This is a question for those of you living in countries where English is not the official language: For games originally written in English do you prefer the original text or do you prefer text translated to your native language?

I speak english and live in the united states, so I''m not exactly who you are asking to hear from.

But I''d thought I''d say that if I knew japanese, I''d rather play the original japanese version of video games so as to avoid the crappy tranlations.

Maybe the people you are asking feel the same about english games? Just my opinion though. Everyone will say different.


Drakonite

[Insert Witty Signature Here]

I live in the Netherlands but I can read and speak English very well so I would prefer the original (English) text rather than my native language which is Dutch, a language which in my opinion, STINKS.

Greetz,
Sephiroth The Third

"Some that live deserve to die and some that are dead deserve to live"

I know the question was not aimed at people like me (since I only speak English, although I can just about read French, and Spanish and Latin at a push), but I think that if English was my second language, I would like games to be distributed in my native language by default but with me able to switch to English (or whatever the original language was) through the game settings menu or via a configuration file. Sometimes the translations aren''t too good, or sometimes translations from the original language lose the ''feel'' somewhat (opera music sounds much more suited to Italian than English, for example), so it''s good to have the option.

I appreciate that in a game with digitized voices, it might be awkward to distribute 2 sets of wave files, but with simple text, it should be easy to distribute at least 2 languages on one cd.

I really prefer one in my native language...

but some times games have VERY bad translations, so in those cases (most of the time) I prefer it in English... even when it takes a little bit more to understand what''s going on (or some times misunderstanding things).

but if you give me a game in very well written spanish... SURE!, I''ll take it!

Id prefer english anytime. But then again, i live in a small country and we''re all pretty much used to english. Especially when it comes to entertainment as in movies, mucis and games.

Im even running the an english version of Windows.

my 2c

English only

Thank you all for your replies.

Spanish is the official language here where I live, but English language content is fairly common. I prefer the original version as long as I''m able to understand it. Translations for me are a last resort. I remember playing the Japanese version of MegaMan for the SNES (I think it was called RockMan). I didn''t understand a word, so in that case I prefer the translated version.