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Review: Hunter: The Reckoning (5th Edition):: Review of the German translation
Posted: Sat, 16 May 03:07:51
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Summary for the impatient:
The German translation is one of the worst I've ever read. No one should buy it. 0/10
Full review text:
I played Hunter a few times back in the day, when the Revised Edition was quite new. I liked it, but as life goes, my regular game group had more and more trouble finding time for regular meet-ups and we slowly drifted apart.
Fast-forward to a few years ago. I got back into RPG gaming with family and friends, and I was thrilled to learn about H5 and found the game premise to be even better than the previous version. Since not all family members speak English on a high enough level to read a complete rulebook, especially not if it contains some uncommon vocabulary, I sought out the German version of the rulebook. The translation was done by Ulisses Spiele. Not a small company, so I thought everything was in good hands. I paid 60€ and got the book delivered. So far, so good.
The small story at the beginning sets the tone really well, and I began reading the book with excitement for the things to come. I noticed a few typos here and there. Odd, but I can overlook a few mistakes. We're all human, after all.
A few pages more, and the run-on sentences started to get to me. A few more full stops here and there would really add to the overall reading experience, and the typos started to add up as well. Didn't anyone proofread this?
After a while I noticed I wasn't even really paying attention to what I was reading; I was just on the lookout for the next mistake. And mistakes I found. Lots of them.
I knew there was no way I could give this book to any family member to read. They'd think I wanted to play a joke on them, giving them a book of such low quality.
My breaking point was pages 34 and 35. Yes, that early in the rulebook (over 250 pages were left unread!), but the mistakes were so numerous I couldn't overlook them any longer.
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I got this image from the Ulisses website. It does say "work in progress", but this is exactly how it appears in the finished product. I'll try to translate this catastrophe of a translation back to English.
Left page, bottom left paragraph:
"A destroyed vampire can not the mind to influence, but who knows, inhowfar a captured vampire is able to be". Um, okay?
Left page, second column, second sentence:
"And apart from, the quarry usually moves faster [...]"
Seems like someone accidentally the whole thing?
Page 35, first column, upper half. There is a list, separated by full stops, instead of commas. At least they didn't start the next point of the list with an uppercase letter. Credit where it's due.
Second line under the "Influencer" header: "[...] and it would have and by a part of the military". Why the second and?
After that I flipped to random pages later in the book. I found obvious mistakes on 2 out of 3 tries. So it's not like you have to go out of your way to find them.
This product is so bad, I even voiced my dissatisfaction to the company. Something I usually never do. But I paid a lot of money for something that's not worth the paper it was printed on, to be honest. (Again, credit where it's due: the people handling my complaint were very professional, AND I got my money back without any problems)
I can only advise anyone to not buy anything from Ulisses Spiele anymore. I feel sorry for anyone working there, trying their best, but being let down by their employer.
Apparently bad copy editing is part of their CI (at least there are a lot of complaints on the web regarding their poor editing standards). This book right here? There is a name listed under "copyeditor" and "proofreading", but I am 100% certain this person never saw a single line before it was published, or every single editor's note simply got ignored.
Seriously, you have to go out of your way to release a product this bad. If it hadn't been so damn expensive, I would have kept the book as an oddity.
Posted: Sat, 16 May 03:07:51
by LordHorst
Summary for the impatient:
The German translation is one of the worst I've ever read. No one should buy it. 0/10
Full review text:
I played Hunter a few times back in the day, when the Revised Edition was quite new. I liked it, but as life goes, my regular game group had more and more trouble finding time for regular meet-ups and we slowly drifted apart.
Fast-forward to a few years ago. I got back into RPG gaming with family and friends, and I was thrilled to learn about H5 and found the game premise to be even better than the previous version. Since not all family members speak English on a high enough level to read a complete rulebook, especially not if it contains some uncommon vocabulary, I sought out the German version of the rulebook. The translation was done by Ulisses Spiele. Not a small company, so I thought everything was in good hands. I paid 60€ and got the book delivered. So far, so good.
The small story at the beginning sets the tone really well, and I began reading the book with excitement for the things to come. I noticed a few typos here and there. Odd, but I can overlook a few mistakes. We're all human, after all.
A few pages more, and the run-on sentences started to get to me. A few more full stops here and there would really add to the overall reading experience, and the typos started to add up as well. Didn't anyone proofread this?
After a while I noticed I wasn't even really paying attention to what I was reading; I was just on the lookout for the next mistake. And mistakes I found. Lots of them.
I knew there was no way I could give this book to any family member to read. They'd think I wanted to play a joke on them, giving them a book of such low quality.
My breaking point was pages 34 and 35. Yes, that early in the rulebook (over 250 pages were left unread!), but the mistakes were so numerous I couldn't overlook them any longer.
I got this image from the Ulisses website. It does say "work in progress", but this is exactly how it appears in the finished product. I'll try to translate this catastrophe of a translation back to English.
Left page, bottom left paragraph:
"A destroyed vampire can not the mind to influence, but who knows, inhowfar a captured vampire is able to be". Um, okay?
Left page, second column, second sentence:
"And apart from, the quarry usually moves faster [...]"
Seems like someone accidentally the whole thing?
Page 35, first column, upper half. There is a list, separated by full stops, instead of commas. At least they didn't start the next point of the list with an uppercase letter. Credit where it's due.
Second line under the "Influencer" header: "[...] and it would have and by a part of the military". Why the second and?
After that I flipped to random pages later in the book. I found obvious mistakes on 2 out of 3 tries. So it's not like you have to go out of your way to find them.
This product is so bad, I even voiced my dissatisfaction to the company. Something I usually never do. But I paid a lot of money for something that's not worth the paper it was printed on, to be honest. (Again, credit where it's due: the people handling my complaint were very professional, AND I got my money back without any problems)
I can only advise anyone to not buy anything from Ulisses Spiele anymore. I feel sorry for anyone working there, trying their best, but being let down by their employer.
Apparently bad copy editing is part of their CI (at least there are a lot of complaints on the web regarding their poor editing standards). This book right here? There is a name listed under "copyeditor" and "proofreading", but I am 100% certain this person never saw a single line before it was published, or every single editor's note simply got ignored.
Seriously, you have to go out of your way to release a product this bad. If it hadn't been so damn expensive, I would have kept the book as an oddity.
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