Monday
Jan 22 2007
German Card Translations
German card translations are a sad affair. They are riddled with clumsy translations, especially in the card names. It's not such a great idea to translate english card names 1:1. The rules texts are translated sanely, i.e. using special German templates, although some of the template choices are a bit strange and more verbose than needed. For example, "target" is translates as "deiner Wahl" ("of your choice"), while "of your choice" is translated with "die du bestimmst" ("that you choose").
In Planar Chaos Ovinize was translated as "Verhammelung". First of all this sounds strange. The noun "Hammel" was turned in the verb "verhammeln", which was turned back into the noun "Verhammelung". But it's also not good templating. Ovinize is an Instant, and Instants and Sorceries usually get a verb as name. Ovinize is a verb. The German translation "Verhammelung" on the other hand is a noun. This shows a lack of understanding of magic card naming on the part of the translator. "Verhammeln" or "Schafen" had been a much better name.
But what's worse are wrong translations. For example the German version of Necrotic Sliver has the following ability: "All Slivers have '3, Sacrifice this creature: Sacrifice target permanent.'" (You can only sacrifice your own permanents.) Since Wizards decided not to publish Oracle texts until Monday after the prerelease, I could not confirm that the card was actually a mistranslation and had to rule it by its German text. Unfortunately the mistranslations (in the rules text) average around one per expansion.
Finally, cards that have obvious templating problems in the original are not corrected in the German version. For example the flip side of Saviours of Kamigawa's Erayo, Soratami Ascendant reads "Counter the first spell played by each opponent each turn", a rather obvious templating error. This was unfortunately not corrected in the German translation. In my opinion a good translator should catch errors like this.
Comments
rulings
by EvilBernd
Wednesday, 2007-01-24 14:37
As for the rulings: You - as the HJ - have the ability to rerule the card if there is no oracle-text available, so that it works the way most probably intended, which is mostly correct.
And yes, wrong translations are bad!!
by Sebastian Rittau
Thursday, 2007-01-25 00:14
It's true that I as head judge can overrule a card if I think it was translated wrong. In this case I did not learn about the wrong translation until after deck construction had concluded, though. In this case I will rule the card as printed, since everything else would disadvantage players who took the card as printed, and possibly decided not to play it for that reason. Next weekend I will rule differently, of course. Now I have access to the official spoiler text and I can announce the misprint before the tournament (and deck construction) starts, so that everybody has an equal chance to evaluate the card.
by EvilBernd
Friday, 2007-01-26 05:26
Most of the times this error get spotted during deck construction, because someone usually has read the spoiler and will notice this error, if they don't just look at it and say, "hey its the vindicate sliver"...
necrotic sliver
by vermondy
Monday, 2007-01-29 19:51
Actually I would have been on the receiving end of this error. I read the card and smiled. I had not read the spoiler or anything. And besides the ability as translated could have a use... A very narrow one there could be
My opponent on the other obviously had not had the idea of requesting this card during construction. I also don not think that a judge should overrule a card text that is not yet officially published. So maybe wizards are to blame...
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