Hello everyone,

So like probably half of the 360 owners I've just finished halo 3. Only finished it on normal, might try heroic one day, but I love halo because it's fast and action packed, so dying every ten minute kinda defeat the whole point of the experience I'm trying to get when playing a halo game. So yes finishing halo 3 on normal is easy and can be done pretty fast but still I have no regrets.

But it's not another blog entry about halo 3, at least not entirely.

The only thing I hated in this game, is a recurring one: no english langage on the French version !!!

I don't understand why we, as a society, can't come to understand that translating is wrong. I know that it's sadly necessary, because French gamers are before anything else French and therefor can't speak or understand English (I'm actually having college level English that can be resume to "hello my name is xxx, I like xxx"). But we are a growing few who decided to make the effort, to manage to understand the langage (I will not pretend I've mastered it) so that we can enjoy many forms of modern entertainment the way they were meant to, and should be rewarded by the ability to do so.

The problem of translation is also persistent in tv shows and movies, that can litteraly be ruined by translations. From simply bad translation to poor voice acting (during the last two seasons of friends some of the voices of the main characters actually changed), and bad lips synchronisation.

It seems like translators like to change stuff, probably because they believe they are better than the original writers; That's how C3PO became Z6PO in the original trilogy (becoming for some reason C3PO again in the new trilogy) or why the millenium falcon can actually bear like 3 names!

Video games are of course no strangers to the problem. And halo 3 is a great case of this. I've configured my 360 to English langage so that whenever a game gets more than only one langage it will choose English. But Halo doesn't fit into this category, if you bought it in France it's gonna speak French. Odly enough the subtitles and menu screen are gonna be in English. (and I've spoted at least one cortana intervention in English, go figure....). This allowed me to compare the translation to the original text. And well while it stick to the general idea, even though sometimes the choices were odd to say the least, there are sometimes, though they are rare, when the translation is not reflecting the truth. Biggest one of all: the chief became "major" (I've checked with the subtitles and everytime he is called major in the French version, Chief is used in the English one), you're right guys you are spending like a week translating this game you should get to decide how the main character is called.

Even worse, the voice acting is really inferior to what I've heard on the videos online, and that's the sadest part. Some games really gain from their voice acting (I think gamespot even has a review badge for this), and for regionalisation considerations we get screwed out of it. A studio is paying big bucks for a famous actor to speak as an in game character? Sorry this money is irrevelant in my country. At least when they translate and dubbed an animated movie they try to hire famous French actors to do it

I don't mind the general principle of dubbing, if people are to lazy to learn the most commonly spoken langage in the world fine by me that'll make is easier for me to find a job, but we should have a choice. I think that's why dvd worked that well, because we finally had a choice to watch a movie in it's original langage. And it's really sad that not all of games allow for this choice, that some games force your native langage on you, because considering how much smaller the French video game market is, (less people and a smaller proportion of gamers) dubbing a game will always go poorly, there's simply not enough money to do it well. What really makes me cry is that when a game doesn't have a translation, it will reflect poorly on his French review score !! Come on really? Madden is a lesser game because there's no French in the audio? Is there even someone here that would play US football and not be able to understand English?

I guess the problem also reflects with japanese games but probably to a lesser extend. Because when they translate those in English they can put much more money into it because the market for the English translation is much bigger. Even then I guess really hard core japanese rpg fans will enjoy them much more in the langage they were meant to be heard.

Hopefully this will follow the same path that movies followed with dvd, and that tv shows are starting to take, and we will all be allowed to play our games the way we choose to. But considering that video games already use the technologies that allowed for multilangage in other medias, I'm not too hopefull. Maybe it's just a space problems, like putting more than one langage on one disk take up too much space (but then why can some games allow it?). Maybe ps3 owners are less subjected to this problem, because it uses blueray. Still it's sad, and I really think that playing a game in it's original langage is better, and that even on an economical point it makes more sence to publish one copy of the game for all of Europe (because we do sometimes have multilangage manuals) but well I'm not a game publisher so I probably can't understand the secret reasons behind all this.

It's just one of the many reasons why being a French gamer sucks. Even though right now the biggest reason it sucks for me is that I only have one friends equipped with a 360 and he doesn't even have xbox live yet, won't be able to play the Halo with friends...