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Hello everyone out there! I'm posting about the localization of Halo 4 mostly, but general discussion seemed like the appropriate forum. What I'm about to tell might sound strange to some of you, as I've understood that localizations are usually well received and sometimes needed. I live in Finland and bought my copy of Halo 4 from my local game store on the day of release. Apparently only Nordic editions are sold in Finland, along with Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Starting the game, I was surprised at the menu being in Finnish. "That's ok", I thought, and starting the campaign I noticed the Finnish subtitles. Now I had an uneasy feeling. After the opening cinematics I finally woke up as Master Chief and was ready for my next gun-blazing kick-ass adventure. Then the HUD came up - in Finnish. Now I was almost angry. I paused the game, browsed through the settings, trying to find the option to change the interface language. Couldn't find it as it apparently doesn't exist. Googling the issue, I could have changed the location setting of my console to UK, which would have solved the problem but also would have caused new ones with LIVE functionality and credit card payments and probably my Netflix-subscription. Even if it didn't, it's an inconvenience. You see, I'm fluent in English, always have been, and I like my games in English. As a consumer, I feel underestimated because of the forced localization. Here are some arguments to explain my point of view. If there are any other Nordic members, please share your opinions on this matter. First, and most importantly, LOCALIZATION DESTROYS IMMERSION. I'm pretty sure that in the world of Halo, wherein I love to be immersed, UNSC didn't choose Finnish as the language of their combat-related software. Nor does Master Chief speak Finnish. Only 5 million people speak Finnish in the real world, so I doubt many would speak it in the Halo universe. (Although, in Reach, we've heard Hungarian, which is a partly related language.) Second, THE FINNISH IN THE GAME IS BAD. Finnish is a hard language, probably one of the hardest in the world. It gets even harder when you have to make up technical or magical terms (and science fiction has tons of them) or translate terms that don't have real-world counterparts. So whoever translated the game decided to cut some corners and leave English word in the Finnish text. For example, the Light rifle is called "Valokivääri", a direct translation of the word. But the Boltshot is just Boltshot. And Suppressor became "Suppressori" - it's the original word in a mouth-fitting form, not a translation at all. On top of that, the grammar is bad at times, and some words are translated to meaningless word monsters that are, for me at least, easier to understand in English than in Finnish. These are common problems in games. Assassins's Creed 3 has a forced Finnish HUD too. So far, the only good localizations I have seen came from Maxis in SimCity 4 and The Sims series. Third, THE LANGUAGES GET MIXED UP ANYWAY. The dialog is in English, HUD and subs in Finnish, weapons and map elements in Finnish and English and in multiplayer almost everyone speaks English. Even for a fluent speaker such as myself this brings a lot of problems. It's hard to concentrate on the game, when the constant shifting of languages gets your attention. On top of that, if I'm playing split-screen with a friend, we speak Finnish to each other. Now I actually have to read and learn special Halo 4 vocabulary (weapons, places, names, whatnot) so that if, for example, someone in multiplayer tells me to go somewhere, I know the exact place and don't have to guess the Finnish word for it. (Yes, the map locations in MP are in Finnish...) Fourth, LOCALIZATION IS BAD FOR LEARNING. In Finland, subtitles are traditionally used in movies and TV instead of dubbing. This has a positive impact on a crucial skill, on a national level: reading. Heck, I learned to read watching TV and I learned basic English playing King's Quest 3 where you had a parser to give commands to your character. My guess is that subtitles are mostly chosen over dubbing in other Nordic countries too. (Nordics, please confirm this if you can!) The reason for this s that Nordic languages have relatively little speakers, so most of us HAVE to learn English or another major language if we are to succeed. And it all comes down to this: game developers and publishers all around the world, please stop forcing the localization! Make a simple option to change the overall language to English/original language regardless of the player's location and the edition of the game. If you at 343 read this, do you have any opinion on the issue and are these matters generally handled by the developers or the publishers? I'd also like to hear comments from countries where localization and dubbing are common, such as in Germany. How do you feel about localization and have you encountered similar issues? Thank you for reading. Peace, love and headshots, my friends!
