On November 1st, Elder Scrolls Online released the Official Simplified Chinese localization patch after nearly a decade of its release. However, the patch ended up to angered the Chinese players due to the irresponsible, disaster-grade translation.
Elder Scrolls Online is an MMORPG released in 2014. It was not easy for Chinese players to enjoy the game. Elder Scrolls Online only had NA and EU servers, and it did not have Chinese localization at that moment. But still, many Chinese players decided to spend their time exploring the Tamriel and helped other Chinese players do so. Some were joking that they were hardworking English learners while playing the game.
No wonder when on June 15th, Bethesda officially announced the long-awaited Chinese localization patch would be released, those players were excited to shout out with joy. But when the patch came, they were extremely disappointed.
The players were excited about the upcoming Chinese localization patch.
Players will encounter dozens of clumsy translations only 3 minutes after the character creation. Norianwe, the NPC who will guide the players in the tutorial, starts to talk ridiculous words that literally means, “Can you hear me I don’t know and I don’t know” or “put your ears close to your ear”.
In fact, some players complained that they had to guess the original English text to understand the Chinese translations. After trying by themselves, players surprisingly found that even machine translations such as Google translate actually perform better than this localization patch.
A screenshot of the negative reviews about the poorly performed official Chinese support
NPC dialogs are not the only translation issue Chinese players faced, there are weirdly named items, inconsistent proper noun translation, bugs that only happen in the Chinese version, and so on. Even the “Credit” button in the main menu is translated into “scores.” The Chinese players did not feel respected by the game provider, and instead, they felt Bethesda was irresponsible.
A weird UI bug in the tutorial that only appears in Chinese language UI.
Some players tried to switch back to the unofficial localization plugins made by players only to find the plugin was no longer available, and the group chat was banned for an unknown reason.
UPDATE:
On November 7th, BethesdaAsia officially posts a letter to Chinese players as an apology. They claim that they are working on improving the translation of the patch and will inform the players of the progress.
Source: Baidu