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Colonel Viktoria Antsyforov (GRU)
Colonel Pavel Doletskaya, (GRU): A Russian Officer

Really? Pavel = Paul, "aya" is a suffix of female surnames. Victoria is a female name, "ov" is a suffix of male surnames. What kind of crap editor did they have? I mean... even Red October didn't have that level of neglect when it came to the Russian language.

There are millions of Russians in America. Is it so god damn hard to hire even one to do the job properly? Oh, and "Captain Pravota"? Me thinks the developers should have been carefully looking towards World in Conflict and copying their use of names. That would at least save them from embarassing errors.

Stas Bush wrote:Colonel Viktoria Antsyforov (GRU)
Colonel Pavel Doletskaya, (GRU): A Russian Officer

Really? Pavel = Paul, "aya" is a suffix of female surnames. Victoria is a female name, "ov" is a suffix of male surnames. What kind of crap editor did they have? I mean... even Red October didn't have that level of neglect when it came to the Russian language.

There are millions of Russians in America. Is it so god damn hard to hire even one to do the job properly? Oh, and "Captain Pravota"? Me thinks the developers should have been carefully looking towards World in Conflict and copying their use of names. That would at least save them from embarassing errors.

When US government/diplomatic officials make the same mistake with the Russian language, I'm not that surprise.

Yeah, but US politicians often don't have years of production of a game. They have days to prepare their talk and then they have a new talk.

These guys have no excuse other than "our demographic won't care".

This is the type of idiocy that I have been putting up for years during my career as an editor and a journalist.

"Oh, there isn't a comma here, so what? Not that anyone would notice..." is the type of ignorant bullshit I have heard many times in my life. My wife is a full time editor and a publisher of economic and legal books and she has the same problems, with ignorant authors acting like dumbassess when they see that she DARED to correct their minor spelling or punctuation mistake in their perfect masterpieces.

People who don't know anything about a given subject will not notice any errors. Too bad it's the editors of a game who turned out to be ignorant smartasses in their own department (linguistics).

A shameful day to be an editor and a writer it is.

As for the russian language (and generally slavic accents) I get the impression that everyone in the western english speaking world thinks that imitating russian is just a matter of adding a heavy handed slavic accent with a strong "R" makes your english language teacher into a kremlin diplomat.

Oh and generally everyone thinks editors are just people who put in commas and therefore their hiring costs cannot be easily justified. Until someone makes a mistake that pisses people off.

Stas Bush wrote:Colonel Viktoria Antsyforov (GRU)
Colonel Pavel Doletskaya, (GRU): A Russian Officer

Jesus, that's just embarrassingly bad. I know better than that and my Russian consists of a half dozen words (although apparently my pronunciation is pretty good for an English speaker). Two minutes with Google looking up a site with Russian names and naming conventions would have caught that.

In other news, Tom Clancy games suck and the label is now little more than an automatic cash source for Ubisoft that requires about as much effort as taking a shit.

Obviously, you haven't played GTA IV. The supposed Serbian in that is, well, more Russian or something then Serbian. There's a phrase here and there spoken with horrible foreigner-who-never-properly-learned-the-language pronunciation that's actually correct (and then usually in the stilted academic-who-tries-to-write-slang style), but for a huge chunk of it, they aren't even using Serbian words. And don't get me started on Bellic as a surname - especially when they pronounce it Belik - seriously, are those people retarded and couldn't even bother to realize that Americanized Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian names ending in c should almost always actually end in ch since in the original they were ć (as in Belić - Belich)?

I wouldn't really mind that much if it was some scumbag NPC that was supposed to be killed off, but this is the damned main protagonist around who's history the story revolves - is it really that much to ask that they get his fucking surname right?

Right because it is impossible for someont to have an unconventional surname in their own country.

No, its not, but then again look at who the guy is supposed to be - he's supposed to be a small-town boy originally, so that already lowers the chances of him having a strange name, and the "ll" structure never occurs in BCS. So the name is obviously Americanized, and the question becomes what it was Americanized from. The obvious answer is Belić, which actually makes a lot of sense - Niko Belić, translated, is Nicholas White, which is a pretty good ironic name for the character, considering what he does and his conscious-troubling background. Belik, on the other hand, is a surname that doesn't carry any meaning at all.

So I'm guessing they had someone who had a clue back when they were developing the story, but then simply did not consult them when it came to the actual implementation. Hence yet another media product which on the surface attempts to have some depth to foreign characters, but actually utterly fails even at first glance for anyone who has any knowledge about the actual foreign location depicted.

Netko wrote:No, its not, but then again look at who the guy is supposed to be - he's supposed to be a small-town boy originally, so that already lowers the chances of him having a strange name, and the "ll" structure never occurs in BCS. So the name is obviously Americanized, and the question becomes what it was Americanized from. The obvious answer is Belić, which actually makes a lot of sense - Niko Belić, translated, is Nicholas White, which is a pretty good ironic name for the character, considering what he does and his conscious-troubling background. Belik, on the other hand, is a surname that doesn't carry any meaning at all.

I was under the impression that it was Niko Bel(l)ic anyway, just slightly anglicized.- to be fair, Roman and Niko have both been, by their own admission out of their home country for so long that they are forgetting the language: Niko in the merchant marine, Roman as a cabbie- it is entirely within the realm of possibility that they are speaking it as an english speaker would to reduce misunderstandings.

Stas Bush wrote:What kind of crap editor did they have?

Most likely none at all. I don't know if there are any game companies that hire people to go over their stuff to check things like this. They could have hired a Russian to test the game and make sure things made sense, but the developers probably didn't care very much. Hell, they could have checked Wikipedia for basic Russian naming conventions, but yeah, wouldn't want it to look like we put too much effort into this...