Man only Atlus in the early 2000's would be crazy enough to put this much effort into a game 7 people were gonna buy. I love their financially irresponsible roots, I'm glad that against all odds they still exist and thrive today but their days of making the best localizations of games almost nobody was gonna play are long gone.
You're very welcome. It takes a fair amount of work to optimize them, but I know it helps people who are hard-of-hearing and people whose native language isn't English.
When it comes to songs being localized in video games, I must shout out Rhythm Heaven for the DS! Rhythm Heaven Fever for the Wii also localized its Japanese songs in English, but the DS entry went one step further by adding localizations in French, Italian, German, Spanish and Korean for all its songs. What an impressive endeavor! You're absolutely right that song localization is an impressive task. With all the constraints one needs to observe, each localization ends up being even more unique to whoever's localizing it compared to an ordinary localization. I didn't even consciously notice Japanese songs don't rhyme as often as English songs until you pointed that out, haha!
I can't decide what I enjoy more about your videos: the informative and accessible examinations giving me the vocabulary to articulate what makes words feel right, or the fact that you never know when you're gonna be jumpscared by Flappy Bob
It continues to blow my mind that you only have like 3k subs. Your essays are highly polished and some of the most informative on the topic of translation. Keep up the good work.
You cannot believe how excited I was when I realized that there was probably no more relevant time to include "I'm Always Seeing You (Do Cool Stuff)". A song where the lyrics rhyme and are literally about translating something from Japanese is an opportunity I had to take.
I recently watched Hazbin Hotel in Japanese and started thinking a lot about how songs are translated, especially with fixed visuals that can't just be changed or rearranged. Thank you for this analysis!
This is such a fascinating topic and I'm keen to have more of a discussion about this! Last year I produced an acapella VGM concert and ran into this problem several times. We covered Baka Mitai and Eyes On Me, both of which have pretty dreadful English lyrics. Baka Mitai's English lyrics are weirdly out of cadence with the musical phrasing, where certain lyrics are emphasized by notes or rhythms that wouldn't normally be emphasized in English, leading to something feeling off with them. Eyes On Me in particular doesn't have official Japanese lyrics, but it's clear that it was translated from Japanese by a non-native speaker, and my arrangement reimagines the song as a duet, so I shuffled some things around to fit the new idea a bit better. Other examples! We have FFX-2's A Thousand Words, where the English version not only changes the melody to something more compelling (in my opinion), but actually outshines the Japanese version, the latter of which has some lazy choruses towards the end where Yuna just sings "la la la" for some reason. I can also think of two opposing examples, good and bad, found in the Fire Emblem series. "Emblem Engage!" has got some excellent lyrics that not only carry over the motifs in the Japanese version, but also match what is happening onscreen in that cheesy-90s-TV-show kind of way. They also play around with some of the anacrucic notes in the melody to better fit the English version. On the other hand, Lost in Thoughts All Alone's choruses have this awkward 3-4 syllable sets to work around, and the English version just... doesn't bother, leading to weird phrases like "the path iiiiis yours to cliiiimb".
Wow, that's really cool, and I love the examples you've given. I'll say that you're not too far out there with your modifications, as quite a few of the sources I read talked about alterations and modifications translators have done. Sometimes it's minor, just adding or subtracting a syllable here or there, but there were examples of things like Scandinavian hymns where the translators made more significant changes to the vocal melodies. One thing that I didn't get to cover in this video, but is actually a pretty significant part of translation theory is the idea of "skopos" (purpose or goal). Essentially, while being faithful to the original source is important, depending on the purpose of what the final translation is to be for, your priorities might change. Peter Low thought about song translation as "the pentathlon principle", where you're essentially trying to get the highest overall score in five categories (singability, sense, naturalness, rhyme, and rhythm). Looking into it, I'm really surprised and impressed with the changes done to FFX-2's song. If you're dubbing a musical scene in a show or cutscene and people's lips are moving to sing the song, you're generally even more tightly restricted to the melody. But the cutscene's actually substantially different to match some of the arrangement changes (when the second girl starts singing). I know Square-Enix started reanimating lipflaps in the PS2 era for their overseas releases, but this is something else. Also, a part of me is now very curious if the "la la la" is 'thing' in Japanese pop songwriting. It reminds me a lot of the song "Darling Baby" (a song produced as a merchandise tie-in for the anime The World God Only Knows), where the entire last verse is the chorus just sung as "la"s instead of words.
This might just be me, but I think "the path ISSS yours to cliiiiimb" actually lends itself to the weight of that song, because it has that sort of... I'm not a musician in any degree but "emphatic chanting" feel that feels appropriate for religious dirges and the like, which I think gets across what that song is doing in English very well. It drags every note in a strange way because it is very much a song about dredging up reality, in a sense.
@@LaZodiac It's less about the melody movement and more that the cadence doesn't match how you'd speak the phrase. It's shoehorning, basically. It also just completely demolishes the rhyming scheme. Using the same phrase as an example, "the path is yours to climb" has the same cadence as Shakespeare's classic "to be or not to be". If you've ever studied Shakespeare, you might be familiar with the concept of an iamb, which is basically where the stressed syllable of a word falls, called a "foot". When translating works of poetry, preserving meter is an incredibly important part. It's like translating a haiku from Japanese and just ignoring the 5/7/5 rule. In the phrase "the path is yours to climb", the feet are path, yours and climb. Good poetry (and therefore songwriting) incorporates these feet into the melody so that the emphasised notes match the feet. Try singing "to be or not to be" to the same melody as "the path is yours to climb", and you'll get a feel for how weird a choice it is. And we're just talking about one phrase! The entire song is like this. If I had translated the song, I might have picked out key imagery and themed words and then placed them in spots where the melody wants them to be, and then written the rest of the phrases around them.
I'm always a sucker for translation analysis videos and thought "wow what a nice recommendation and well done video, I should subscribe" and then realized that I'm already subbed and have already watched all of your previous ones. Glad to see another one of your videos, love your content!
Loved the brief reference to Somnium Files -- the main musical number from that game is so charmingly translated and i can't imagine what a tough process it must have been. Well, I guess now i can a little more! Song translations are really what first interested me in translation because I got really into jpop/jrock but wasn't good enough at Japanese to understand, so i kept reading lyrics and "literal" lyric translations and trying to think about how I would switch it to English so I could sing it and people would understand the meaning. I have a couple ones I'm somewhat happy with but I know they're very amateur so it's so cool to see this process being broken down!! Thanks for making this video!!
Very interesting video! Rhapsody has always been one of my favorite games and it was quite enlightening to see the side by side comparisons of the different versions of the songs. I always preferred the English ones so it was disappointing that the sequels didn't get the same attention under NIS America compared to the extra work Atlus USA did for us.
I’ve wondered if maybe they would’ve needed separate licensing to dub the songs, given how long it’s been since the original release? Maybe they weren’t included and would’ve cost extra. Maybe it also would’ve cost more to have the voice actors sing? I know that the Gunvolt series, despite recently getting a dub, hasn’t started dubbing the songs.
Can't believe I missed this video, youtube algorithm didn' show it for me. Great analysis as always, you deserve so much more subs considering the quality of your content but the subject is too niche for that I suppose
My girlfriend shared this video and I ADORE it. Incredible work! This is a game I intend to share with her at some point too since I quite enjoyed it as a younger me. Relatedly, as a possible future idea along these lines; I think you'd enjoy looking at HER musical rpg that she shared with me, the Ar Tonelico series. It's got really fascinating musical tracks that are partly Japanese and partly in their own in-setting conlang- obviously not dubbed because that'd be absurd work, but might be fun to look at.
That sounds fascinating, I've never heard of someone taking conlangs that far for a game. I think Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn or Path of Radiance has a song or two in a conlang, but a full set of different musical tracks with a fully developed conlang is super unique. I'll have to look into it.
Great video, subscribed! Got me really intrigued to experience both versions of the game myself, as I love studying the creative solutions other translators come up with.
Yet another brilliant video combining my favourite field with my favourite medium. Delightful range of references as ever What a charming, special game a musical JRPG turns out to be. Really felt some pantomime vibes from the English version - at least for the most effectively adapted songs. Inspirational work and can't wait for the next one!
I finished playing the NIS classics vol 3 switch version of rhapsody last year. And while I mostly played through the japanese audio for the songs, I still like the three songs you picked from the english dub. Especially the side by side comparison further explaining the reasoning behind each of them. Really great video!
I love good song translations so much. Not many people know how hard it is. Good work on the research!
Yes, and when it's done poorly, we end up with lyrical monstrosities like Lost in Thoughts All Alone from Fire Emblem Fates, or English Baka Mitai 😢
Man only Atlus in the early 2000's would be crazy enough to put this much effort into a game 7 people were gonna buy.
I love their financially irresponsible roots, I'm glad that against all odds they still exist and thrive today but their days of making the best localizations of games almost nobody was gonna play are long gone.
I know this isn’t related to the content of the video, but thank you so much for the subtitles! They’re very good. Your effort is well-appreciated.
You're very welcome. It takes a fair amount of work to optimize them, but I know it helps people who are hard-of-hearing and people whose native language isn't English.
When it comes to songs being localized in video games, I must shout out Rhythm Heaven for the DS! Rhythm Heaven Fever for the Wii also localized its Japanese songs in English, but the DS entry went one step further by adding localizations in French, Italian, German, Spanish and Korean for all its songs. What an impressive endeavor!
You're absolutely right that song localization is an impressive task. With all the constraints one needs to observe, each localization ends up being even more unique to whoever's localizing it compared to an ordinary localization. I didn't even consciously notice Japanese songs don't rhyme as often as English songs until you pointed that out, haha!
I can't decide what I enjoy more about your videos: the informative and accessible examinations giving me the vocabulary to articulate what makes words feel right, or the fact that you never know when you're gonna be jumpscared by Flappy Bob
It continues to blow my mind that you only have like 3k subs. Your essays are highly polished and some of the most informative on the topic of translation. Keep up the good work.
How the hell did you manage to fit a Taskmaster clip in this video LMAO i love your work man
You cannot believe how excited I was when I realized that there was probably no more relevant time to include "I'm Always Seeing You (Do Cool Stuff)". A song where the lyrics rhyme and are literally about translating something from Japanese is an opportunity I had to take.
I recently watched Hazbin Hotel in Japanese and started thinking a lot about how songs are translated, especially with fixed visuals that can't just be changed or rearranged.
Thank you for this analysis!
This is such a fascinating topic and I'm keen to have more of a discussion about this! Last year I produced an acapella VGM concert and ran into this problem several times. We covered Baka Mitai and Eyes On Me, both of which have pretty dreadful English lyrics.
Baka Mitai's English lyrics are weirdly out of cadence with the musical phrasing, where certain lyrics are emphasized by notes or rhythms that wouldn't normally be emphasized in English, leading to something feeling off with them.
Eyes On Me in particular doesn't have official Japanese lyrics, but it's clear that it was translated from Japanese by a non-native speaker, and my arrangement reimagines the song as a duet, so I shuffled some things around to fit the new idea a bit better.
Other examples! We have FFX-2's A Thousand Words, where the English version not only changes the melody to something more compelling (in my opinion), but actually outshines the Japanese version, the latter of which has some lazy choruses towards the end where Yuna just sings "la la la" for some reason.
I can also think of two opposing examples, good and bad, found in the Fire Emblem series. "Emblem Engage!" has got some excellent lyrics that not only carry over the motifs in the Japanese version, but also match what is happening onscreen in that cheesy-90s-TV-show kind of way. They also play around with some of the anacrucic notes in the melody to better fit the English version. On the other hand, Lost in Thoughts All Alone's choruses have this awkward 3-4 syllable sets to work around, and the English version just... doesn't bother, leading to weird phrases like "the path iiiiis yours to cliiiimb".
Wow, that's really cool, and I love the examples you've given. I'll say that you're not too far out there with your modifications, as quite a few of the sources I read talked about alterations and modifications translators have done. Sometimes it's minor, just adding or subtracting a syllable here or there, but there were examples of things like Scandinavian hymns where the translators made more significant changes to the vocal melodies.
One thing that I didn't get to cover in this video, but is actually a pretty significant part of translation theory is the idea of "skopos" (purpose or goal). Essentially, while being faithful to the original source is important, depending on the purpose of what the final translation is to be for, your priorities might change. Peter Low thought about song translation as "the pentathlon principle", where you're essentially trying to get the highest overall score in five categories (singability, sense, naturalness, rhyme, and rhythm).
Looking into it, I'm really surprised and impressed with the changes done to FFX-2's song. If you're dubbing a musical scene in a show or cutscene and people's lips are moving to sing the song, you're generally even more tightly restricted to the melody. But the cutscene's actually substantially different to match some of the arrangement changes (when the second girl starts singing). I know Square-Enix started reanimating lipflaps in the PS2 era for their overseas releases, but this is something else. Also, a part of me is now very curious if the "la la la" is 'thing' in Japanese pop songwriting. It reminds me a lot of the song "Darling Baby" (a song produced as a merchandise tie-in for the anime The World God Only Knows), where the entire last verse is the chorus just sung as "la"s instead of words.
This might just be me, but I think "the path ISSS yours to cliiiiimb" actually lends itself to the weight of that song, because it has that sort of... I'm not a musician in any degree but "emphatic chanting" feel that feels appropriate for religious dirges and the like, which I think gets across what that song is doing in English very well. It drags every note in a strange way because it is very much a song about dredging up reality, in a sense.
@@LaZodiac It's less about the melody movement and more that the cadence doesn't match how you'd speak the phrase. It's shoehorning, basically. It also just completely demolishes the rhyming scheme.
Using the same phrase as an example, "the path is yours to climb" has the same cadence as Shakespeare's classic "to be or not to be". If you've ever studied Shakespeare, you might be familiar with the concept of an iamb, which is basically where the stressed syllable of a word falls, called a "foot". When translating works of poetry, preserving meter is an incredibly important part. It's like translating a haiku from Japanese and just ignoring the 5/7/5 rule.
In the phrase "the path is yours to climb", the feet are path, yours and climb. Good poetry (and therefore songwriting) incorporates these feet into the melody so that the emphasised notes match the feet. Try singing "to be or not to be" to the same melody as "the path is yours to climb", and you'll get a feel for how weird a choice it is.
And we're just talking about one phrase! The entire song is like this.
If I had translated the song, I might have picked out key imagery and themed words and then placed them in spots where the melody wants them to be, and then written the rest of the phrases around them.
5:23 jan misali mention
I'm always a sucker for translation analysis videos and thought "wow what a nice recommendation and well done video, I should subscribe" and then realized that I'm already subbed and have already watched all of your previous ones. Glad to see another one of your videos, love your content!
Exactly what happened to me. 😂
What an interesting game! Love the way you broke down the songs. Great video!
Loved the brief reference to Somnium Files -- the main musical number from that game is so charmingly translated and i can't imagine what a tough process it must have been. Well, I guess now i can a little more!
Song translations are really what first interested me in translation because I got really into jpop/jrock but wasn't good enough at Japanese to understand, so i kept reading lyrics and "literal" lyric translations and trying to think about how I would switch it to English so I could sing it and people would understand the meaning. I have a couple ones I'm somewhat happy with but I know they're very amateur so it's so cool to see this process being broken down!! Thanks for making this video!!
Goat is back let's goooooo
Very interesting video! Rhapsody has always been one of my favorite games and it was quite enlightening to see the side by side comparisons of the different versions of the songs. I always preferred the English ones so it was disappointing that the sequels didn't get the same attention under NIS America compared to the extra work Atlus USA did for us.
I’ve wondered if maybe they would’ve needed separate licensing to dub the songs, given how long it’s been since the original release? Maybe they weren’t included and would’ve cost extra. Maybe it also would’ve cost more to have the voice actors sing? I know that the Gunvolt series, despite recently getting a dub, hasn’t started dubbing the songs.
Loved this so much! Rhapsody has become one of my favorite games ever since I played it.
Can't believe I missed this video, youtube algorithm didn' show it for me. Great analysis as always, you deserve so much more subs considering the quality of your content but the subject is too niche for that I suppose
My girlfriend shared this video and I ADORE it. Incredible work! This is a game I intend to share with her at some point too since I quite enjoyed it as a younger me.
Relatedly, as a possible future idea along these lines; I think you'd enjoy looking at HER musical rpg that she shared with me, the Ar Tonelico series. It's got really fascinating musical tracks that are partly Japanese and partly in their own in-setting conlang- obviously not dubbed because that'd be absurd work, but might be fun to look at.
That sounds fascinating, I've never heard of someone taking conlangs that far for a game. I think Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn or Path of Radiance has a song or two in a conlang, but a full set of different musical tracks with a fully developed conlang is super unique. I'll have to look into it.
Amazing work, well researched and detailed!
Very fun video. Thank you for the subtitles and little notes that help explain things. (also shout-out to Ai the somnium files 3:46.)
Great video, subscribed! Got me really intrigued to experience both versions of the game myself, as I love studying the creative solutions other translators come up with.
Very interesting video and kind of a blast from the past. Hope to see more of this
Excellent video as always. Now to re-listen to all my fav english covers of japanese songs!
Super interesting topic to discuss and done in a highly engaging manner! Keep up the great work, and have a lovely day :D
Phenomenal work on this! I hope you keep at it, this is some premium stuff on a topic that doesn't get enough attention in games media.
Yet another brilliant video combining my favourite field with my favourite medium. Delightful range of references as ever
What a charming, special game a musical JRPG turns out to be. Really felt some pantomime vibes from the English version - at least for the most effectively adapted songs.
Inspirational work and can't wait for the next one!
Fascinating video. Subscribed.
Great stuff, might check out the game for myself.
I finished playing the NIS classics vol 3 switch version of rhapsody last year. And while I mostly played through the japanese audio for the songs, I still like the three songs you picked from the english dub.
Especially the side by side comparison further explaining the reasoning behind each of them. Really great video!
YOOOO TOUTUBE ALGORITHM HAS BLESSED ME TONIGHT
Great video!
Nicely done!
Oh, I should've guess music, considering the music notes
Great video!