Witcher 3 Remastered is out and, with it, its original Brazilian Portuguese translation
It's a weird feeling to have a game you worked on be re-released and to see your translation revisited 11 years later. I'm not gonna lie, there are a lot of things I would've changed if I had, at the time, all the knowledge I currently have, but I guess everyone would do the same if they could. The original translation is still in the game, and it's from a time when gameloc was just being restarted in the Brazilian market so, for many of us, we were going blind and just trying to do our best with what we had in hand. Nonetheless, it's an interesting exercise to see it resurface like that, and a kind of window into my past self and all the work that led me to where I currently am.
I find it cool that CDPR kept the credits of the base game, expansions, and the remastered version all accessible within the menus. That's super important! I've been showing around screenshots of the remaster credits — which have me as reviewer and another person (also from the original team) as a translator — but the credits from the original release are still there and have all seven people who worked on it. Getting credit as a video game translator is somewhat new in the industry — in the past, of the big ones, only Ubisoft used to do it consistently — and I'm glad that CDPR is one of the companies that has always shown us support and respect too.
When The Witcher 3 was originally released, companies were just starting to notice the Brazilian market again1. Most of the Portuguese translations available were for European Portuguese at the time, so I got into the industry right when the scales started shifting towards the Brazilian variant. Some games would still be released for both languages (and many today still are!), but I guess that ~3/4 of all Portuguese speakers in the world being Brazilians helped a bit2. Back then, there was no proper "localization industry" in Brazil — people with years of experience were few and far between — so we went all in blind. It all worked well in the end but man, as I said before, there were so many things I'd do differently if I knew then what I know now.
Anyway, I still haven't had the time to play the remaster, and don't know when I'll be able to, but I hope people find it as enjoyable as when it was released, be it in whatever language they play it.
For a time, in the 90s, we had PC games officially translated and dubbed in Brazilian Portuguese, but it all went away in the 2000s.↩
And let's not forget: it's the 5th most-spoken language worldwide at native level, the 3rd most-spoken European language in the world, and the 2nd most-spoken Romance language.↩