Gotta love when translations are done by people that know the language, but don't understand correct grammar and usage for that language.
Times when the localization team really went rogue
- Thread starter ciro64
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I don't necessarily think it was that. Remember that translators sometimes don't get to play the actual game and have to finish their work under very short deadlines. Back in those days they would get spreadsheets with a bunch of words to translate with no context. What I imagine happened is that the translator saw the word "Miss" with no context and assumed it was the title for a young lady and not the intended meaning.
i've heard that translation team are also some times very small. i think "trials of the Sky" [i think that was the name] only had two guys working on the translation for the game. usually they have excel spreadsheets with all of the text in it. that game i think had everything in a text or notepad file.
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an infamous recent one is the nukitashi localization which the translators just excused the fact that its originally a comedy vn in order to write their own fanfiction. its one thing to "localize" jokes to an equivalent in english but its another thing to just disregard any logic entirely and just write what you think is funny. its full of donald trump jokes, gen z slang, there was a character re-written as "Bazinga kid" who just says bazinga (the original japanese was him just being a normal dude who makes sexual jokes)
though i say translator it was the localization editor at fault who ruined the whole game and still went and bragged about how proud he was for it, splitting fans with the heavy inclusion of his political views all throughout the translation. he didnt just go rogue he started his own villian union with matching capes and a dental plan
though i say translator it was the localization editor at fault who ruined the whole game and still went and bragged about how proud he was for it, splitting fans with the heavy inclusion of his political views all throughout the translation. he didnt just go rogue he started his own villian union with matching capes and a dental plan
Ad blockers are your friend. I'd get one on your main browser if you haven't yet.
Cu-Neo told me about a trick to load the wiki sites with out ads. put the word "anti" in front of the word fandom in the website address.
Quite a few Japanese tie-in games got transmogrified into something completely different. JJ and Jeff for the TurboGrafx was originally based on some Japanese variety TV show, Dragon Ball game for the Famicom got reskinned to something completely unrelated and released as Dragon Power in the West. There was also a SNES Ranma fighting game that got similar treatment.
Also, guise, completely new territory but did you ever hear about the tragedy of Doki Doki Panic and how the original Super Mario Bros 2 was something completely different than what we got?
Also, guise, completely new territory but did you ever hear about the tragedy of Doki Doki Panic and how the original Super Mario Bros 2 was something completely different than what we got?
I didn't know Disney published Persona games
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Don't remind me
Awakening and Fates go beyond changing lines, it's practically a different game with different characters story-wise!
Henry in the og version is like another person
One more. Dynamite Headdy on Sega Genesis / Mega Drive. There were so many changes made and none made any sense.
This is one of the most extreme changes. A boss going from a Doll to a Robot.
You can read about all the changes here.
Luckily there is a translation patch for the Japanese version on romhacking.net.
This is one of the most extreme changes. A boss going from a Doll to a Robot.
You can read about all the changes here.
Luckily there is a translation patch for the Japanese version on romhacking.net.
Pft, guess the Doll wasnt macho enough? They already tried badassifying the cover art
HE'S PISSED NOW
Were swords really too violent for Dragon Ball?
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It could be a young lady demon bird for all you know!
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https://callofduty.fandom.com/wiki/No_Russian#:~:text=or police officers.-,Regional Differences,Modern Warfare 2 Campaign Remastered.
Discovered that the line is a meme in japan. That's pretty neat
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Why does the OG look better? Look at the colors
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The German translation of Final Fantasy 9 really went hogwild with the dialects of the characters. It was at times borderline incomprehensible.
I do have a soft spot for the botched original translation of FFVII though.
A bigger topic that deserves its own thread is the censorship violent games endured here especially in the 90s. It was absolutely nuts and often quite hilarious.
I do have a soft spot for the botched original translation of FFVII though.
A bigger topic that deserves its own thread is the censorship violent games endured here especially in the 90s. It was absolutely nuts and often quite hilarious.
That's an interesting subject I'd like to hear about. Sounds like the opposite of America, where they censored sexual and religious content.
I've definitely heard of the German Fallout 2, where child thieves are invisible but still technically "there", leaving you to be robbed by ghosts and disembodied voices.
Ah yes, I do recall reading about something similar. I think it was one of the Elder Scroll games where they prohibit the player from killing child NPCs.
I don't care what anyone says, working designs localizations own. I wish there was more effort in modern localizations to at least be interesting or try to be entertaining. or there was some sort of option for a more or less literal translation when you start a game. if anything for me it would add some replay value. a few months later if I like a game I'd be down to go back to it and see what the direct translation is or vice versa.
that being said I can't tell you how many times I have went and played a retranslated version of an older game and with the exceptions of removed censorship and clarifications on more confusing plot elements it's almost always a worse experience. stilted dialogue or just plain boring. there's something of an art to actually adapting a translation to a foreign audience, not that I'm arguing that was what WD was doing (at least faithfully).
official game translations are in a better spot today then they were back then but I would argue there is little personality in a lot of them. this type of thing is in general a monkey's paw situation or just a mixed bag but as always I just wish as consumers we had more choice. just an early game option to have your game be closer to it's intended experience or one more tailored to a western audience. in a perfect world there would be pretty minimal changes besides some jokes/puns/names/basic cultural reference changes here and there and the overall story and characters themselves would largely be what the same between them and probably share 95% of the script between the two versions.
that being said I can't tell you how many times I have went and played a retranslated version of an older game and with the exceptions of removed censorship and clarifications on more confusing plot elements it's almost always a worse experience. stilted dialogue or just plain boring. there's something of an art to actually adapting a translation to a foreign audience, not that I'm arguing that was what WD was doing (at least faithfully).
official game translations are in a better spot today then they were back then but I would argue there is little personality in a lot of them. this type of thing is in general a monkey's paw situation or just a mixed bag but as always I just wish as consumers we had more choice. just an early game option to have your game be closer to it's intended experience or one more tailored to a western audience. in a perfect world there would be pretty minimal changes besides some jokes/puns/names/basic cultural reference changes here and there and the overall story and characters themselves would largely be what the same between them and probably share 95% of the script between the two versions.
I don't know any stories about localization teams "going rogue", however I do know of one localization team who went... well... NOWHERE!
Did you ever localize a whole game and forget to put THE WHOLE GAME in it? It was 1999 and I'm still upset. Everyone who didn't speak Japanese got robbed of a fantastic game, thanks Namco!
Did you ever localize a whole game and forget to put THE WHOLE GAME in it? It was 1999 and I'm still upset. Everyone who didn't speak Japanese got robbed of a fantastic game, thanks Namco!
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Lmfaooo I'm dying. I'm shocked I don't remember this.Tales of Phantasia by DeJap
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Oh, the Spanish FF7 ps1 translation... That's just plain out horrible xD Everytime I play I found myself translating literally sentences into english to try and make them make sense!
I'll also include most of the Dragon Quest game translations in Spanish, since they do use accents a lot to differentiate cities and you can find people speaking with different accents from Spain/Spanish-speaking countries and even using accents from different countries with other languages as their official languages... Although some of the latter have not aged well at all
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I mean, I admire the effort into translating this gem by what was obviously a bunch of teenagers at the time, but teenagers gonna teen.
Fire Emblem Awakening has the option to make your protagonist mute, the story will change accordingly and other chars will speak for you
The international version simply doesnt have this..
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WD was not the best back then. That's a myth their fanbase spreads to justify their faults. There were plenty of perfectly fine translations from other companies. Was the grammar perfect? Not always, and that's the one thing WD did right consistently. (It's easier to do that when you only publish on systems with the technical ability to avoid old-school character limits.) But there was a serious effort to translate as accurately as possible within the limitations of the structure of the companies and the platforms they were on.
Ted Woosley actually put as much effort as he could working on a system not made for long English texts. And the various translators who weren't allowed to see the game itself nonetheless never threw out the script to write dumb jokes and rewrites.
WD's approach was objectively bad translation. Their method was to write down the basic plot, throw out the dialog, and replace it with whatever they wanted. Entire characters were warped into someone else. (See "Boner" from Alundra, whose entire character and dialog was changed to one lame joke about how much his character art looks like Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High.) Jokes were inserted into serious moments and other places where there wasn't any such thing, deflating tension like in the worst Marvel films and taking the player out of the experience.
And then there's the socio-political stuff. The pop culture jokes were not the only products of their time. Dated Clinton-era references not only looked like Jay Leno D-material, but pushed a political perspective on something completely apolitical. Regardless of your views, alienating ~50% of the audience for no reason other than "huh huh, I heard a funny one at the water cooler" is a dumb business move, let alone measurably bad translation.
And then there's the bigotry. The ebonics joke from Albert Odyssey is the most notorious, but there's more subtle ones in Lunar and other releases that you can notice if you use decent reading comprehension. And there's also less subtle ones, like how Popful Mail repeatedly used the R-word and blatantly used a racial slur that you'd think died 100 years ago.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad we got these games in some way. But it is possible that we might have got them without Vic Ireland's grime all over them; in fact, it's commonly believed that we don't get rereleases of WD games that often because Vic won't allow them without his approval and control. (Note that he insisted on firing the majority of the original voice cast as a condition for the PSP Lunar to be made.)
In fact, the fanslating community probably would have got to them by now if not for the existence of ① already existing "good enough" translations causing inertia and ② a fanbase that rabidly insists they are not simply good enough, but absolutely perfect. In all likelihood, that's also why we don't have a translation for Lunar Magical School either. Do it right, and you'll be told you ruined it based on the "totally Knee Hung Hoe Joe's Shoe" crowd's understanding of what it's "supposed to be"; do it wrong, and you'll be patted on the back by people who aren't even fans of Lunar, but fans of Vic Ireland — which would not be rewarding, to say the least.
In reality, we got just as much screwed over by WD as we got rewarded. The games were fun, and we got to play them before emulation and rom hacking made JP-only games easily available, but in the long run we've lost out on what could have been the true experience of playing these games as the creators' intended. I'd have rather got a "bad" translation of the Ted Woosley variety than what WD gave us. At the very least, some fanslator would come along eventually and fix the mistakes.
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i think awakening did the best job of handling an avatar character. robin was pretty balanced as a character from what i remember. not overly worshiped by everyone but got along with most characters.
...still no mention of how Skies of Arcadia got entirely butchered to hell and back, to the point even the localization lead translator admitted it himself in the interview?
Shame. Shame on all of you. Because technically Skies of Arcadia English is no more than a huge fanfiction.
Shame. Shame on all of you. Because technically Skies of Arcadia English is no more than a huge fanfiction.
Don't forget the blatant classism/disrespect towards a certain part of the United States by having the town of idiots in Lunar Silver Star remake talk in Southern accents.
And yes, Ted Woosley is a paragon of good localization practices compared to WD. Most Squaresoft translators are pretty professional, as they often come from the ranks of academia and not necessarily heavy in the Otaku culture. I find that those companies that are coming from a fan perspective are more willing to "make their mark" on the industry through things like fan fiction style localizations and fan service. They live their dreams of writing manga/anime through localization changes, I guess.
i didn't know that was something that happened. the dialog seemed pretty high quality to me.
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