I had already heard about miHoYo before by playing Honkai Impact 3rd, their previous title. It wasn’t to my liking… But the graphics were great and the gameplay was fine.
When they released Genshin Impact, I got surprised by the actual overall quality of the game. It’s much more than just a simple mobile waifu-collecting gacha game or BoTW clone. I still haven’t played much, but I can already confidently say that I’m enjoying it a lot! The art-style, game design, characters… it all feels very well polished! + it’s always appreciable to see an ambitious game getting localized into so many languages! (13 languages and 4 dubs!)
But… As I started playing, I encountered a certain number of issues with the French localization that could have been easily avoided with LQA testing.
I found really interesting to select some examples of localization ‘errors’ contained in the game and to try fixing them. That is why I decided to make this little post in which I will share some issues I have found in the French version of the game during my first game session (of about 3h) in order to explain them.
Disclaimer (1): The screenshots of the game are hosted on this site for ‘educational purposes’.
Disclaimer (2): It is possible that these mistakes will get fixed in the future. The screenshots taken are from version 1.0.0 (Windows).
Disclaimer (3): FYI, this post will be divided into three parts: 1) Typos, word omissions & context issues; 2) Punctuation & interface issues; 3) Translation tags left in the game.
Here we go!
1 – Typos, word omissions & context issues:
Typo: “bine” instead of “bien”.
Typo which makes the sentence agrammatical: “soit” (‘be’ wrongly conjugated = *’It is be certainly be special’) instead of “doit” (‘can be’ = ‘It must be special’).
Typo: “sec” (‘dry’) instead of “sac” (‘bag’). Literally “I have some in my dry”.
Typo in an in-game satisfaction questionnaire: ‘possible‘.
Word omission (missing “que”). (= ‘And that is how your solitary journey begins’)
Word omission (missing “de”). (‘Also allows him to levitate’)
Contextual issue: “Équipé par” (‘Equipped by’) instead of “Équipé avec” (‘Equipped with’)
Contextual issue: Should be “Débloquer” or “Ouvrir” (‘Open’, to perform the action of unlocking the door – infinitive form) instead of “Débloqué” (‘Unlocked’)
Strange formulation: I would have put “notre linge” instead of only “de tous”. Doesn’t sound very idiomatic.
2 – Punctuation & interface issues
From top to bottom: 1) Space omission. 2) Two spaces instead of only one. 3) Issue with the color tag. Only speaker names should appear blue.
Colon “:” omission.
Green & red = typographical consistency issue, different types of ellipsis used. “. . .” is generally used instead of “…” in the game. Black = another double space.
The placement of this colon deeply stresses me out. Especially since it wasn’t necessary to put one here. + The fact that this character isn’t on the same line as the text shows that simple spaces have been put before special characters instead of non-breaking spaces, as the French typographical rules specify it. It is a norm in French localization to use the non-breaking space character to avoid this type of result.
1) The title of every character in the game is very often in the masculine form, regardless of the NPC’s gender. Here, it should be “Historienne” instead of “Historien”. I checked, and other romance languages such as Spanish made a distinction between masculine and feminine titles for most characters. This process has been more inconsistently done in French. 2) “Hi,.”
The same punctuation error is to be seen in multiple similar messages. This is likely due to the error getting into the Translation Memory. This shows these two messages have been simply copy-pasted and no proofreading work has been done.
All keyboard keys icons have been translated in the settings menu (e.g “Enter” into “Entrée”). However, they all appear untranslated elsewhere in the interface.
Oh btw, the game isn’t suited for ‘AZERTY’ keyboards and the inputs cannot be edited as of now… It basically means 99% of French players have to press the ‘move back’ key in order to move forward. Not that intuitive, if you ask me.
Fortunately, it has just been officially confirmed that the devs are working on a fix:
3 – Translation tags left in the game
In the first screenshot of Part2, we saw a little issue with a color tag. Here, they are ALL messed up. 7 tag issues in just one paragraph! And this happens in multiple parts of the game, I could add about 10 screenshots like this one. It honestly make it really difficult for the player to read the dialogues. At least we do know that the particular shade of blue used for speaker names is #37FFFF!
There are lots of line break tags issues.
Here too.
Here as well.
Hmm… Very interesting. Seems like every piece of text in the game has two interchangeable variations, one for male and another for female (the text loads accordingly to the gender you picked at the start of the game). Except that here, there’s something wrong with the tags.
The same issue seems to appear for all skins descriptions in the game.
Bonus
I somehow received a notification in Spanish in my mailbox?!
It’s kind of interesting to see that in the Spanish version, notices address the player in the masculine AND feminine form “Querido/a viajero/a”, whereas the French version always assumes the player is of the masculine gender “Cher voyageur”.
Conclusion
Here, I focused on the bad side of the work that has been done, but overall, I would say that Genshin Impact’s French localization is actually of very good quality, most of the dialogues have been cleverly localized, item descriptions are well written and easily comprehensible, and a excellent job has been made regarding trans-creation of place names and weapons in particular, the only real issue being that numerous typos and translation tags crept in, certainly because of a lack of time and/or budget allocated to LQA (it looks to me that looks like there has been no LQA/testing done whatsoever, especially since errors I found appeared very early on in the game and are often typos or interface-related issues.).
As we do not know the conditions under which the game has been translated, please do not simply blame the translators for these errors, it is often not their fault. All of this could have been easily avoided with a quick LQA check, but most companies prefer to save money localization-wise…
I hope this article has piqued your interest! If you are playing the game in another language, I would love to hear your opinion on its localization quality!
Hope you found what I wrote interesting! See you soon, loc peeps!
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