17th April 2005, 11:02 PM
Quote:And you still didn't respond to the rest of my post...
What, this? Not much to say...
Quote:Allow me to put it this way. Let's say I was writing a play about Julius Caeser. I might write the whole thing in the language of the time and just show a bunch of poster boards over the whole play people could read. Or, since I speak English, I would just write the whole thing in THAT, except like maybe some cool phrase during the murder scene that everyone would be quoting at the water well at the office the next day or something. As ABF pointed out, translations aren't perfect. If they decided to have someone translate their english script into Chinese, it wouldn't be perfect.
It's definitely easier to use your own language, and will lead to fewer translation errors. But that isn't the point here. Accuracy is. If you're doing a story set in Shakesperean England, it'd be more accurate to use that style of speech (or look at other playwrights of the period and compare them to see if they use similar or other speech patterns and come to some conclusion about what "Shakesperean" English was...). Look at Eternal Darkness -- I'd have LOVED if the whole game was, like the first few lines, in the actual languages those people used... it felt cheap that they went to English so fast and stayed there.
Quote:And I must add, this is not new at all. It's done all the time, and has been since like... forever. Who cares?
Because it's annoying and unfair, to both our culture and theirs. We've made progress (witness how anime DVDs come with the japanese language tracks), but we're not there yet...