Depends on the kind of translation style. I guess the goal of a game translation like that is not primarily to do a faithful translation, but one that fits the target market.
This must not necessarily be bad, and can sometimes be a chance. E.g. the German translation of Donald duck pocket books has so much more depth and literary quality than the english originals that the translator herself has her own memorial and grammatic term in Germany¹.
Translations that make things worse are the rule, but it is not impossible to create translations that makes things better, especially if the text quality in the original is lacking involuntarily itself.
The various translations of the Asterix comics have to undergo similar machinations, because they basically have to invent new puns to replace the ones in French.
> I guess the goal of a game translation like that is not primarily to do a faithful translation, but one that fits the target market.
An other issues especially for older games was technical limitations: the devs might have squeezed the game content to fit within e.g. cart limits, and the translation would be bound to that regardless of the langage’s “density”.
A similar issue occurs with comics / mangas: speech bubbles might be tight fit for the original and require significantly altering font and size for translations to fit. Not to mention sfx.
Besides "spoony Bard" I think the other most famous one is probably the "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets" line from one of the Castlevanias. Personally I like it, but I guess it's pretty notorious.
This happened at the height of "photoshopping", almost like a showcase of the state of the art couched in a meme techno song. Wonder if there will ever be a deepfake equivalent?
Apparently, one of the commonly used Japanese words for a logic gate flip-flop (a beach shoe?), can be written as "bird clapper" (one of those bamboo water fountain features you see in gardens).
I think this comes from なるこ in the original text, but my Japanese is minimal.
That sounds just sort of non-intuitive, but when reading a patent where the accepted US filing used the word "bird clapper" every time a type of logic gate was intended made reading it initially incomprehensible, then bizarre, and finally hilarious.
I've briefly looked at USPT and although I can find references to such phrases in patents, the one I'm looking for appears to have been thankfully fixed.
I can see how the sozu is analogous to such an oscillator... but sozu aren't called clappers. The energy a clapper uses comes from you shaking it. There's no buildup and no release.
I’ve been learning Japanese for a few years. The basic translation here is close, but it still sorta keeps the non sequitur: they’re nice AND ALSO easy to move in. But these are not meant to be independent statements.
Part of the problem is that Japanese does this thing where they label whole statements as “good” with いい. To me, he’s really just saying “it’s great how comfy shorts are!”.
If you translate it robotically, he says “speaking of moving easily, shorts are good!” But we don’t judge clothes like this in English, so it’s weird sounding
TFA's version is right. "Shorts" is the topic word (the topic particle after it is implied), and the "easy to move" and "good" parts both modify "shorts". So robotically, "speaking of shorts, they're easy to move in and good" or the like.
I see the issue - it looks like it could be a "～って(いうのは)いいぜ" kind of construction. But in that case the preceding bit wouldn't be te form, it would be "動きやすいっていいぜ" or whatever.
Rather, the っ here is just an affectation that makes the speech sound a bit childish. What's being said grammatically is just 「動きやすくていいぜ」.
I think you're correct about the two statements not being completely independent, though. In both the shorts and backpack examples the second adjective is meant as a corollary of (or subordinate to) the first. タンパン（は）よくて動きやすいぜ！ or このリュックは便利で大きい both sound unnatural and it seems to me like the logical relationship between the adjectives is lost. The same grammar could technically be used to combine two independent statements, but the context indicates the (pseudo- ?)dependent interpretation.
In English we would just say "Shorts are easy to move around in!" and it wouldn't lose any of the semantic meaning, but I do think TFA's "nice and easy" might preserve some of the "feeling" of the Japanese without sounding unnatural like a word-for-word translation would be.
I'm not a native speaker though so I could still be completely wrong.
The first NPC interaction in Pokémon Blue/Red can remember being a source of amusement for me and my primary school friends.
Professor Oak: "This is my grandson. He's been your rival since you were both babies. Erm... what was his name again?"
Player: types in a silly/rude name
Professor Oak: "Yes! I remember now! His name was (silly/rude name)!"
I also remember the rival saying "smell ya later". I wonder if this was in the Japanese version and if it was influenced by Milhouse from the Simpsons.
Looks like the author from the OP has an article about that too [0], and it is not "smell ya later" in the original. It is just a causall goodbye, "Welp, be seein’ ya!".
I'd add a note or two here about how homogeneous the Japanese society is, where everyone "decent" wears a suit, and it was surely even more 30 years ago when pokemon was released. So someone with shorts on the street was probably considered much more of a rebel (a youngster) than today/in the west.
If you think all Japanese games are well written, it means your Japanese isn't good enough.
Square-Enix especially, their games almost all have better scripts in English in Japanese. Which makes sense since they have Western settings; if you're in a "pirate city" like Limsa in FFXIV there's no way to sound "piratey" in Japanese. So they just have no character voice.
Actually, this very game was a good example too. Gen 1 Japanese Pokemon names were really lazy - Zapdos and Jolteon are called "Thunder" and "Thunders".
> Which makes sense since they have Western settings; if you're in a "pirate city" like Limsa in FFXIV there's no way to sound "piratey" in Japanese.
Japan has a long native tradition of piracy. They're most of the reason China preferred to ship goods over inland canals instead of along the shore.
A historian could probably do a good job coming up with linguistic features in Japanese associated with their historical pirates, but I assume nobody would understand what was meant.
But that's more of a fact about modern Western pop culture (pirates are their own genre!) than about piracy as a historical phenomenon. It's not a Western thing, any more than highway robbery is a Western thing.
I don't care about what is technically better, nor do I think Japanese origin means it is automatically good. I care about the artists' original vision. I am interested in the story that they want to tell. Not the story some localization team wants to tell.
>there is no way to sound "piratey"
Do they need to sound piratey for me, the player, to know that they are pirates?
>Zapdos and Jolteon are called "Thunder" and "Thunders".
Is that any less lazy than English names like Seel the seal or Krabby the crab? It doesn't really bother me.
Most of the time you see complaints about "changes", they were approved by the original creators, actually asked for by them, or necessary to sell the game (console cert or legal requirements).
Sometimes, it'd just be really weird if you didn't change things. A lot of Japanese otome/romance tropes seem either rapey or childish in English, and only weebs would appreciate it while the average American woman would just wonder why the male characters are kabedonning or head patting you, so it wouldn't sell. Which is what the creators want it to do.
Modfiying the creator's vision so that it will be legal or sell better is in my opinion compromising the art piece for the sake of making money. I am not denying that it will sell better.
I also believe that localization corrupts the art piece more than controversial changes, the small things such as what the article is about counts too. It all adds up.
I am also not against the authors changing things for games that are releasing later. Iteration is a natural part of the process and it's possible that the extra time you have for making the international release of the game allows you to refine things that you did not like from the original version.
FFXIV is a great example where characters are just more mean and less wholesome in the English localization compared to the original. I noticed a lot of instances where the English subtitles skipped some appreciative comments from characters that received help, or instances where the subtitles straight up added mean comments that were not in the original lines at all. I have no idea why they do this, maybe the localizers think that being mean is more exciting, but it’s just off-putting for me.
I always got a little bit of inexplicable joy out of how the card game was "pocket monsters"(using latin characters) in Japan and "pokemon" in the US.
Was it to appear exotic in both markets? perhaps the respective terms were easier to trademark in each domain. maybe they were a small scrappy game company making it up as they went, there was no real motive behind the names. They just called the english translation what the japanese version was known by at that time.
Generally speaking, if you’re going to video games for the writing, you’re going to have a bad time. I’m not saying that there aren’t those few unique gems out there, but I haven’t played many games and thought “thank god for these cutscenes”
Also, let’s be real, English translations of Japanese titles are absolutely the worst offenders. I don’t speak Japanese, so I can’t say whether or not coherent dialogue gets lost in translation but like: Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, literally any JRPG at random. Nobody I know talks like they do in these titles, and I still don’t understand why it’s fashionable to write inane character dialogue like they do in these games.
But no, Hideo Kojima and Tetsuya Nomura are just inane writers and there's a lot of pressure to make games unnecessarily long by padding cutscenes out.
The recent FFVII Remake I thought had great writing in both Japanese and English though, which is surprising since I didn't expect it out of that staff.
Perhaps, although I really don’t think age has anything to do with it. I mean, even GOW: Ragnarok which just came out is pretty noticeably preachy and self-indulgent with its dialog a lot of the time, and that is a fantastic game. Also, WRT Shadow/Colossus, I was probably about 11 when it was originally released, so I do feel like it’s a game for 10-up’s coincidentally. But also part of what makes S/C so great is its minimalism, eg apparent lack of dialog besides the ceiling telling you where to go next.
I remember playing FFVII in Spanish as a kid, and I cried with laughter at times.
- people talked to Barret using female pronouns half the time.
- Barret constantly mentioned he was cold (in the English version he used “cool” as an expression and it was translated literally).
- NPCs talked about savepoints as if they were a person called Point Saving.
- characters were constantly celebrating things (party was translated as celebration rather than as “your group of people”).
- the mayor of a city was called the City’s largest. (Bad translation from “major” I guess).