Great bit of insight, I'm eternally fascinated by language changes for global releases, not just what is lost in localization but also what might take on a whole new tone to match the culture that speaks that language. Lots of interesting stories about Spanish translations in particular having either outlandishly bad localizations, or becoming the definitive way to appreciate certain games, superceding a bad English translation.
Love the idea of skipping extracting the interpreter though, I bet your russian fluency would make a No-Reflex,No-UI, No-Marking run far more immersive since you can actually understand the conversations overheard by enemies. Cool stuff homie
Glad you enjoyed it, I've been mulling over creating a post like this for Metro 2033, being set in Moscow, based off of a Russian novel and having bilingual voice actors, that one has some really interesting differences. I started learning Spanish about a year ago, once I'm a bit sharper I'll check those out.
It's so gratifying to play it now. When the game came out I had only been learning Russian for a about 7 months so my understanding was next to none; Russian is a very flexible language, which means it's hard to mess it up by putting the words in a funny order but it also makes it hard to adapt to when you're new. When I played again recently, apart from the garbled radio speak I could get it all just about spot on.
I was asked to lead a Russian mil-sim group in Arma once, I declined due to the towering mod list but that was cool too and I remember translating Russian orders for a group of friends I used to play with so we could get the drop on them.
Reminds me a lot of how the highest difficulty in Crysis made the enemy troops yell at each other in Korean instead of awkwardly accented English, along with a bunch of other little changes.
And not to give Kojima too much undue credit, but I would argue [besides the very obvious spoiler reasons] that it's perfectly reasonable that an early mission in this operation would involve extracting a dedicated translator - it's not like you should trust Ocelot to hang around, or be present 100% of the time, and it makes sense to have someone on-staff that can work on more mundane translation of enemy chatter/intercepts or fill in for Ocelot. You are supposed to be gearing up a PMC force to operational readiness, after all, and you'll probably need a kidnapped and brainwashed English/Russian translator to help wrangle all your kidnapped and brainwashed Soviet conscripts. But even moreso, it is right in line with the themes of the MGS games and especially 5 that there might be OTHER, unstated reasons for certain objectives, ones that the player or player character is never clued in on... you never know who might have some reason for this one guy to be removed from his current location or claimed for your own base.
Very hard to dance around spoilers XD but rest-assured I know exactly what you're talking about and agree on many points.
I've definitely sold the difficulty of translating/interpreting short here: it was to be my career and I would sometimes get headaches and a lot of fatigue if I did too much at times but the Ocelot stuff has always been quite funny even if what you say makes perfect sense.
I love MGS5, it has some big issues and isn't my favourite Metal Gear but quirks like this make it so memorable to me.
Great bit of insight, I'm eternally fascinated by language changes for global releases, not just what is lost in localization but also what might take on a whole new tone to match the culture that speaks that language. Lots of interesting stories about Spanish translations in particular having either outlandishly bad localizations, or becoming the definitive way to appreciate certain games, superceding a bad English translation.
Love the idea of skipping extracting the interpreter though, I bet your russian fluency would make a No-Reflex,No-UI, No-Marking run far more immersive since you can actually understand the conversations overheard by enemies. Cool stuff homie
Glad you enjoyed it, I've been mulling over creating a post like this for Metro 2033, being set in Moscow, based off of a Russian novel and having bilingual voice actors, that one has some really interesting differences. I started learning Spanish about a year ago, once I'm a bit sharper I'll check those out.
It's so gratifying to play it now. When the game came out I had only been learning Russian for a about 7 months so my understanding was next to none; Russian is a very flexible language, which means it's hard to mess it up by putting the words in a funny order but it also makes it hard to adapt to when you're new. When I played again recently, apart from the garbled radio speak I could get it all just about spot on.
I was asked to lead a Russian mil-sim group in Arma once, I declined due to the towering mod list but that was cool too and I remember translating Russian orders for a group of friends I used to play with so we could get the drop on them.
Reminds me a lot of how the highest difficulty in Crysis made the enemy troops yell at each other in Korean instead of awkwardly accented English, along with a bunch of other little changes.
And not to give Kojima too much undue credit, but I would argue [besides the very obvious spoiler reasons] that it's perfectly reasonable that an early mission in this operation would involve extracting a dedicated translator - it's not like you should trust Ocelot to hang around, or be present 100% of the time, and it makes sense to have someone on-staff that can work on more mundane translation of enemy chatter/intercepts or fill in for Ocelot. You are supposed to be gearing up a PMC force to operational readiness, after all, and you'll probably need a kidnapped and brainwashed English/Russian translator to help wrangle all your kidnapped and brainwashed Soviet conscripts. But even moreso, it is right in line with the themes of the MGS games and especially 5 that there might be OTHER, unstated reasons for certain objectives, ones that the player or player character is never clued in on... you never know who might have some reason for this one guy to be removed from his current location or claimed for your own base.
Very hard to dance around spoilers XD but rest-assured I know exactly what you're talking about and agree on many points.
I've definitely sold the difficulty of translating/interpreting short here: it was to be my career and I would sometimes get headaches and a lot of fatigue if I did too much at times but the Ocelot stuff has always been quite funny even if what you say makes perfect sense.
I love MGS5, it has some big issues and isn't my favourite Metal Gear but quirks like this make it so memorable to me.