Guild Wars 2

Vikkela.7261:

Personally I hate the idea of encouraging people to not learn English and continue to only be able to communicate in their own language, it feels like you would help them keep shooting themselves in the foot.

TheRandomGuy.7246:

Vikkela.7261:

Personally I hate the idea of encouraging people to not learn English and continue to only be able to communicate in their own language, it feels like you would help them keep shooting themselves in the foot.

<comment about english speaking people not caring about other cultures and languages>

I should’ve probably added that English is not my native tongue, it’s a foreign language to me and my countrymen. I still have troubles with it and my accent is horrible, but, I was born bilingual speaking both Finnish and Swedish with my family. We learn English here as kids in school and are probably affected by the fact that only cartoons get dubbed, everything else is subbed (note that I am not trying to make it sound like everyone should do it like this, or that it would be a superior way)
Learning English does in no mean affect our ability to communicate with each other in our own language. I’ve read that some people actually imagine that people who start learning English will just abandon their own language and culture, how silly is that?
It helps us to communicate with foreigners globally, since English nowadays is what everyone speaks (yes, yes, go on and bring up the amount of people who speak Chinese, that oughta show me). Sorry France, you had your days and they are over, time to realise that and move on
I am not expecting anyone to master English or pronounce anything even remotely correctly, but c’mon, fellow Europeans, it’s 2015 and we have modern Western countries where there are people under 30 that can’t even speak a word of English

Latinkuro.9615:

It is not a.net’s fault your native language is not supported by the game, yet I do not see the portuguese or any other minority community starting a kerfuffle about it.

If you consider Brazil and other portuguese speaking countries, it is not a minority (having more speakers than russian and japanese). I am portuguese, yet I totally understand why it is not supported by the game.

Of course more language options are a good thing, but sadly we just can’t have them all, especially the least spoken.

This conversation seems to get needlesly heated for some individuals. ^^; Do you mind if I throw my two cents in?

I see some fellow Finns have already commented on this, put let me give another perspective on this. You see, despite being on that ridicilously awesome finnish school system, I have learned to write english way after everyone else, little after my twenties. I understood it pretty well before that, but I couldn’t write it. You see, I suffer from learning disability, which in my case is dyslexia.

I learned to write and read finnish closer to age 8, and even then I was very, very slow. I was age 10, when I finally learned to read inside my head instead of out loud. Age of 9 I started to learn english, I was terrible at it, one of my first tests was particulary funny when I was meant to write “people” and wrote “peapole”. Writing english was a nightmare. by high school I actually understood english, but still couldn’t write it. I got 5’s (thats from scale 4-10) from most of the classes. However, as finals came, I got M, which is equalent to 8, because I mostly had to just listen and read and write in finnish did I understand it. Last question was a essay, and I managed to utter just 5 sentences there, and they were technically unreadable. And thing is, in scale of severnes, my dyslexia is about medium, meaning it could be much, much worse.

Reason I write this is not to gain pity points, I have no need of such nonsense. I learned finally write and read english trough games, in fact.D I just wanted it out there to point out, that not-learning-language isn’t nessecerally sign of laziness. We don’t know topic starter’s age, educational background, possible learning difficulties, access to resources or knowledge of where to find those resources. That’s why it sounds a bit harsh to speak of ‘entitlement’. I do agree, that learning languages is good (see, I learned in the end did I? ) and should be encouraged, please consider that learning a language just isn’t as easy to some as it is to others. So let’s not be needlessly rude, ok? ^^

That said, I do have to point out that starting message wasn’t too polite either, people tend to answer aggressively to aggressive messages. Politeness takes long way.

Personally I think that fansubs would be very good idea, all and all. I bet there are fans who would be more than happy to translate the texts. Though of course, that has it’s downsides. Translations would be first partial, and quality control from Anet’s side would be hard unless they got someone who speaks the language which is used. this might cause some troublesome translations. Also, if we have livin world content which goes away in short time, there isn’t much time to translate that. But the idea would be lovely, and it could be helpful for some!

In huge, global games like this translations are always problematic, as well as several languages on chat. It would be nice to speak with friends with your native language via chat, but if there is issues with offensive names or harassment, Anet might have hard time to take action without translation of what is going on. We all know how awesome translations bing and google give to stuff…

TheRandomGuy.7246:

Vikkela.7261:

Personally I hate the idea of encouraging people to not learn English and continue to only be able to communicate in their own language, it feels like you would help them keep shooting themselves in the foot.

<comment about english speaking people not caring about other cultures and languages>

<comment about immature people dragging their mickey mouse lefty political views into a gaming forum and completely missing the point, big time>

It’s ALOT of work, that’s why :P
Beeing danish i’m used to not having native subtitles ^^
It doesn’t really bother me in an mmorpg.

Wow… Just wow… Sounds like some people have got everything they wanted or something.

I can understand that it sucks to live in a country that doesn’t teach English in school and then have games not released in their own language.

But I live in a country that does teach english and it is something you have to learn in this country. But thanks to some countrys my hopes of old Nintendo games comming to Europe was shredded becouse the companies couldn’t translate the game to (for example) Italian so they decided to not even release it in Europe at all.

You know what I did? Well if the game didn’t release in US iether I ordered it from Japan and I learned to read Japanese so I could play and understand the games.

kuben.9826:

@ OP Imagine You live in Poland. You know what? I’ve never seen MMO translated into polish and probably I’ll never see.

GW1 had a polish translation (+ Russian, Japanese, Korean and Bork! Bork! Bork!) ! It’s not a MMORPG, but at least a CORPG.

Anet, make it happen! Just bring all these languages back. (My native languages is already supported, but I still prefer the english client)

- sorry, 4 my english -

I’m just another italian player, askin’ for a localization, cause even if all of u can understand english/spanish/whatever pretty well, english is troublin’ sometimes for me. And if for me is troublin, for all my friends is unaccettable in 2015 don’t have an Italian Localization, while even World of Warcraft has done it. I honestly can’t blame them, when i try to invite them in gw2 and they just answer me “sorry dude, but i prefer to play something that i can fully enjoy”. Now, i can understand that a service like this has a cost (i’d pay 5k gems if needed, but whatever…), and legal issues for a community doing it for free may be real (?), but when i played wow in TBC expansion pack, there was (there’s still tbh) a feature called “addon”, and thanks to this feature players were able to customize the UI. One of my favourite addons was the Italian translation…. Why gw2 can’t do something like this?

I can read english, but i can’t enjoy it!
Sorry, but this is true: i hate listening npcs speaking a language that i can barely understand… it’s more a disturbing sound, than a voice… And a lot of other italians (or at least all my friends) think the same as i do. They all say to me the same thing: “Gw2 has a cool graphic, a nice gameplay, and interesting features, but i prefer to play something that i can fully enjoy”…
It’s not all about ignorance…

It would be interesting to remove the other localizations and just leave the “english” language, and see the drop of players in a month or 2. Not because no one can understand Magg saying “We need to cross magmafield to find Magmacyte” but because is another game experience to listen “Dobbiamo attraversare il campo di lava per trovare la Magmacite”.

Don’t just imagine… try it. Play a Black Temple (wow) in english language, and play it in italian, and then tell me. It’s not about defeating a boss and dropping its legendary dagger. It’s an adventure, a final dungeon, a piece of story…

Once more, sorry 4 my english, but it’s not my native language, perchè nella mia quotidianità, nel mio lavoro, e nelle mie relazioni sociali viene richiesta semplicemente una buona conoscenza dell’italiano, e se conosco due tre cose di inglese, è per semplice cultura e fortuna personale.

GG.

you know… the only way to learn foreign languages is by listening, reading and using it yourself.

many foreigners seem to think finnish education system is so amazing every finn excels in english. sad to tell you but that isn’t right. i have friends who had totally no interest towards english at school and now they’re playing gw2 (thanks to me) with their poor english skills. but you know what? they have improved greatly since because they HAVE to use english for there’s no support in finnish. and i’m thankful for a’net for not having finnish because learning english through gw2 has made the life of my friends so much easier. thanks to gw2 and a’net they can handle english on their own now.

so what was the point of my post? if you do nothing but complain you are not good enough at english to play you certainly will not learn it. and thins comes from a person who spent a year on exchange in a foreign country without speaking the language. every language is learnable if you only want to learn.

and fyi, if i had to play gw2 in finnish i would uninstall it on the spot.

That sucks
/15 characters

Akkrem.8157:

many foreigners seem to think finnish education system is so amazing every finn excels in english.

The difference from the Finnish education and the Brazilian education in english is that while students with no interest managed to improve their english later there, here in Brazil the best students will barely learn anything at all, and the average/uninterested students will only know how to count to 10 say a few colors and things like “sorry” and “welcome” and that is it, that is all you’ll be able to do after 5 years of english from just regular school.
I know english because I took some particular classes when younger and later I used it a lot on forums of the MMOs I played.

Spanish is included in the game, which should be good enough for Italians. Plus it makes sense to include Spanish, biggest Spanish speaking country right next to biggest EN country. Why Spain flag? idk. But with spanish they now can serve most of the western side of the world.

Italian? not much gain there other than Italy.

Germany and France have laws that prevent selling games there unless you translate both audio and texts.

Spanish is the language spoken by most native speakers in the world, after Chinese and before English. And the third in general, after English and Chinese.
Since it’s mostly Spanish-speakers the only ones in the world that are pigheaded about not learning English and wanting everything in Spanish, you have no choice but to translate that one if you want to sell in Spanish-speaking countries. Still, usually text is enough, so no need for audio for Spanish.

So, English, Spanish, German, and French are the bare minimum needed, any more would take extra resources, and it may be risky when starting. But who knows, maybe it could be added later.