Ted Woolsey was never a good translator
I think for the most part the guy did a pretty good job considering the hand he was dealt. He was often battling as much with NA censorship as he was the technical constraints of the games themselves. I appreciate many people crave the AUTHENTIC nihongo experience (and yet do not play the games in Japanese, curious...) and I think it's really cool that fans have retranslated the scripts and modern tools exist to allow for easier text formatting and editing, but his translations are as much a part of squaresoft's success and history as anything else.
So I addressed this in the
Chrono Trigger review thread, but given that we're talking about retranslations now, I'd like to add a bit more.
The Woolsey hate has been overblown by fan translators to the point that they've wasted time retranslating his work when they had no good reason to do half of them. For one, half of everything he worked on got a rerelease with an official retranslation. That doesn't mean no one could do better, but it does mean that it wasn't entirely necessary. Secondly, the majority of fan retranslations are just for his work (as well as entries in series he worked on), while there are plenty of retro games that need it more.
Like I said before, Woosley wasn't the first game translator. He was preceded by a lot of "translators" who were just some random guy around the Japanese office with the bare minimum 英語上手 to write something that looked correct at a glance. And there were others like him, both before and after, who were working within constraints that made things difficult. Worse still, there was the whole Working Designs cult of "f*** translating, write whatever you want, throw some bad jokes in, and just make sure the grammar's good so the audience thinks you did your job correctly." That strain of amateurness took years to get rid of from "professional" work, and
still hasn't disappeared from "fan" translations by people falsely claiming to be making "the most accurate English script ever." (J2E, DeJap, and — most of all — Dynamic Designs are all guilty of this.)
Really, Woosley gets the most hate because he was the first translator that clearly made mistakes and was known by name to fans. Nobody remembers Toshi from accounting for his 1986 translation of 変態英雄の伝説 as
Great Warrior Big Adventure. Nobody even realized Vic Ireland mistranslated everything because, unlike Woosley, he put out propaganda (excuse me,
documentaries) to promote his translations as 128% accurate. And there were plenty of others after him that deserved hate too (particularly the ones who put memes in official translations), but they got let off the hook because nobody knew their names.
Like I said before, Woosley's work is outdated, but it wasn't that bad for its time, and it has been mostly replaced already by later translations. If fans want to complain about bad translations, they should focus on the tons that haven't been retranslated — from Working Designs, random unskilled "professionals", and bad-faith fanslators — and fix those.
