And this absolutely pains my heart, how the gaming industry and capitalism itself is heading towards a direction where everything just gets worse thanks to new technologies companies think do the work that actual people were paid to do before.
So yeah, let me show you what it used to be, and what it has become.
If you never heard about the Spanish translation before, I don't blame you! GW2 has 4 languages to select from, and Spanish is the only one without voice acting, though this was never a problem for me personally. This also means that its easier for us to compare the original lines vs the translations, in real time! Also, the game has a really nice feature, where by pressing Right-Ctrl, all in-game text will change to English. So its always been fun to compare the languages.
Now, when I say that this game is one of the better gaming Spanish localization, I mean it. Let me explain with some examples that I have been gathering over the past 10 years of this game's lifetime:
Okay, this is a pretty standard localization problem, how do you translate "Talk about hang time!"? The localization team opted to do this:
The localization team is not only translating, they are adding their own flavor. They know that text is just some random quip, so they have some freedom to do a joke here: "Me encanta que los planeos salgan bien" translates to "I love it when plans go well", but with the word planes (plans) changed to planeos, which means glides. Which makes perfect sense for this achievement!
Lets take another example. This is the description for the chair item:
Ok, even the most basic of translators will get this right. How can the localization team possibly improv-
Bam. Instantly improved. Not only the text has been translated. It has added a little quip. Do a double-click to sit on a chair and judge others. The localization team didn't need to do this, but they did it anyways, because this little extra quip make people laugh. This is why they know how to do this job.
Because localization isn't just about translating. Here, take another example where the original text is plain and simple:
Again, there's not even a joke here. Why would the spanish localiz-
Wow. Just wow. Are you happy to see me? To make this translation, the localization team needed the context to know that Tequatl is a dragon, and made the joke here that the reason this dragon is moving its tail is because, like a dog would, it is happy to see you, because it is wagging its tail, because that's the tail you are dodging.
Now, not everything is perfect. Translation errors always end up making their way into the final builds, never to be fixed for years. I did say that, with time, the game's localization got progressively worse, but by the time End of Dragons (the 3rd expansion, Feb 2022), while more mistakes were getting in, it was clear that the localization team still had its charm. Take this example:
This is a fishing achievement (one quite hard to achieve, I must say!) The joke here being the phrase "God walking amongst mere mortals", but with the fishing theme. This is also a popular Guild Wars 1 achievement that you can import to GW2 giving you a title, so this phrase kinda stuck between the players. Now for the spanish version:
"Cod swimming amongst mere groupers". The main joke here being that meros (mere) also means grouper, so you just end up saying the word twice! Funny joke!
But as I said, this is the time where mistakes started popping up:
To explain whats happening here, that's my character, next to a dog, so an action dialogue pops up. Originally, the text reads as "Pet", the verb. But since the localization team was most likely given no context for this line, it was translated to "Mascota", which is "Pet" as a noun, where it should have been translated as "Acariciar", the proper translation from the pet verb.
I make this stop at End of Dragons because, in this expansion, something very interesting happened. In English, the word "They" can be meant as a genderless pronoun, or just the plural of something. This is an expansion where a non-binary character was introduced, of course using They/Them pronouns. In Spanish, we don't have the same similarities with our pronouns, instead having a separate word ("elle") only used for genderless pronouns, which (to this day) many people will think that sounds bad, because this word is barely spoken. Because of this, this pronoun barely gets used. But the Spanish localization team chose to use this pronoun anyways when referring to this character. Why am I mentioning this, well, you see-
Enter Secrets of the Obscure
The 4th expansion, released Aug 2023. This was a complete dissaster, and apparently the other languages which have voice acting also suffered. The old localization team was clearly either changed entirely, or fired. Either way, this expansions had so many mistakes I don't know where to begin.
Oh wait, I do know! For some reason, this expansion decided that your player character, the commander, was now a They. Something that didn't happen before, lines opting to just call you the commander, and most non-voice acted lines still using your pronouns. Do you see the translation problem here?
Yeah, of course! What happens when you throw a translator (or a localization team with 0 context) the word They? The return is always they, as in many people. Suddenly my character was multiple ones every time someone spoke to him. Things are made worse by the fact that GW2 was using a gender-neutral pronoun just 1 year before this happened.
And there were tons of wrong translations. Clearly none of these lines were given context. There's none of the charm that could be seen before this expansion. Perhaps Anet (GW2's company) gave localization teams a very short time to do the job? Or maybe they just ditched the team entirely, thinking that a tool could do the job faster and without a "waste of money". Oh, oh, we know a human is behind this, because of this screenshot:
Huh? What do I mean? This is just an NPC named "Gol". Localization teams don't even translate NPC names-
This made me lose my fucking mind.
Like, how did this even happen. The translator thought the text said "Go!" instead of "Gol", a name. This implies this text was given with 0 context, and that there was an actual human who made the call. This broke me. The game I used to love because of something has become one of the things I hate the most in this world. The embodiment of profits over quality.
And stuff doesn't end here. Reading badly translated text while hearing what the original lines are supposed to be in real-time is one thing, but this goes beyond the game. And it gets worse. Last week, I got an email promoting a new event from the game, in Spanish. And oh my god it was so clearly auto-translated it hurt. Some phrases didn't make sense. Jokes translated literally. Wording referring to you changing between lines. And it extends into the Spanish news articles on their website. This is how just things are now.
I'm writing this mainly to vent out, because this is happening not only to this game. Not even only in the gaming industry. Year after year I see companies thinking they can just translate entire cultures with a tool. And everything ends up being worse. Uninspired. Wrong. Soulless. These tools may be getting better at translating text, I won't deny. But there is just so much shit you can't just auto. Spanish especially suffers here because all translators have just "Spanish" as an option, without realizing Latam-Spanish and Spain-Spanish are very different languages. But the tools try to do both at the same time, and it ends up being a mess.
Maybe I'm getting like this because I remember how everything used to just be good enough a decade ago. When companies were forced to pay actual people, though the job never paid that well, to do the work.
