That is not English. It’s not even ambiguous; it’s simply nonsense.
We’ve been telling you how to easily avoid this kind of stuff – which makes the writer look like an utter moron (or possibly a child) – for years. Yet nothing has changed. NOT. ONE. THING.
Your contempt for players is despicable and completely unacceptable for a company that makes real money from us.
Furthermore, when @Jeto and @Kafka and @Gman and others shelter @Sirrian and @Nimhain from this feedback, it insults your bosses and guarantees that they cannot do their job to fix the process problems (both amongst the writers and in the player-developer communication link, or lack thereof) that thereby ensure players are institutionally insulted and bullied by Infinity Plus Two.
I repeat. This is not acceptable, and never has been.
In Spanish, the text is pretty much straight forward and intelligible.
The scene depicted is that Gemhammer thinks that Dhrak-Zum (un)dead smiths could forge a key to maybe make it impossible for the Onyx Giant to enter through the Nexus gate (locking him in the Underworld, because, as seen in previous story entries, supposedly he’d been using the Umbral Nexus gate to enter Krystara) and do baddie things.
English is such an imprecise and fiddly language. It doesn’t surprise me that something can be said easily in Spanish and Russian, but remain troublesome in English, depending on your tolerance for grammatical imperfection.
As written, I find the sentence easy to understand in English, even if it may not be the very best English. Since it’s perfectly acceptable to write “lock the Onyx Giant out…,” it’s easy to see why “lock the Onyx Giant from…” appears to be too. I’d expect for most people it’s just fine. It’s not insulting or intolerable, really. Just a bit awkward.
But I suppose some of us more, ahem, elderly types recall when writing was a profession, requiring professional skill. Ah, those were the days, when you could write indignant letters to the local newspaper mocking a missed misspelling! Alas, such things are all too common, even in such previously reliable greats as The New York Times. Typos appear regularly in books printed by reputable publishers. No one has a budget for proofreaders any more. If these things cause such a strong reaction in a reader, they might be advised to learn some personal coping mechanism. It’s not worth shortening your life over some less than stellar prose.
I find the first part of the sentence even harder to interpret.
Gemhammer believed the dead smiths of Dhrak-Zhum could craft a key.
The what smiths now?
The dead smiths? Dead smiths shouldn’t be able to craft keys.
The undead smiths? Eh, works - I guess.
The Dead-Smiths? Really awkward.
The Smiths of Death / The Death-Smiths? I like the sound of that, has a 13-year-old-Norwegian-Black-Metal edge to it.
The complaint is that the verb being used – to “lock [somebody] from” – kind of just doesn’t exist.
The correct wording would usually be to “lock [somebody] out” (or “in”), or in this case “behind” or “inside” is probably a better fit.
This certainly isn’t the first error in Campaign lore texts. I’d have to consult which campaign/week it was but there was one text that said specifically “the Wood Elves of Silverglade” when they obviously meant Forest of Thorns.
Mistakes in English prepositions are almost always the easiest way to recognize when text has been written by a non-native speaker. (Many foreign trolls pretending to be citizens have been outed this way). Native speakers do make errors with prepositions, but they’re usually the same very common errors you see over and over (“different to” instead of “different from”) or regional variations (“different than” vs “different from”). Maybe the text writing has been outsourced to Fiverr. There are numerous errors and inconsistencies on troop texts as well.
Not even the first error this campaign
They ‘’ a word earlier. The suspense!
First week had superfluous and missing commas (in the same sentence no less!).
Is it Giant or giant? Let’s just go with … big’uns.
How often can one use ‘so’ in subsequent sentences?
Is it really ‘and and’ or just ‘and’?
“we had Ruby Shard”. “we had a” / “…Shards”? Come on!!!
Next week’s lore has a typo too. Also uses the same awkward preposition for ‘lock’.
It’s worse when you read all of it in one go.
SPOILER: All lore entries for this campaign
00 We received news from Keghammer that a new type of Giant had been spotted in Stormheim. Apparently it was made of crystal, and was wreaking havoc. We set out to investigate.
01 We collected some Sapphire Shards from the new Giants. Unfamiliar with them, Keghammer suggested we meet with a scholar, Fakyr the Wise, in the Drifting Sands who knew more about gemstones than Dwarves and Gnomes combined.
02 Fakyr the Wise told us these shards we found were the blood of a new giant. He sensed there may be a threat to Krystara from these new creatures, and and we agreed to see where else they might be. We’d some rumours of trouble in the Forest of Thorns…
03 We had some Emerald Shards now too. We figured a place of power like the Broken Spire might harbour some Ruby Giants so we set a course for there next.
04 While we fought lots of fiery creatures in the Broken Spire, none of them were Ruby Giants. So we set course for the Pridelands - another kingdom where we knew the power of fire was strong.
05 We found the Ruby Giants, and now had Ruby Shard too! Looking for Giants like this was very hit and miss though, so we set out for Urskaya to talk with Baba Yaga. She may have been annoying, but she knew many things.
06 We helped out Baba Yaga, and in exchange she told us the most likely places to find the other Crystal Giants (Karakoth & Whitehelm). She also warned us of a threat to Krystara and the Underworld - a mythical Onyx Giant who had tried to enter this world and conquer it for many centuries may now be using the Umbral Nexus Gate to enter Krystara
07 The first of the Giants Baba Yaga told us about - the Amethyst Giants of Karakoth - had been defeated. We now had some Amethyst Crystals, and I posed the question to Keghammer and Gemhammer of what we should do with them.
08 Finally we had Topaz Shards - giving us 5 different colors. Gemhammer believed the dead smiths of Dhrak-Zhum could craft a key that might be used to lock the Onyx Giant from the gate of Nexus.
09 We had a Prismatic Key from Dhrak-Zhum. All that remained was to go to te Umbral Nexus and try to lock the Onyx Giant from our world.
10 Finally, we reached the Gate of the Umbral Nexus, and used the key. It worked! Krystara and the Underworld had been saved from the powerful forces of the Onyx Giant.
What a horrific Russian text. It’s an example of poor translation. Moreover, it talks about Umbral Nexus, while in the English text you see “the gate of Nexus”.
Just to be clear: the insult is that these errors continue to happen, even though inserting a grammar checker into the process would very easily avoid them.
For those who don’t know, I believe the foreign translators are players who have “volunteered” for the position. I expect they are paid, but it’s hardly their primary job. Yet even they, it seems, care more about getting it right than the devs (at least, sometimes).
I love the discussion about translation!
I recently saw SBS’s Chinese language translator speaking about her job (SBS is Australia’s multicultural TV channel). What I found remarkable was that she focussed heaps on getting the nuance from the source language correct, but completely failed to understand how important it is to get the English sounding right. And her spoken English, at least, was not great. Of course, if they’re doing it right, she probably works with a native English speaker.
I totally agree with one of the other posters, about translations from non-native English speakers. In fact, I frequently provide feedback to games and media companies that they need to get all their text checked by a native English speaker. Sadly, it’s something of a losing battle.
FYI: Australian news recently reported that every aspect of English education except spelling is showing significant deterioration amongst school kids. I think it was over each of the last five years. I put the blame on parents who learned to think of school as a chore rather than an opportunity.
I see your point. I didn’t think non-human grammar checkers were all that good, but I guess they’ve improved quite a lot over the years.
I think there’s a whole host of reasons, from spending a lot of time reading other people’s errors on a screen (it reinforces those errors, even if you’re aware that they are errors when you see them), to parents and teachers who aren’t themselves educated well enough, to a culture that simply does not value the written word as much as it used to.
Why read when you can listen to an audiobook or podcast, or watch a video? Because if you’re in the habit of reading and know how to skim to get to the info you need, it’s so, so, so much faster (unless you’ve got an atypical visual processing system in your brain, like dyslexia, or blindness, in which case, wider availability of audio must be a godsend.)
In any case, I’m not sure it matters in the long run. Very few people get paid for their grammar skills, and technology has rendered them much less useful. It could render reading and writing pointless (from a monetary standard, and that’s what education administrators seem to care about), I suppose. What will divide the masses into literate and illiterate in the future could well be their ability to program or not.
Edit: School is a chore. I mean, I’m glad I went, but I have never used anything I learned in the public school system or at university beyond the age of ten in any job I’ve ever done. There was no opportunity there for anything better than I would have got with a 6th grade education.
