Thank you to one of my closest and lifelong friends Tolga Han, who was raised in Japan and speaks the language fluently, for helping me with the translations in this video. I studied Japanese academically for a year and am surrounded by a Japanese community, but since I can’t be expected to translate the Japanese constitution of 1947, I got someone who could.
I'm a translation student, and I found this video really interesting. I've studied translation theory and it seems that the translators for games like this want to "appeal to a broader audience", or "feel more digestable and easy to understand without Japanese context", or "explain nuance" - but it seems that there hasn't been a clear goal set between the those involved in the translation, or much fan feedback, because as someone who plays Japanese games with English subtitles, some of these translations really suck and miss a lot of fluidity and nuance. Made me think, thanks for the video :)
Except when it comes to different languages options (if the game is kind enough to even have that) translations are usually taken from the already done English script. If the English translation is weird, your native language translation will also be weird.
I can speak japanese but i'm functionally illiterate in the language, so always use english text. it drives me absolutely insane when the translation makes the characters just new people entirely and I want to shake the translators responsible. I understand you can't directly translate things, languages don't work like that, but it really isn't hard to build sentences with the same or similar idea/vibe, they're choosing to write fanfic and I HATE it
There actually is a correlation between the eagle eye and carrots response lol it’s just a bit corny, hate to literally spell it out, but carrots have vitamin A and Beta Carotene, which are good for your eyes. Pretty stale dialogue exchange, but it isn’t irrelevant.
I've seen the odd cases where a game has had a fan translation for years before an official translation got released... and the official translation is straight up worse and less faithful to the japanese script. It completely baffles me... (Looking at you, Jast blue)
Even an 'older' game like story of ''season trio of town'' suffered from those liberty, especially one of the male bachelor Ford. As a game with a social part quite important to the gameplay, having correct dialogue seems like the bare minimum. But they butchered his line so much he was hated in the international fandom sometimes because of that. He seemed way more agressive or outright saying other things and till this day i don't understand why they translated him that way. Well, at least that what it seems like many years ago, but when i went back to check the fandom's feeling towards him now, it seems better. Anyway, it's the kind of things that once it happend make you doubt a lot that what you're getting is actually the story and it didn't get modified for whatever reason. And it's a shame because there are def good translations out there but i get to hear or encounter some questionable ones and now i have trust issue lmao. As someone who like to play heavily story driven game it's kind of a bad spot especially since i always took english translation over my language because in the past it seemed more accurate/precise. But other language often take the english one to translate so it's not really better going back to my language too...
N2 Japanese speaker here and long time GBF player (so a little biased) but on your comments on Relinks translations specifically, that's honestly how the team has done it with the mobage for years now. I know there's a big argument between translation vs localization but what the team has done has created very distinct personalities in text form, as there are no Eng VAs in the mobage. I always felt that the translation got the same idea across while also being faithful to the character speaking. Vyrn in particular constantly speaks in casual slang and shorthand and gives a nickname to every single character in the game and sometimes it requires some heavy lifting to translate into one that is both fitting to his character and actually gets the joke across in English. Liberties are taken, yes, but they have never used it to push an agenda like others and instead serve to enhance a character, getting across what that character is about in text form. Also you harped about Eugen eating carrots thing but isn't that just a natural response to Gran's comment about him having eagle eyes? I'd take flowing and natural sounding English over 1 to 1 literal translations.
Yessir, I did mention that the conversation between Eugen and Gran was fairly well translated, but what I wanted to especially express is that some parts of the Japanese dialogue are replaced, while others aren't, and I couldn't quite pin down the reason as to why they'd do that. Like you said, the flow was there and it sounded completely natural in English, but on the flip side, the Japanese flow was already fine, so it feels like extra work making a brand new flow for a different language. Thank you for your informative comment, I'm unfamiliar with the history of GBF, and I'd like to apologize if any of what I said in the video was insensitive.
Ken Liu once said "The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as though they were originally written in English." So sure, よろしくお願いします does not make much sense in English. People hardly say things like "please take care of me" but a faithful interpretation needs to preserve the original's nuances of meaning as much as possible without omission. The text can sound slightly different from real English because its a video game! However, I am not opposed to slang, honestly. As long as it's not super cringe or over the top from the og meaning, it can add plenty to a character that might be lost in direct translation. For example: Ryuji from Persona 5 is always saying "Bro" and "Dude". It matches his character which is a teenage boy. He talks the same in Japanese, albeit the meanings come off differently, the character is still interpreted the same way.
The only thing that annoys me is when it's maybe a bit too faithful and doesn't try to teach about the cultural differences. I'll use Persona as an example because it was in the video. Persona 5 Strikers had a lot of traveling across Japan, and of course they talk about food a lot. Specifically food each location is famous for. They ask you every single time you go somewhere what sounds the best, or what your favorite is of these Japanese foods. It was kinda fun looking them up at first but a few locations in and I'd just pick a random option and skip the dialogue. I'd never heard of most of those foods, and I definitely had never tried them. Eventually I just got annoyed whenever they asked. It's not just the food either, there's a lot of very specific things they mention and don't explain, because obviously someone from Japan would know it. But it simply didn't translate well over here. I could also swear some of them had English names they purposefully weren't using, but I could be mixing it up with another game I was playing around the same time that was translated similarly.
there needs to be some kind of law that keeps things as close to the source material as humanily possible, even if some people might not like it. It's straight up altering art and that is wrong, no one outside of the original vision should be allowed to tamper with it, no one.
The thing that your video ignores is that these changes are most of the time consulted with original creators, who are also very often baffled that people have problems with the translation, to the point of it being a joke in some parts of japanese gaming industry.
Same energy as that one time 4Kids didn't even want to dub One Piece but were essencially tricked into doing so. Japanese creatives likely wonder why we try to respect their source material when they don't.(Though it is also relative because some japanese creators are also so close to their source material that they get outraged or depressed when it gets messed with)
To be fair, the problem is not new, it's a problem that has always existed in English localization, the thing is that now is more blatantly bizarre and obvious. You can problems in older Final Fantasy games for example, that contained a lot of old English and fancy expressions that were not present in the original Japanese. It is pretty obvious in FF Tactics and Tactics Ogre to mention a couple of games. The problem just got worse with the years. FFXIV translation is basically a fanfiction, they made up a lot of parts of the story and lore on the early versions of the game that later didn't match with the lore that following expansion were building up so you get a ridiculous amount of contradictions. They also changed the personality of lots of characters, like one of the villains was basically praying for his life when defeated in the Japanese dub, while in the English translation he doesn't admit defeat with an arrogant, overbearing tone while dying. And the amount of people that this affect is a lot larger than you might think. Yes I'm sure that in English speaking countries, the large majority of player prefer the English voice over so they never notice the issue. But in other places, like here in South America many people prefer the Japanese dub thanks to the large popularity of anime, so the problem becomes noticeable even when you don't completely understand the languages. And even when you set the game to use Japanese dub and Spanish (or any other language) text the problem is still present, because new translations are all based on the English translation instead of the original Japanese, so all the BS of the English translation bleeds over other languages as well. I really hate localizer that think they can do a better job than the original writers, if you want to write your own story, make your own game.
You happened to use the worst examples. 1. The creator of tactics gave his full blessing to the translator due to him having a Japanese literary masters degree and degree in fancy old ass literature I general. He told him to make it sound biblical. This was for vagrant story, he would have this man work on his laters projects such as ff12 and they'd carry over that man's direction for all ivalice matsuno games to the rereleases of tactics ogre and fft. Ff14 devs openly site and show and obsession with matsunos work so you see the english scripts reflect that. The changes are the Japanese creators intended vision and he'd prefer English speakers experience it that way since it's intended to be fairly Shakespear like. 2. Ff14, the translator head of localization shares a desk with the script writers, has several roles on development, is best friends with the games lead devs. Every single english change is something they are 100% aware of, they see and hear his explanations all the time, and frankly they encourage it to the point they prioritized the english side of development in ff16 despite the script being written in Japanese. I really get annoyed when people try to assume it's some brain dead localizer with zero respect for the Japanese when in a lot of cases the very same Japanese people SAW the scripts and went "okay". But the real reason the ff14 example is bad is because Koji fox speaks fluent Japanese and yoshiP has a solid grasp of English, they literally can tell eachother exactly what he changed without a language barrier. Look up "Thals balls". You'll hear this man explain that HE was writing lore. He's stated in the past his title as head of localization is extremely misleading because he's technically a music composer, writer, director, manager, etc. We just know him as the guy who makes the english scripts super funny. I'll admit the english scripts are bothersome if you switch to Japanese voices but I can't think of many videogames or anime that have more than 1 subtitle track for one language speaking audience and frankly several different subtitles for one release sounds like an extremely horrible doubling of work load for the fringe vocal option compared to the primary way majority of people will experience the game. And unlike anime where it can afford to have a Japanese accurate subtitles. Games, are so complex and you have too many ways to interact with the world that you definitely need subtitles sometimes to know what anyone said sometimes because you turned your camera wrong
@@PrincessNine While I can partially concede for Tactics if this is true, I still believe it is a bad translation even if the creator allowed and encouraged the fancy translation, because it changes the meaning of many sentences and many character go out of character. However, I can't do the same for XIV, I'm also an active player since the release of realm reborn and I completely hate Koji Fox work, at least on the localization side. Yes, I know he assumes many hats within XIV's team and he's a close friend of Yoshi, but that doesn't make his localization work any good. Yoshi himself usually gets stunned during streams when he learns of the changes Koji made with the localization. The fact that somebody gave his ok to script doesn't make the translation good, specially when the ok obviously didn't came from Yoshi or the rest of the writers. Haurchefant is the perfect example of everything that's wrong with the localization. XIV translation is just plain bad. And most modern games come with subtitles for multiple languages nowadays, not all of them of course, but many do, some even have multiple dubs, Sony is one of the bests at that since they include Spanish dubs for Latin America and Spain. Even ports of old games now include subtitle for multiple languages. Same applies to anime, Crunchyroll, Netflix, Prime Video and HBO MAx all has subititles in multiple languages for anime, just like the rest of their content. And of course we also have fansubs too, but that's a different story. In the past Spanish scripts used to be translated directly from Japanese with varying degrees of quality. FF7 was infamously bad in Spanish, so bad you would believe it was machine translated, except that when this game came out machine translation was still not a thing. FF8 was a lot better, still had some issues (they translated Ultima as "Artema" because translator couldn't understand that was the Japanese pronunciation for that word. Same thing happened with Ultimecia), but it was ok. Now that Spanish translations comes from the English script, we also have to deal with English shenanigans on top of ours.
I despise localizers who insert their own beliefs into a translation and straight up rewrite the dialogue to stroke their own ego's. I'm not here for your beliefs I'm here for the original creators vision.
Translation teams should stop hiring failed scriptwriters that don't understand anime culture as localization supervisors or localization team leader/coordinators, the moment that happens translation qualities will soar. They think every game should sound funny and wacky at every single moment that is not being serious, and sometimes even in serious moments All this does is literally make every game feel like a 4kids translation, 4kids in 2024. Nobody that genuinely loves anime says 4kids was good and these people think it's the funniest shit ever for some weird ass reason.
the problem with localization is that a lot of the people involved range from mildly incompetent to deranged. that whole industry is just ass, from bad translation to straight censorship.
Thank you to one of my closest and lifelong friends Tolga Han, who was raised in Japan and speaks the language fluently, for helping me with the translations in this video. I studied Japanese academically for a year and am surrounded by a Japanese community, but since I can’t be expected to translate the Japanese constitution of 1947, I got someone who could.
W Mr. Han
Localization has always been a problem in video games .Looking at you revealations persona
I'm a translation student, and I found this video really interesting. I've studied translation theory and it seems that the translators for games like this want to "appeal to a broader audience", or "feel more digestable and easy to understand without Japanese context", or "explain nuance" - but it seems that there hasn't been a clear goal set between the those involved in the translation, or much fan feedback, because as someone who plays Japanese games with English subtitles, some of these translations really suck and miss a lot of fluidity and nuance. Made me think, thanks for the video :)
I'm glad you enjoyed the video, and thank you for your comment!
Except when it comes to different languages options (if the game is kind enough to even have that) translations are usually taken from the already done English script.
If the English translation is weird, your native language translation will also be weird.
I can speak japanese but i'm functionally illiterate in the language, so always use english text. it drives me absolutely insane when the translation makes the characters just new people entirely and I want to shake the translators responsible. I understand you can't directly translate things, languages don't work like that, but it really isn't hard to build sentences with the same or similar idea/vibe, they're choosing to write fanfic and I HATE it
What an amazing channel and topic, hope to see even more of you!
There actually is a correlation between the eagle eye and carrots response lol it’s just a bit corny, hate to literally spell it out, but carrots have vitamin A and Beta Carotene, which are good for your eyes. Pretty stale dialogue exchange, but it isn’t irrelevant.
I've seen the odd cases where a game has had a fan translation for years before an official translation got released... and the official translation is straight up worse and less faithful to the japanese script. It completely baffles me... (Looking at you, Jast blue)
Your edits are so clean and so professional. I love the quality of this video!
This is exactly why I'm holding out on buying GBF Relink until the modders address the localization issue.
The way they butchered lowain, tomoi, and elsam characters in the english localization for versus rising is just.....
Akihiko can fill the Theurgy bar with other characters buff!? Legit didn't know for the entire game.
honkai peak rail mentioned
Why is there a Honkai Star Rail character on the thumbnail if there's not a single honkai Star Rail reference in the video 😔
Even an 'older' game like story of ''season trio of town'' suffered from those liberty, especially one of the male bachelor Ford. As a game with a social part quite important to the gameplay, having correct dialogue seems like the bare minimum. But they butchered his line so much he was hated in the international fandom sometimes because of that. He seemed way more agressive or outright saying other things and till this day i don't understand why they translated him that way.
Well, at least that what it seems like many years ago, but when i went back to check the fandom's feeling towards him now, it seems better.
Anyway, it's the kind of things that once it happend make you doubt a lot that what you're getting is actually the story and it didn't get modified for whatever reason. And it's a shame because there are def good translations out there but i get to hear or encounter some questionable ones and now i have trust issue lmao. As someone who like to play heavily story driven game it's kind of a bad spot especially since i always took english translation over my language because in the past it seemed more accurate/precise. But other language often take the english one to translate so it's not really better going back to my language too...
N2 Japanese speaker here and long time GBF player (so a little biased) but on your comments on Relinks translations specifically, that's honestly how the team has done it with the mobage for years now. I know there's a big argument between translation vs localization but what the team has done has created very distinct personalities in text form, as there are no Eng VAs in the mobage. I always felt that the translation got the same idea across while also being faithful to the character speaking. Vyrn in particular constantly speaks in casual slang and shorthand and gives a nickname to every single character in the game and sometimes it requires some heavy lifting to translate into one that is both fitting to his character and actually gets the joke across in English. Liberties are taken, yes, but they have never used it to push an agenda like others and instead serve to enhance a character, getting across what that character is about in text form.
Also you harped about Eugen eating carrots thing but isn't that just a natural response to Gran's comment about him having eagle eyes? I'd take flowing and natural sounding English over 1 to 1 literal translations.
Yessir, I did mention that the conversation between Eugen and Gran was fairly well translated, but what I wanted to especially express is that some parts of the Japanese dialogue are replaced, while others aren't, and I couldn't quite pin down the reason as to why they'd do that. Like you said, the flow was there and it sounded completely natural in English, but on the flip side, the Japanese flow was already fine, so it feels like extra work making a brand new flow for a different language. Thank you for your informative comment, I'm unfamiliar with the history of GBF, and I'd like to apologize if any of what I said in the video was insensitive.
Thank you for the upload Bonnod4! I will not be eating carrots anymore.
Ken Liu once said "The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as though they were originally written in English." So sure, よろしくお願いします does not make much sense in English. People hardly say things like "please take care of me" but a faithful interpretation needs to preserve the original's nuances of meaning as much as possible without omission. The text can sound slightly different from real English because its a video game! However, I am not opposed to slang, honestly. As long as it's not super cringe or over the top from the og meaning, it can add plenty to a character that might be lost in direct translation. For example: Ryuji from Persona 5 is always saying "Bro" and "Dude". It matches his character which is a teenage boy. He talks the same in Japanese, albeit the meanings come off differently, the character is still interpreted the same way.
The only thing that annoys me is when it's maybe a bit too faithful and doesn't try to teach about the cultural differences. I'll use Persona as an example because it was in the video. Persona 5 Strikers had a lot of traveling across Japan, and of course they talk about food a lot. Specifically food each location is famous for. They ask you every single time you go somewhere what sounds the best, or what your favorite is of these Japanese foods. It was kinda fun looking them up at first but a few locations in and I'd just pick a random option and skip the dialogue. I'd never heard of most of those foods, and I definitely had never tried them. Eventually I just got annoyed whenever they asked. It's not just the food either, there's a lot of very specific things they mention and don't explain, because obviously someone from Japan would know it. But it simply didn't translate well over here.
I could also swear some of them had English names they purposefully weren't using, but I could be mixing it up with another game I was playing around the same time that was translated similarly.
You're an underrated UA-camr
there needs to be some kind of law that keeps things as close to the source material as humanily possible, even if some people might not like it. It's straight up altering art and that is wrong, no one outside of the original vision should be allowed to tamper with it, no one.
damn i was surprised this had so little views
Shoutout to Unreal Life for having an excellent translation
Here we go again.
Ooh nice.
eagle eye and carrot? yeah lemme just spread false information on a game from japan. it's totally in my right to do as a localizer
The thing that your video ignores is that these changes are most of the time consulted with original creators, who are also very often baffled that people have problems with the translation, to the point of it being a joke in some parts of japanese gaming industry.
Same energy as that one time 4Kids didn't even want to dub One Piece but were essencially tricked into doing so. Japanese creatives likely wonder why we try to respect their source material when they don't.(Though it is also relative because some japanese creators are also so close to their source material that they get outraged or depressed when it gets messed with)
To be fair, the problem is not new, it's a problem that has always existed in English localization, the thing is that now is more blatantly bizarre and obvious. You can problems in older Final Fantasy games for example, that contained a lot of old English and fancy expressions that were not present in the original Japanese. It is pretty obvious in FF Tactics and Tactics Ogre to mention a couple of games.
The problem just got worse with the years. FFXIV translation is basically a fanfiction, they made up a lot of parts of the story and lore on the early versions of the game that later didn't match with the lore that following expansion were building up so you get a ridiculous amount of contradictions. They also changed the personality of lots of characters, like one of the villains was basically praying for his life when defeated in the Japanese dub, while in the English translation he doesn't admit defeat with an arrogant, overbearing tone while dying.
And the amount of people that this affect is a lot larger than you might think. Yes I'm sure that in English speaking countries, the large majority of player prefer the English voice over so they never notice the issue. But in other places, like here in South America many people prefer the Japanese dub thanks to the large popularity of anime, so the problem becomes noticeable even when you don't completely understand the languages. And even when you set the game to use Japanese dub and Spanish (or any other language) text the problem is still present, because new translations are all based on the English translation instead of the original Japanese, so all the BS of the English translation bleeds over other languages as well.
I really hate localizer that think they can do a better job than the original writers, if you want to write your own story, make your own game.
You happened to use the worst examples.
1. The creator of tactics gave his full blessing to the translator due to him having a Japanese literary masters degree and degree in fancy old ass literature I general. He told him to make it sound biblical. This was for vagrant story, he would have this man work on his laters projects such as ff12 and they'd carry over that man's direction for all ivalice matsuno games to the rereleases of tactics ogre and fft. Ff14 devs openly site and show and obsession with matsunos work so you see the english scripts reflect that. The changes are the Japanese creators intended vision and he'd prefer English speakers experience it that way since it's intended to be fairly Shakespear like.
2. Ff14, the translator head of localization shares a desk with the script writers, has several roles on development, is best friends with the games lead devs. Every single english change is something they are 100% aware of, they see and hear his explanations all the time, and frankly they encourage it to the point they prioritized the english side of development in ff16 despite the script being written in Japanese. I really get annoyed when people try to assume it's some brain dead localizer with zero respect for the Japanese when in a lot of cases the very same Japanese people SAW the scripts and went "okay". But the real reason the ff14 example is bad is because Koji fox speaks fluent Japanese and yoshiP has a solid grasp of English, they literally can tell eachother exactly what he changed without a language barrier. Look up "Thals balls". You'll hear this man explain that HE was writing lore. He's stated in the past his title as head of localization is extremely misleading because he's technically a music composer, writer, director, manager, etc. We just know him as the guy who makes the english scripts super funny.
I'll admit the english scripts are bothersome if you switch to Japanese voices but I can't think of many videogames or anime that have more than 1 subtitle track for one language speaking audience and frankly several different subtitles for one release sounds like an extremely horrible doubling of work load for the fringe vocal option compared to the primary way majority of people will experience the game.
And unlike anime where it can afford to have a Japanese accurate subtitles. Games, are so complex and you have too many ways to interact with the world that you definitely need subtitles sometimes to know what anyone said sometimes because you turned your camera wrong
@@PrincessNine While I can partially concede for Tactics if this is true, I still believe it is a bad translation even if the creator allowed and encouraged the fancy translation, because it changes the meaning of many sentences and many character go out of character.
However, I can't do the same for XIV, I'm also an active player since the release of realm reborn and I completely hate Koji Fox work, at least on the localization side. Yes, I know he assumes many hats within XIV's team and he's a close friend of Yoshi, but that doesn't make his localization work any good. Yoshi himself usually gets stunned during streams when he learns of the changes Koji made with the localization. The fact that somebody gave his ok to script doesn't make the translation good, specially when the ok obviously didn't came from Yoshi or the rest of the writers. Haurchefant is the perfect example of everything that's wrong with the localization. XIV translation is just plain bad.
And most modern games come with subtitles for multiple languages nowadays, not all of them of course, but many do, some even have multiple dubs, Sony is one of the bests at that since they include Spanish dubs for Latin America and Spain. Even ports of old games now include subtitle for multiple languages. Same applies to anime, Crunchyroll, Netflix, Prime Video and HBO MAx all has subititles in multiple languages for anime, just like the rest of their content. And of course we also have fansubs too, but that's a different story.
In the past Spanish scripts used to be translated directly from Japanese with varying degrees of quality. FF7 was infamously bad in Spanish, so bad you would believe it was machine translated, except that when this game came out machine translation was still not a thing. FF8 was a lot better, still had some issues (they translated Ultima as "Artema" because translator couldn't understand that was the Japanese pronunciation for that word. Same thing happened with Ultimecia), but it was ok. Now that Spanish translations comes from the English script, we also have to deal with English shenanigans on top of ours.
I despise localizers who insert their own beliefs into a translation and straight up rewrite the dialogue to stroke their own ego's. I'm not here for your beliefs I'm here for the original creators vision.
Translation teams should stop hiring failed scriptwriters that don't understand anime culture as localization supervisors or localization team leader/coordinators, the moment that happens translation qualities will soar. They think every game should sound funny and wacky at every single moment that is not being serious, and sometimes even in serious moments
All this does is literally make every game feel like a 4kids translation, 4kids in 2024.
Nobody that genuinely loves anime says 4kids was good and these people think it's the funniest shit ever for some weird ass reason.
the problem with localization is that a lot of the people involved range from mildly incompetent to deranged.
that whole industry is just ass, from bad translation to straight censorship.
No one cares weebs, just watch the dub