Have you played D&D in a foreign language?

[psychognome]

I live in Finland, and even though our games have mostly been in Finnish, there are also smatters of English, German, Swedish, and French tossed around the table. I've also played in a dominantly English campaign because one of the players was German and didn't understand English, and some of our latest campaigns have been dominantly English. I seriously think that English works better for roleplaying than Finnish, but I don't know why. But what can be said is that without roleplaying games I'd probably have a far less impressive vocabulary in English, which has been a great help since I go to an international school.

Oh, and the one thing that I love about English is the great variety of dialects that can be used as a simple way of adding character to a... er, character. Need a streetwise thief? Use Cockney. A surly dwarf? A Scottish accent will do. A daring woodsman? Learn a few phrases of Strine and change the kangaroo references into something native. ("He's got two antilopes lose in the top paddock, and no two ways about it!") Even though Finnish does have many unique dialects and such, the variety isn't quite as rich as in English.

 

[lior_shapira]

I live in Israel and although we try to play in english, we use hebrew for about 50% of the time. It's easier on us but it's hard to get a "Medieval feeling" in hebrew, it's just not that kind of language.

 

[Li Shenron]

Oh, and the one thing that I love about English is the great variety of dialects that can be used as a simple way of adding character to a... er, character. Need a streetwise thief? Use Cockney. A surly dwarf? A Scottish accent will do. A daring woodsman? Learn a few phrases of Strine and change the kangaroo references into something native. ("He's got two antilopes lose in the top paddock, and no two ways about it!") Even though Finnish does have many unique dialects and such, the variety isn't quite as rich as in English.

This post of yours calls me to add more... here in Finland we were playing for the first year in a mixed group of Finns & Italian, and therefore English was the only choice. Later (one year ago) we formed another group in which I am the only stranger, and yet the Finns never complained that they had to play in English because I am the moron who hasn't learnt Finnish yet

Second, I am amazed about how well Finns know English! They may not have a perfect accent (better than ours, anyway), but the fact you say that you can discern between so many dialects I found to be true: probably because here you watch movies with subtitles and not with dubbing, many Finns knows how Scottish or Australian sound different from US or UK English... I can hear the difference when our DM uses them as well, but no way I could be able to use that accents myself!

Oh, and by the way, yet all Finns always say that their English is very poor

 

[mmadsen]

I live in Israel and although we try to play in english, we use hebrew for about 50% of the time. It's easier on us but it's hard to get a "Medieval feeling" in hebrew, it's just not that kind of language.

Sounds excellent for Testament though...

 

[Numion]

Second, I am amazed about how well Finns know English! They may not have a perfect accent (better than ours, anyway), but the fact you say that you can discern between so many dialects I found to be true: probably because here you watch movies with subtitles and not with dubbing, many Finns knows how Scottish or Australian sound different from US or UK English... I can hear the difference when our DM uses them as well, but no way I could be able to use that accents myself!

That's a very good point. I think it's very good that we don't dub television here. Lets people learn languages a little easier.

Oh, and by the way, yet all Finns always say that their English is very poor

Modest people, thats us

 

[Li Shenron]

Modest people, thats us

To say, all of my fellow Italian friends always write OTTIMO (literaly it means "perfect") on their CV at the voice "English". We aren't modest, we are just optimists

(I am hijacking my own thread, jee... )

 

[Snoweel]

When 3e came out I was studying Swedish in a class for adult immigrants (Svenska För Invandrare) and so most of my friends were from around the globe.

Our first campaign was DM'ed (by me) in English, but OOC discussion featured healthy doses of Swedish, Spanish and Serbian.

Basically, all the girls spoke Swedish and passable to excellent English, except one girl who only spoke Swedish and Serbian but not English. Her boyfriend, of course, spoke English and Serbian.

At that stage, none of us guys could speak Swedish at anything better than infant level, so naturally some sessions would devolve into language lessons.

Ah, thems were the days...

 

[wocky]

Well, I always game in spanish (why would I do otherwise? ), but most of the books we have are in english, so we use names for monsters, feats, PrCs and spells in english.
Not only I find most of the names in spanish awful, but I also have no idea what something is from the translated name...

Spanish speakers can check out the translated terms here.

 

[Perun]

I've gamed in English and Croatian (my mother tongue). Our current DM used to live in the USA for a long time, about 17 years, and he started gaming over there. When he introduced the game to us, back in '94, we first started playing in English. The degree of English proficiency varied, but all knew it well enough to understand the rules.

We used to play exclusively in English till about two or three years ago, when we decided to switch to Croatian. The above mentioned DM, who wasn't very proficient in Croatian in the beginning speaks it well enough now, so it's all good.

We still use some English terms, and we do mix-and-match a lot, but I still prefer to role-play my characters in Croatian. For a tiny country, we have an enormous number of dialects. (Try three main dialects, with another three ways of pronunciation (and the latter can be combined among themselves), and you've got an almost inexhaustable source of language variation.)

We've had some difficulties with translating certain terms to Croatian (for example, there are no separate words for wizard and sorcerer in Croatian, both are covered by the word čarobnjak).

As a side note, a number of D&D novels (mainly FR, IIRC) were translated in Croatian, but the translation was extremely bad. Not a good way to attract possible gaming audience.

Regards.

 

[mmadsen]

As a side note, a number of D&D novels (mainly FR, IIRC) were translated in Croatian, but the translation was extremely bad. Not a good way to attract possible gaming audience.

Don't be so sure it's the translation at fault...