This can be quite a post to read, if you do not want to bother reading the behind my frustration, skip to the “IN SHORT” part. I appologize for any mistakes (grammar or spelling) in my post below, English is not my native language.
Like all the people on this forum I have been waiting for a next Halo game. A game that most feared would not be Halo worthy, but in my humble opinion turned out far better then expected. However, I can hardly look at my tv-screen while I play this game, because the game’s menu bothers me to no end.
I live in the Netherlands and for about 20 years of my life I have been playing computer games. All of them were in English. No one ever bothered to translate any menu’s or ingame texts. On tv it’s just the same. Every noteworthy televisionprogram is in English. It even has come to the point that I do not like to read books when not written in English, because I can envision stories better when written or told in English compared to my native Dutch language.
The day I bought Halo 4, it looked strange to me that there was Dutch text on the cover of the game. I checked in multiple stores (also to see if prices might vary), but all of the gamecovers were in Dutch.
So I bought the game and returned home. Excited as I was, I immediately place the game in my Xbox 360 and start the game…
It came as a shock to me that EVERYTHING INGAME IS TRANSLATED IN DUTCH!!! It seems 343 industries is one of the first gamedevelopers in history, that thought Dutch people might be glad if a game was translated for them. There is also no option that lets me choose what Language I would want to use.
Besides the fact that I am not used to my own language being used in games (excluding games for kids aged 6 years or under), which makes it all very silly and hilarious to play Halo 4 (not what I want in my Halo games), the Dutch is often not correctly translated! It looks like they just put half of the ingame texts through google translator, or hired a very old guy that uses old Dutch to translate the game. Even worse, in some parts of the menu they forgot to translate the English altogether!!!
IN SHORT:
I bought Halo 4, expecting a well polished game with maybe minor ingame bugs. I got a game, that is the first translated game I have ever bought.
The translation is not only a bad option stylewise, because we Dutch people are accustomed to all our media being in English, but also because the translation is sloppy:
- old fashioned use of words, which makes no sense in today’s use of our language.
- some sentences look as if translated by an automated translator (like google translate).
- some parts of the game are not translated at all and thus in English!
- the translation is incorrect so that if I enable some options in custom, the opposite happens, or something else I did not enable at all (yesterday I set the infinity weapon drop cooldown between 60 and 120 seconds, and set the drops to contain nothing but heavy weapons, or so I thought. It resulted in no drops during the course of the game)
This might seem to be a minor issue to most of you, but to me and all of my friends that have bought/played the game it ruins a big part of the game experience.
Besides that, it looks sloppy on the part of 343industires.
I hope there is a way 343industries could release a file that would, upon installation revert the game’s written texts back into English, or that would add an ingame option in the menu to let players choose their language of preference.
Thank you for your time