Monday, March 30, 2009

Lost in translation

While reading a story on Joystiq, I found the following quote regarding how weather affects gameplay in Alan Wake:

"Everything in the game can be influenced by the weather. If you are running the car will run conditions will be worse by heavy rain, than if the weather was good ... the weather is dynamic, since it will influence how you play the game."

Now since Joystiq's post is actually referring to a post on IGN and this quote, horrible as it is, is presented as a direct quote from that IGN article, I went to the source and double-checked that the error was there in the original. Nothing to be found. Turns out, it's actually a quote from a Google translation of a Norwegian article. And of course, the automatic Google translation does a horrible job of it. This was referenced in the IGN article, but not Joystiq. In any event, I would have expected at least a [sic] tag or some reference that this was a translation from the Norwegian original. I'm not sure what the actual citation rules are for a situation like this, but I feel this to be a huge omission.

Joystiq post: http://www.joystiq.com/2009/03/28/new-alan-wake-details-emerge-into-the-cold-hard-light-of-day/

IGN post: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/966/966715p1.html

Google Translation: http://translate.google.com.au/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamer.no%2Farticle.php%3FarticleId%3D764&sl=no&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

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