I thought the Arkham Asylum dub wasn't bad at all, especially the Joker, but then you have to compare it in the wider scheme of games dubbed into German. It was certainly on par with the German dubbing of the Joker in The Dark Knight (which of course itself wasn't a patch on Heath Ledger's original performance).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md0SNhbgbSw

Yeah, those are all terribly bad. Except for Woodruff, that's a classic "so bad it's good"-thing in my ears. It somehow fits the weird style of the game and therefore doesn't keep you from enjoying this hilarious gem.

That's the problem with far too many german voice actors. Their range. There are some who are really awesome and can do incredibly diverse performances, but most of them tend to just stick to their normal voices. This is especially sad when they are the standard voice of a great actor like Tom Hanks, who changes his voice in nearly every movie, be it even just nuances. The german voice actor sounds every time the same and Germans are just missing out on great talent this way. Although, I have to admit that the voice acting in movies for cinema is generally quite good. It's the straight to DVD stuff and TV series that get really butchered (it's a money problem). The worst examples would be The Simpsons (translation - awful, actual voice acting - quite good) and Heroes (translation - ok, voice acting - horrible with terrible voice over directing decisions).

Games probably fall into the second category of being bad because of money problems. That's why the really big titles are not so bad compared to all the other crap out there.

OK, I was mainly talking about censoring.
And in most games that have heavy censoring, the story is not so importand.
When you play games to see exploding heads, you don´t care what the head says.

Since I play mostly RPGs and adventures, I do not have the games mentioned above except bio shock 1. I stopped playing it because I played system shock 2 from gog before. Bio shock is a good shooter, but nothing can replace SHODAN.

"Podwójny klik - ruchać się biegiem" (Double Click - to fuck {while} running) - a mistranslated "running move" courtesy of the eastern black market translation of Commandos Behind Enemy . Not sure if it came from Russia, Ukraine, but these translations were commonly called "russian polonisations".

Here's a polish pirate localization of Red Alert 2. Epic.

Nowdays, anything localized into Polish by Cenega is cringeworthy, though, mostly because they are literal translations, that don't take into account the simple factor: "Will that sound stupid in Polish?"

Here's a sample of the pirated AOE2 "russian polonisation", the heavy accent is hilarious.

CD Projekt really isn't any better. Polish translations seem to be cursed ever since Dungeon Keeper 1.

Kuon for the PS2
The german translation is a trainwreck. Grammar? What's that?
Also, the translation had an odd habbit of making new words up that didn't even exist in the german language.
the highlight? The loading screen. It said "Jetzt im Laden", you can transklate it to "Now in stores". Seriously.
Plus, they translated everything, even the monsters. While the summons were still called by their japanese names in the english translations, we got german names.
It was odd, when Abe no Seimei reffered to her spirit companions to "Good Spirit" and "Wrathful Spirit".

The only way to play this game AND understanding the story was in english.

Come to thjink of it, I feel like playing this atrocity again. Despite the bad translation, it's palyable.

The german FF7 isn't much better, either.
While the grammar... works, there are only a few messed up things.
during the events at te northern crater, Rufus is called "Rufhaus" und "Rufaus" for a few scenes. Also, Yuffie has the bad habbit of having a few of her textboxes in english. "Read it sorgfältig durch" has become a meme.
There's more, but it has been a long time since i played it. Well... I did bought it last year, but stopped playing after reaching Nibelheim (after Cosmo Canyon).

I agree, but still, they're way better than Cenega. There are levels of bad i guess.;) I can't stand localized games myself, it's a shame that so few releases have an optional localization.

Ooh!
Looked at the shelf, got another one - the official translation by Cenega for Quake Wars. Once i heard it, i stopped playing the game. It's somewhere between laughable and sad. I've heard people learned to hack the english files in, but i didn't pay for something to hack it.

I thought CD Project (who made "The Witcher" games and run gog) are from poland, if I remember correctly. So they do not need to translate it (or if they make the games in english they do it themselves). I do not know polish, but if you translate anything word by word the result is crap. There was a show in german TV. Somebody read a manual (made with a chinese tranlation tool most likely) and the people had to guess what this manual was made for (a TV, a washing machine or a toaster, . . .).

You got it the other way around, CDP localised and distributed games for the local market. That is, from english to polish. Baldur's Gate would probably be a highlight of polish localisaitons. Myself, i don't like too much of the threarical school of acting in games.

Oh, Baldur's Gate, that reminds of another terrible localization in Germany, complete with Saxon accents.

The first Mass Effect's localization wasn't quite to my taste, I have to say :D Think I played the game once in German, then I switched to English and continued playing the sequels in English as well.

I just remembered the PT-BR version of Mega Race that I used to play. I never had it, but some of my friends had it because it was bundled with some sound cards back in the day, so I got to play it when visiting them. :)

I don't recall it being bad, but it had some compromises done during translation: Lance Boyle became Chico Flecha (something like Frank Arrow) and the Enforcer became "O Vingador" (the Avenger).

I think it was the first PT-BR computer game I ever saw.

I wonder if any of the other brazilians around here has it. :)

The German versions of Interplay's games were infamously awful. Subpar translations, atrocious dubbing (Baldur's Gate being one particularly notorious example, as someone decided to randomly assign the characters heavy, unintentionally funny regional accents) and heavy censorship (the Fallout games being the worst offender in this category) - those games had it all!

If you want a taste of how utterly, irredeemably horrible the dubs were, check out this clip of "Starfleet Academy". The horror starts about three minutes into the video. http://youtu.be/3s5jwju2N7s?t=3m
(Suffice to say, that's not the Shat's usual German voice actor)