first honkai star rail post and its a localization thing oops. not negative exactly but a bit rambly
i dont play genshin so idk if this is a mhy thing, but is it just me or is the english translation really good in lore parts but mid if not sometimes just... bad in regular dialogue?
theres this thing in spoken dialogue where characters refer to someone else by their name instead of "you" when theyre speaking directly to them (eg. saying "mr yang is so smart!" to mr yang himself), or the ever-hated by americans "big sis", which is definitely a case of directly translating the form of address from the original chinese version where this is totally common and normal, or maybe the translators dont even know the full context of the line (ie they dont know if its a conversation with that person or if theyre talking about them with someone else) and end up having to sound stiffer to avoid a total mistranslation.
this smells of "lack of time to actually see the whole conversation play out in its entirety in QA" to me which is like... its a game with a LOT of dialogue including throwaway npc lines and theyre on a simultaneous live service schedule so its not NOT understandable, but every time i see it im like "this could be fixed so easily by having march say 'you're so smart, mr yang!' instead" and get mildly annoyed
this problem kind of carries over to the english voiceover too since the voice actors dont get to see the scene in full, let alone hear the lines of the other characters in the conversation. some lines sound like they are positively winging it bc they dont know if theyre talking to the guy directly or not, or theyre very confidently voicing it as if theyre NOT talking to them directly bc thats not how people usually talk in english. its not even a "we had to match the mouth flaps" problem thats common in a lot of games and anime, bc each language has custom mouth flaps that match the voiced lines (which is really impressive)!
this problem is almost completely nonexistent in the japanese version btw due to japanese using peoples names/titles to address each other even MORE naturally than chinese in everyday speech. the japanese version has its own problems of stiff translations where they either use the kanji equivalent of the chinese words (星核 for stellaron) or katakana (ガーデンオブリコレクション for garden of recollection) and its not always consistent which one they go for which makes it sound kinda weird but thats not the point of this post
the english lore parts however are good. the simulated universe aeons for example are really well written. crucially there is no direct dialogue with aeons (afaik) and most things are descriptive, so theres no "who are they addressing rn?" problem since theyre like "yaoshi is...". or maybe the translators are just better at descriptive texts than dialogue! that happens!
i like the english translation most of the time, and sometimes more than the japanese one due to the problem above (english doesnt need to pick between languages! its english!) so lore terms sound more consistent and cohesive. and the english voices are really nice, i like dan heng and sampo and aventurine and clara a lot for example. but sometimes its really obvious that the voice actors were more clueless than they shouldve been which takes away from the immersion a little unfortunately
wow that was too long but yeah i completely understand the reasons behind this so i dont blame the translators themselves at all. so my conclusion is GIVE YOUR TRANSLATORS MORE CONTEXT AND TIME TO WORK! YOURE ONE OF THE RICHEST GAME COMPANIES IN THE WORLD
the giffers, vidders, people who make edits are the real true heroes. y'all have to watch, rewatch, pause, process and continue and painfully go through watching 15x18 just for putting out content out here for all of us. y'all so brave dude, i mean i have a literal physical reaction if i even read words or their closeup is shown, y'all do so much for the brainrot ;-; <3
