. But when my English proficiency level was much lower than now, the translation would've heavily altered my view on the characters portrayed. I wonder how much is lost, found, and twisted in the translation of games that I know almost by heart but can't understand languages they were originally written in. Maybe I'd like them more if I could.
Or maybe I wouldn't like them at all.