Interview with Oster at PC Gamer praising the fans for their excellent translations.
Bytebrain
Member Posts: 602
Trent Oster gives an interview at:
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/11/16/baldurs-gate-contains-close-to-a-million-words-of-dialog-and-how-fan-translations-helped-the-enhanced-edition/
Excerpt from the interview, which will be posted in its entirety next week:
PC Gamer: I’m curious to know if, going through all those source files, you know just how much writing is in Baldur’s Gate. It must be tens of thousands of lines.
Trent Oster: I’m not sure the exact number of lines, but if I remember correctly, I think there’s close to a million words of dialog.
PCG: Wow, a million? I ask because the other day the Dishonored guys were talking about the number of dialog lines in their game. I thought it was an interesting statistic, because we don’t always think of it in that sense—that these are novel sized or bigger works.
TO: Yeah, the most hilarious example I can think of is when we [BioWare] signed Neverwinter with the Atari guys. So they sent us their localization form and it had three boxes on the form, and it said: “Number of words of dialog: Less than 100; 100 to 1,000; 1,000-plus.”
I made a fourth box on there, checked it off, and wrote “1.2 million words.” I sent the e-mail back to them, and got a call the next morning from the translator saying, “You’re kidding, right?”
And I’m like, “No, I’m dead serious. There’s 1.2 million words of dialog in Neverwinter Nights.”
And they’re like, “Oh my God, oh my God.”
And they hung up on me and I didn’t hear from them for a week. Apparently they had a big meltdown in their localization department as they realized the volume of what they committed to.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/11/16/baldurs-gate-contains-close-to-a-million-words-of-dialog-and-how-fan-translations-helped-the-enhanced-edition/
Excerpt from the interview, which will be posted in its entirety next week:
PC Gamer: I’m curious to know if, going through all those source files, you know just how much writing is in Baldur’s Gate. It must be tens of thousands of lines.
Trent Oster: I’m not sure the exact number of lines, but if I remember correctly, I think there’s close to a million words of dialog.
PCG: Wow, a million? I ask because the other day the Dishonored guys were talking about the number of dialog lines in their game. I thought it was an interesting statistic, because we don’t always think of it in that sense—that these are novel sized or bigger works.
TO: Yeah, the most hilarious example I can think of is when we [BioWare] signed Neverwinter with the Atari guys. So they sent us their localization form and it had three boxes on the form, and it said: “Number of words of dialog: Less than 100; 100 to 1,000; 1,000-plus.”
I made a fourth box on there, checked it off, and wrote “1.2 million words.” I sent the e-mail back to them, and got a call the next morning from the translator saying, “You’re kidding, right?”
And I’m like, “No, I’m dead serious. There’s 1.2 million words of dialog in Neverwinter Nights.”
And they’re like, “Oh my God, oh my God.”
And they hung up on me and I didn’t hear from them for a week. Apparently they had a big meltdown in their localization department as they realized the volume of what they committed to.
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Comments
A professional translator who'd played the BG trilogy 20 times might be even better still of course, but something tells me those are rare.
Of course, this is my stance on most aspects of modding. Imo some of the current mod content for the trilogy is so solid it's quality-wise inseparable from official/professional content. I know there are purists who are likely to disagree, but I also got the impression many of them didn't try mods out in the first place.
Amazing!
Found a link here:
http://nicolehumphrey.net/word-count-for-famous-novels/
Combined, total word count is 1.084,625....
That means that the amount of dialogue in BG is tantamount to the amount in all the Harry Potter books combined!!
That surprises me big time...
I remember writing longer homework in highschool. I don't know, even shooters these days can have a lot of lines to translate.
(ok so there are some execptions out there, but they are few and far between, unfortunatly)
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art39332.asp
Less than both BG1 and BG2.
I would have thought it would contain more words, but there you are...
EDIT: These estimates is including the expansion packs which of course increases the amount of words immensely.
Vanilla BG1: less than half million
PST: more than 850k
ToB: 1.2M
according to the interview with Chris Avellone, the estimate for PS:T is 800k.
Not saying you're wrong, as he is saying it's an estimate after all, not an actual number.
EDIT:
Oops. Just now noticing that you're a member of the development team.. You must know better than most...
I'm just going by what I read in the interviews.. :-)
Otherwise, my 'estimates' are correct, because they are not estimates.
I simply used a tool called 'word count', a linux command.
Thank you for the info!
I find it mindbogling the amount of text in these games..