Small typos and translation errors in games usually end up being either annoying or humorous, and this particular mistake falls very much into the latter category.
Shantae and the Seven Sirens - which is planned to release on Switch at some point in the future - is now available on iOS. While the English-language version appears to be just fine, the Italian version is said to be littered with small errors, including the absolute clanger seen in the image below. The word 'resume', meaning 'to continue', has been swapped out for 'Curriculum Vitae'.
The image above has been shared online by @FrancescoDonald, who also supplied the image below suggesting that Google Translate was used for localisation. It appears that the development team went ahead with Google's suggestion, despite the fact that it was actually translating the other use of the spelling 'resume', the kind referring to a job application.
Now that the error has been spotted, we'd hope that this will be fixed in time for the game's launch on Switch. We're sure someone will make a point of checking that out as soon as it arrives.
Of course, translation errors aren't actually that uncommon in games, especially when smaller titles are being developed on a tight budget. We still have nightmares about Vroom In The Night Sky to this day.
[source twitter.com]
Comments 41
I want to play this game, but I don’t think my Bachelor’s degree is going to cut it.
@NotTelevision I hope my Master's Degree will do
hahaha, Love news like this!
Damn I still have nightmares about Half Genie Hero's french translation where Shantea and Abner threw the f word at each other... I'm very afraid.
O even wrote to Wayforward, which I never do, to tell them just how bad the translation was...
I am: A professional Shantae player with more than 5 years of experience
I'd like to work as: new Shantae game player
I prefer to be paid with: Gems
presses button boy I hope they'll hire me
Lmao as a New Zealander I would've thought the long form of CV was p common knowledge
It's a secret to everybody!
@Ham-n-jam It is supposed to be in Italian though. Maybe whoever (if anybody...probably nobody) proof read it just assumed that's how it is in Italian.
@Ham-n-jam As an American, I never knew what "CV" meant until right now because we call them resumes for some reason. Sure, I've heard the term "CV" before, but I had no clue other than context clues that it meant "resume."
How do we know the game wasn’t originally written in Italian (or Latin) and the mistakes are in all the versions?
Ooooohh....
Insight from a developer's point of view:
I wouldn't expect a respected company like WayForward to use Google Translate for this purpose. This actually happens quite often, also happened a few times with our games, when a developer only hands an Excel sheet to a translation company. They don't play the game, and the sheet doesn't come with the context of what's meant with the word.
That's pretty funny actually
As an italian after seeing this I can just hope they will drop the italian language from the switch version and future games.
I understand that translate the game professionally in other languages can cost quite a bit, so, if you can't effort to do it, just skip it and release the game in english.
I know this may reduce slightly the sales, but a game badly translated can really leave a bad impression on the player, both toward the game and toward the developer.
Shantae 5 is already available on mobile? What?
Don't forget Zero Wing's "All your base are belong to us".
A CLASSIC 😄
And some developers and publishers still don't get it. A subpar translation hurts their game as much as lousy sound effects or bugs. Depending on the gente, it can eventually become game breaker.
@TryToBeHopeful
Because WayForward is an American company. English has always been the official language for their games. I know during Shantae 1/2 Genie Hero kickstarter , the French, Spanish, German, and Italian translations were outsourced to a translation group. From what I have read, the translations are pretty bad. The Spanish translation refers to Shantae as male.
But yeah, this is clearly an example where the translators are not getting the context of the text, which of course results in bad translation.
@ALinkttPresent It's on Apple Arcade.
I'm an assistant ESL teacher and I can pretty much always tell when someone uses Google Translate on their homework.
It's just not that accurate. Very often languages do not translate directly one to one. Here is an example, the word "have" has many meanings. It can mean eating, drinking, possessing, holding, and several other things. You put it into Google translate English to Japanese and the main answer you get is the verb that means "possess" or "own" as in "I have a pencil."
This is even a single, commonly used, easy word. The reliability of that program rapidly decreases the more complex of a word or phrase you input. Don't even bother trying to put full sentences into the program.
@Stuffgamer1 Résumé are not the same as curricula vitæ. Résumé are one-page long and just tell the employers the skills and experience you have to work someplace. The Curriculum Vitæ is a few pages long and tells the employers everything you could brag about: your prior jobs, awards, published works, etc.
Brain-dead idiots. If they won't offer proper human translations, then they ought not to bother at all and leave players to be stuck with English. What an absolute joke.
Yet more proof of developers cutting corners. Paying customers have become the new Beta testers.
„Oh no!“, he shouts, with a Super Mario‘ish Italian accent.
@Heavyarms55 But....but....but....Google tells us soon there will be no need to learn other languages except for entertainment and personal interest purposes, because they will all be automatically translated with ease!
Google don't do the lie. Ever never is happening!
@Coolmeesje Distributor too cheap to hire an actual localization company.
@Stuffgamer1 even in America, Resumes and CVs are not the same thing. If you apply for work in academia for example, you need a CV, not a resume. A resume is 1-2 pages and mainly highlights work experience, skills, and education in a concise manner. CVs are much longer and require more in depth detail on the aforementioned areas in addition to awards, volunteer work, published works, and projects. They’re not interchangeable and if you submit a resume to a job requiring a CV, you probably won’t even get a call for an interview.
@ALinkttPresent it’s on Apple arcade and it’s only the first level, or first part of the game
Wait so Shantae and the Seven Sirens is a mobile game? Oh this doesn't bold too well, usually I would be more interested in this had it came out on consoles first then mobile sometime in the future. The fact that it's a mobile game first means that version of this game is going to be litter with microtransactions and that the later console versions may and I hope are the definitive edition of the game.
@NEStalgia I mean, I do think the tech will get there, eventually. But there will always be limits. Context matters. The same word, in different contexts can have totally different meaning. Especially in languages that use an alphabet and nothing along the lines of kanji like in Japanese and Chinese. In Japanese you have "kaeru" written like that, or in the Japanese phonetic alphabet hiragana "かえる" you just can't know which word it is. But Japanese has Kanji, characters which express meaning, from which we get the sound. So 帰る to go home 変える to change and 蛙 frog, all "kaeru[kah ay ru] all are easily understood despite being the same.
But with an alphabet, you have the above problem that I already mentioned - where, without context, you don't know which "have" you are trying to translate. It can give you a list but how are you, the user who doesn't speak the target language, going to know?
If I ask you, which word is Japanese for "to go home" and gave you this list 帰る 蛙 変える and you don't speak Japanese, how are you supposed to know which one is correct?
@retro_player_22 are you aware that “it’s on iPhone” doesn’t actually default to “it’s a casual pay to win game”?
Same thing happened in the italian localization of Half Genie hero:
It says "Yes,I think I will organize a reproduction date with the kid"
Google translate turned Riskyboots into a pedophile.
The spanish translation in past Shantae games is terrible as well. Barely playable. Worst part is you usually can’t select the lenguage, is the same of the system.
@Heavyarms55 For automated translation I would think Japanese would be one of the very hardest to translate to the point of near impossibility. So much of the language is contextual and colloquial there's almost an emotional interpretation required to understand it. So little is literal.
That said I dread the day when "automated language" translation convinced the world there's no need to learn languages, everyone returns to speaking their own native languages and requiring computers to translate it all "perfectly" with few able to tell the difference.
And we thought Engrish instruction manuals were bad now!
@Randomname19 The be fair, that translation produced a believable character for Risky Boots.
@D64 exactly
and its translated by people, not google translate (otherwise it wouldnt have so many spelling mistakes)
Please keep "this" in as a language option.
@ALinkttPresent “Part 1” of it is on Apple Arcade. I think Part 2 comes out alongside the other versions.
@retro_player_22 No it’s not. The first half of it just came out early on Apple Arcade. 🙄
@Collo Even then, the word résumé is a borrowed French word that is supposed to have those marks over the e's when spelled properly. A respected company like WayForward should've included the proper characters on the Excel sheet they gave to the translators.
@Heavyarms55 Yeah, this is common sense. The word "have" even has an additional meaning (complete with separate pronunciation) along the lines of being required to do something.
However, such translators are still useful if you already know most of the grammar and just need to look up or expand your vocabulary with the occasional noun, verb, and/or adjective.
We need this on Switch sooner than later, it's a tragedy that this is only available on Apple Arcade (at least the first bit of the game).
I speak Italian and now want to play that version more xD
@BulbasaurusRex Indeed. I simply didn't want to take the time going over everything.
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