The German translation/localization in the Xbox app is almost humorously abysmal in certain...

Some of the German translations in the Xbox app are just completely nonsensical. When I first saw the heading of "Seitliche Bildlaufleisten," I really struggled trying to figure out what this was even supposed to mean - before realizing this must have been what someone with no idea what a video game is translated "Sidescrollers" into! What this actually translates back into English to is "Horizontal Scrollbars" or "Lateral Scrollbars," which is, as many will likely agree, not what the genre of sidescrolling games is generally about. The description of that subsection is similarly bizzare - "Springen, klettern und kämpfen Sie, während die Aktion auf Ihrem Bildschirm weitergeht" translates back to English as "Jump, climb and fight while the act on your screen proceeds." It just seems like this string was handed to someone devoid of any context of what it actually was they were translating, and as a result, they made it sound weird and unnatural.

Similarly, the section "Zeigen und Klicken" is supposed to be a translation for "Point & Click," and at least this one is actually an accurate translation I guess - the problem, however, is that the German Point & Click community/scene has historically been a relatively large one, with the genre having always enjoyed plenty of popularity and cultural relevance; and absolutely no one ever called it "Zeigen und Klicken." The genre is usually known here as just "Adventure," though the literal, untranslated term "Point & Click" has gained steam in recent years as the genre expanded and modernized and adventures didn't necessarily have to actually involve pointing and clicking anymore - so "Point & Click" is now the term explicitly referring to those that do.

The description for this section, while not quite as egregious as the one for the genre of "horizontal scrollbars," nonetheless features another instance of strange phrasing; namely, "Testen Sie Ihr Gehirn mit gelegentlichen Abenteuern," which essentially translates to "Test your brain with occasional adventures." I can only theorize as to the word the original English text used here, but it must probably have been "casual"? "Gelegentlich" is one possible translation for that word, but absolutely, definitely not the one that should be used here. In fact, there really isn't a fitting German word that would be equivalent, which is probably why every German gaming community and/or media outlet just also uses the word "Casual."

German is a language that utilizes a large amount of anglicisms - i.e. English loan words - in everyday colloquial language; doubly so in modern societies/communities, which includes essentially everything that involves the internet and new media in any shape or form - but many translations in the app seem like they're trying really hard to thoroughly translate every single word, no matter if it actually makes sense to do that or whether it would sound natural to a German gamer (or internet user in general), which just causes it to appear incredibly silly at times, and as if it was exclusively machine-translated with no human oversight (which it might very well have been).

Though what puzzles me is that this isn't the case for every translation: the one for the section that shows multiplayer games correctly uses the widely used English terms "Multiplayer" and "Co-Op." Similarly, dungeon crawlers are just "Dungeon Crawlers," which is exactly what the genre is known as in Germany (although the description again reads quite awkwardly, as what must have been "loot" was translated as "plündern," which is more of a "pillage" or a "ransack" and not generally what one would do to treasure). On the other hand, "Survival" is translated as "Überleben," which, again, is just not what anyone calls this genre around here (it's, once more, just "Survival").

It's a bit of a mess, is what I'm trying to say. Many strings are completely untranslated, some sections have translated headers, but not translated content, and what is translated swings back-and-forth between "sensibly and well-translated" and "sounds like an alien wrote it".

If machine translation was indeed used to translate the app, I'd actually suggest just to not do that and ship the app untranslated until a proper professional localization agency who knows what its doing can have a look at it - and if there already is a proper professional localization agency involved, I'd strongly suggest looking for a different one; or, at the very least, providing the current team with a lot more context than it seems to be getting right now. As it stands, the experience of navigating the app in German is just utterly awkward and makes it seem quite rough and uncanny.

submitted by /u/ThePaSch
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