D&D in Foreign Languages

[Shades of Green]

BECMI (or, for the very least, B/X), a good number of BECMI-era adventures, the AD&D 2E core books, D&D 3.5E core books and a few other books, and 4E core books and a few other books have been translated into Hebrew. Most of this stuff is out of print, though, except for maybe 4E.

 

[jonesy]

Wow. I totally posted in the wrong thread.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

YThe only gripe I have is that "rogue" is translated as "thief".

Some of us would see that as a feature, not a bug.

 

[Nikosandros]

Where can I buy some foreign editions of the books? I'd love to add a few to my collection!

I've seen some foreign edition of D&D books on Noble Knight. Otherwise, the national version of eBay is pretty good. For example, eBay.it has a lot of Italian D&D material. Also, if you're looking for 4e, Amazon.it has a bunch of books.

 

[buddhafrog]

A friend who is part of our recently started Pathfinder campaign in Ulsan, Korea, corrected me on these forums when I said you could never find any D&D products in Korean. He told me he's seen a couple (3.5 I think?). He has it sitting on his shelves to prove it. But I swear, I can't imagine what the print run was b/c I've never seen any and I don't know any Korean who would've bought the products.

 

[Dragonbait]

I've seen the Japanese 3.5E books. Tokyo has a rather large (for Japan at least) gaming club that uses the 3.5E rules and a yearly convention. I think it's called Dragon.. Or something like that.

 

[Thunderfoot]

While I can't comment on 3.X and beyond; when I was stationed in Germany in between '90 and '92, there was a rolespiele shop behind the Rautskellar in Augsburg.

The funny thing was, it was mostly American GIs that shopped there, but there were German language versions of all the BECMI, 1st & 2nd edition AD&D books that were on the shelves. IIRC they were TSR products, not locally printed with permission, but I may be mistaken, it has been 20 years ago.

I remember thinking I should buy this stuff, but my command of Duetsch at the time was nix so gut; or as I used to say "Meine Duetsch ist Kaput!", I kick myself regularly for not buying them now.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

The funny thing was, it was mostly American GIs that shopped there, but there were German language versions of all the BECMI, 1st & 2nd edition AD&D books that were on the shelves. IIRC they were TSR products, not locally printed with permission, but I may be mistaken, it has been 20 years ago.

After the WotC buy-out German board- and card-game publisher Amigo Spiele held the license for the German editions and hit the market with an ambitious wave of products in '97.

Their handling of 3e was pitiful, though. IIRC the PHB was published in 2002, nearly two years after the English edition. During the 3.5 era, Amigo handed the license over to Feder&Schwert, who again started out ambitiously, translating Forgotten Realms as well as Eberron stuff.

F&S also started to produce 4e books in '08, but their license expired just after publishing MM1. Since then, there are no new German D&D products anymore. Due to this the German RPG "Das Schwarze Auge" is the undisputed market leader.

I remember thinking I should buy this stuff, but my command of Duetsch at the time was nix so gut; or as I used to say "Meine Duetsch ist Kaput!", I kick myself regularly for not buying them now.

Rest assured, many German guys whose "dominance of English language" is dubious at best buy and use English books, while not necessarily understanding written therein.

 

[Locien]

I've seen the Japanese 3.5E books. Tokyo has a rather large (for Japan at least) gaming club that uses the 3.5E rules and a yearly convention. I think it's called Dragon.. Or something like that.

Hobby Japan does the japanese version of DnD. There's also a magazine Role and Roll that while is not solely DnD based it has a lot of DnD material in it, especially of game transcripts, usually referred to as a Replay. And on a bizarre tangent, some people even go so far as to create videos of fictional characters from popular series playing pen and paper RPGs, as displayed in a fashion like that of your typical jrpg. There are two main series used for this, Idolm[MENTION=14053]ST[/MENTION] er, a series of video games where the player trains and guides an idol's career, and touhou project, a series of shooters when all the characters are cute versions of youkai, ghosts and other supernatural beings. In other words, there are people that make videos of cute girl ghosts and monsters playing pen and paper RPGs. I'd post a you tube link, but none of the kind of videos I'm talking about are on youtube and I don't want to risk getting my youtube account banned for some misunderstanding on the part of youtube. So instead here's a video of a virtual idol singing about the necronimicon.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WllXM-uUuRc"]YouTube - ????Append - ????????????(PV)[/ame]

 

[Selganor]

(Deleted Double post)