Earlier this week I received my copy of Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer… and inside awaited a nasty surprise. You see, contrary to my previous Neverwinter Nights 2: Limited Edition package, this time Atari had foolishly seen fit to translate the entire package… into Dutch. And as with any Dutch translations of games: it is beyond horrid!

Imagine a company selling their game with a manual and cover translated by throwing the original language format into a translating machine, like Babelfish. That’s exactly what was done to achieve Mask of the Betrayer’s pitiful excuse for a Dutch manual. Or at least, that’s the only sensible conclusion I can make after going crazy trying to read just a few lines of this nonsensical manual. It’s worthless trash - and the worst part is that this wasn’t even particularly surprising.

Let’s go into that some more shall we?

Major game publishers have had a lengthy history of trying, and failing, to provide properly Dutch translated games and manuals. The earliest miserable failure I can recall was in 2001, as Lionhead released Black & White entirely in Dutch.

If you’ve played Black & White then you’ll undoubtedly remember the nasty English voice work. Now try to imagine something ten times more excruciatingly painful, mind numbing, corny & just plain wrong - that would be the Dutch version. In contrast the English voice acting was a divine gift - pun intended - and marvelously executed… yeah the game was that bad in Dutch. Heck, my sister refused to play the game in Dutch. An eleven year old girl preferring the English version over the one she can understand? Yikes Lionhead…. that is bad!

There is one further major company which is well known for ruining their, already not very impressive, games with Dutch translations: Electronic Arts. Battlefield 2 was released with Dutch in-game text and voice work… people leave it on for one or two games to have some laughs at the absolute stupidity of it all, then they reinstall the whole thing to run in English. I don’t know a single person who plays Battlefield, The Sims 2, FIFA, etc. in Dutch, in fact - it’s scoffed at. It’s a total waste of money.

And yet Electronic Arts continues their, futile, translating of games into Dutch…

And now it seems Atari has decided to follow up in an even more ridiculous manner: horrid direct translations in game manuals. While the Electronic Arts and Lionhead games suffer from horrible Dutch menu text and voice work that is clearly literally translated wherever possible (and therefore even worse than it’d normally be), at least the manuals tended to be slightly readable. Not so with Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer. Can you imagine the screeching sound of someone tracing their nails along a blackboard? That’s the feeling I got when reading the manual…

It’s littered with inconsistencies… ranging from the English words for classes like the Sorceror and Wizard, to the use of an archaic, little known, Dutch word to refer to spell casters. And then yet other classes were simply referred to in Dutch, like the new Spirit Shaman and Favored Soul classes (believe me, you don’t want to know what that sounds like in Dutch). It’s a mess - and I honestly can’t see why Atari would waste their money on something like this when the vast majority of Dutch gamers would have been more than happy with a simple UK import version. At least they didn’t fry their brains (contrary to EA/Lionhead) and decided to translate the rest of the game too… If they had then I might actually have returned my copy and ordered one from the UK - as many Dutch people did with Black & White, back in 2001…

So what’s the morale of this story?

Game publishers should not waste their money on Dutch translations, no one wants them!

Especially if they’re half-assed, Babelfished and useless like the Mask of the Betrayer manual.

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