Official Korean Translation Feedback

[jeffrey8777]

Hello, I know Korean translation just came out but I quickly skimmed through the gamedata.po and have some feedback. I'll probably add more as I continue reading through everything. Steam doesn't have a Korean language sub forum yet so I guess I'll post the feedback here.

Before anything, I try to exclude words that have a strong cultural bias because Kenshi is obviously not a game that's set on a medieval European world.

1. Translation of "Crossbow" as "석궁"
The word "석궁" is commonly used to refer to European crossbows and modern crossbows, but first, it's not a historically accurate term since it literally means "stone bow", and historical Asian crossbows are called "쇠뇌" or "노". There's nothing really wrong with using that term, but it has a cultural bias towards European weaponry and it can trigger history buffs like me.

2. Gutterhead and his wanted paper maybe?
In the current official translation Gutterhead's name is just transliterated as "거터 헤드" and his wanted paper's talking about him looking like a literal gut. I assumed it meant gutter as in the other name of beak things, but I dunno, maybe it's supposed to be about actual guts.

3. Beak things
Currently, beak things are transliterated as "비크". It's just beak. Or bikeu? Anyway beak isn't really a commonly used english term in South Korea, so Korean players wouldn't hear that name and think it's about them having a beak. They'd probably just think "oh, that's a rather interesting name" and move on. I translated it since I thought it was more important to convey the meaning of the name, but if they think keeping the proper nouns are more important then I guess that's it.

4. Rather odd choice of weapon names?
The weapons in question are "moon cleaver" as "문 클리버", heavy polearm as "헤비 폴암", staff as "스태프", desert sabre as "데저트 세이버", and Plank as"대검". The issue with weapon names is inconsistent translation and transliteration. Other cleavers were properly translated as "푸주칼", but for some reason moon cleaver is just transliterated as "문 클리버". My mod did translate the moon cleaver as "그믐칼", meaning crescent blade, but even if they wanted to get rid of my translation there's no reason to transliterate the whole name when other cleaver weapons get a proper translated name. I think heavy polearm is just a typo since other words with heavy get a translation but this one is transliterated as "heabi polam". Staff is also an odd choice since they aren't something uncommon in Korea and there are several different words they can choose, but it's just transliterated as "seutaepeu". Desert sabre I also think is a typo since other sabres get a proper translation but only this guy is transliterated as "daejeoteu saeibeo". Plank was translated as "대검" which usually means greatsword. There isn't anything really wrong with this translation, but I thought the word plank added more to the lore because instead of calling a big fat sword a greatsword they call it a plank.

5. "Scavenger" as "청소부"
Scavengers as in a category of animals are translated as "청소부", but as an occupation for people "청소부" means cleaner or janitor. Mostly an issue caused by Korean not really having a word for "scanvenging". I don't think Kenshi actually has any cleaner?

Okay, I think that's all for now. Overall the people who did the official translation did a great job. Some parts they did a lot better than I could ever dream of. I just personally feel like it's a lot flatter because of the prevalent use of transliteration and Chinese character derived words. I guess I'm just a bit nitpicky.

Edit: Okay I lied there are some issues. It seems like they kept some of my original dialogue translations that seemed okay and forgot that they changed the names for several stuff. For example in the "Bayan sees player carrying enemy" dialogue he uses all of the noun translations I made, not the ones present in the official Korean translation. Maybe this is a bug on the FCS showing my translation, but I deleted everything and reinstalled and same issue. If the actual Korean translation has noun mismatches that is a very big problem.

[jeffrey8777]

I read through a lot more of the dialogue and it seems like the official translation decided to use a lot of the dialogue from the Korean translation mod without fixing them. I see a lot of inconsistent proper nouns being used. For example the current official translation's gamedata.po translates "Bugmaster" as "벌레의 왕", but Bayan and Esata refer to him as "벌레주인", which is the name used in the mod. Using the mods dialogue is fine but they should've made the proper nouns consistent.
Also in the "biome Holy Nation" file refers to "Phoenix" as "피닉스", the transliteration, even though the gamedata.po file calls him "불사조", a translated name. The "피닉스" transliteration is actually a mistake present in the mod because mid translation I decided a translation would be better and forgot to fix it. The typo of translating "Narko's Spawn" as "나르코의 하수" is also present in the file. It should be "나르코의 하수인". Another typo that carried over from the mod. There are a lot more but I think I'll try to compile a more organized document of issues rather than pointing out all of them here.

I haven't read all of the dialogues since there's like 20000 words, but from what I've read currently, it is quite concerning since the mod's dialogue isn't that great and it seems like a lot of them are still there.