Native English speakers... please, help me :)

voivodak · May 2013

Guys of the foundry, I have to ask you a big favor.
After the publication of my first quest I received a lot of feedbacks and I thank you for this.

The majority of them were positive (from 3 stars and up). I noticed, however, that many reviewers penalized me (and rightly so) for the bad translation in English.
You can imagine how this can be annoying, especially if the rest of the quest seems to be done well (rooms, history, encounters, etc. etc.).

At this point I would like to ask a friendly native English speakers to play my quest and note down the most horrific and important mistakes.

I'm not asking to give me a correct translation of ALL the dialogues, but simply a "clean".
I can return the favor with reviews, videos, and French translations. I know it's not much

. Think of it more as a request for sos

hflord1 · May 2013

What's the short code to your quest? I can give it a look later tonight.

Nevermind, found the code

werealchemist · May 2013

It's hard to believe that players downrate Foundry content for stuff like that, it's just sad...

zovya · May 2013

I didn't think anyone actually read the text in quests.

yospeck · May 2013

werealchemist wrote: »

It's hard to believe that players downrate Foundry content for stuff like that, it's just sad...

I dunno, it can be a struggle to get through stuff if the English is bad (thought there's varying degrees, but where do you draw the line?). If people are 3-starring but saying "the English needs to be better" then it spurs the author on to do something about it. If they 5-starred it, but did actually feel annoyed/frustrated/deterred because of the English, then where is the incentive for the author to change it?

People dislike quests for all manner of reasons, besides just being trolls, if it's a valid reason then that's what the voting system is for.

voivodak · May 2013

hflord1 wrote: »

What's the short code to your quest? I can give it a look later tonight.

Nevermind, found the code

Thank you mate

@werealchemist : I want to clarify that my doesn't want to be a critique.
Everyone is free to do what he wants.
I personally avoid to give 3 stars because of the errors in the dialogues, maybe I can give it 4 (even when I play quests with my own language), but then again, is a personal choice

drakedge2 · May 2013

I will happily offer what help I can. I think it is terrible that some crass English speakers would down rate you like that.

voivodak · May 2013

thank you so much everyone

Feel free to ask reviews in return (if I have not already done)

drakedge2 · May 2013

Would a video help explain it? I could record it, publish it on youtube and make it private so that only you could see it perhaps?

voivodak · May 2013

is a nice idea, so I can control them better too

slaidz · May 2013

I rated you a 3/5 and I understand English isn't your native language. I'd be happy to help you, though it'd be easier if you copied all the dialogue and pasted it in a word document. I'd be happy to go through all the text for you.

dugada · May 2013

I need some help too :-/
If there is anybody interesting to help with my quests (also in future) I would be grateful
Sure, I will be glad to help you somehow also (review, test, or what you need)

Just send me pm, pls, I have already my texts in doc form

kamaliicious · May 2013

I've made a quest where someone speaks some dialog lines in a language the player doesn't speak (well, it's unlikely there will be too many players who speak it, they just get an easter egg as it's real dialog translated). The story explains they are speaking in their own language. If the player yells at the npc that they should speak in common, waves of extra encounters show up depending on how many times they complain.

The non-english dialog even tells players what will be happening to people who complain.

tarum89 · May 2013

I got the same problem

It's not easy to fix

crok2 · May 2013

tarum89 wrote: »

I got the same problem It's not easy to fix

Ironically, our best English writer here is (I think) a Swede!

drakedge2 · May 2013

Voivodak, Tsumoro and I just finished your quest, the video should be up soon. This is easily a 5/5 quest. What you could do is send me the Dialogue if you liked and I will read through it and help cleaning up the language with out losing the story. I loved the story it was great, the only trouble, like you said, was the language.

I forgot that it was you when we were playing it lol, otherwise i would have identified that a lot earlier, but with how it read we guessed at it anyhow.

slaidz · May 2013

Drake, I totally agree with you in regards to this being a 5/5 quest if the language was cleaned up. Like I said earlier, I'd be happy to go through the text if I received a copy of it.

drakedge2 · May 2013

slaidz wrote: »

Drake, I totally agree with you in regards to this being a 5/5 quest if the language was cleaned up. Like I said earlier, I'd be happy to go through the text if I received a copy of it.

Exactly, it's the only thing that keeps it at a 3 star for me (not a bad score 3 is average) with the dialogue cleaned up, its a breath taking quest, there were a couple graphic glitches which i point out during the video (taking 8 hours to render with an i7 12 logic processor, 32gb ram and SSD drives lol yay 1080p).

I will start uploading it after it is done with the render

voivodak · May 2013

I just finished putting all the dialogues in a word document. If you write me your email address I'll send the file.

thanks in advance guys, I really appreciate

drakedge2 · May 2013

voivodak wrote: »

I just finished putting all the dialogues in a word document. If you write me your email address I'll send the file.

thanks in advance guys, I really appreciate

Of course, the quest is awesome, and the story is great, the dialogue just makes it hard to get through the story and read it. I did not notice any bugs, but i did point out some suggestions for artistic nature.

I also feel that the quest might be very hard for a solo player above level 30.

voivodak · May 2013

Quest dialogues fixed. I have to thank slaidz for the help with the translation and drakedge2 and Tsumoro for their video.
Now I hope that my quest will be most appreciated.

Great foundry community. I'm touched

jetah · May 2013

you could, maybe, put the foundry quest up on the wiki. This would allow people to go through and correct it as needed.

you could call the page Foundry - In The Streams of Inferno.

The wiki could be used to add more depth (if needed). Maybe what the community needs is a Foundry Wiki. Keeping it separate from the game information wiki.

drakedge2 · May 2013

Awesome! I can't wait to play it again, you really put a lot of work into it!

tilt42 · May 2013

An important thing to note for those of you asking for help to point out mistakes in grammar: (and yes, I've seen this happen often)

Grammar isn't your most important problem if people criticize your English. Your problem is probably your sentence structuring, your use of words and subtle meanings, the personality of a piece of dialogue, and so on. This kind of thing is HARD, which is why so few people bother with it.

Asking people to point out mistakes in your grammar in a finished Foundry quest isn't going to do much good beyond removing the most blatant of mistakes. If your language skills are lacking (which is fine. Nobody is expecting us to be excellent writers in this game), a bigger restructuring of your text might be in order. It might not even be possible to fix any issues by replacing the contents of dialog boxes. Entire dialogues might have to be completely replaced.

My tip to those of you who struggle with this part of quest creation and who really want to give your quests a little extra, is to team up with someone who knows how to write well. There might be really excellent writers out there who'd like to make something for Neverwinter but who don't want to dive into the technical stuff in the Foundry. Give these people your first draft of all dialogue in the quest, before you add it to the Foundry, and then use what they give you back to build the actual in-game dialogues.

Writing is a skill that takes patience and a deep interest in the written word, and not everyone has both or even either of those. What country you come from and what language you speak is of less importance. I'm Norwegian for example. English isn't my native language. My knowledge of writing comes from reading lots of books, for the most part.

Native English speakers... please, help me :)

Comments