I was waiting for the part about how this game "changed video game localization" but it was not there. Just a clickbait title.
Overall nice post, though. Translation is hard, and especially getting the feel of a particular place in time.
It was neat to see their examples of turning plain Japanese into a quasi-Elizabethan English in order to match the vaguely medieval setting of the game. That's something that's really hard to do (because it's more than translation, now you're reinterpreting the original text)...
I was nominally in charge of making Diablo 2 localizeable from the USA side but all I did was make all the text into resources loaded at run time that had some scrolling speed information embedded into so that scrolling text could match different spoken language speeds/text length for text that was more than one over head speech bubble in length. I handed off text data file to a parent company team in Ireland that translated it to all the European languages we supported. We could check the Spanish in house but had to trust them for every other language. I think we had contractors in the Far East do the Japanese/Chinese/Korean translations. The team in Ireland early on provided a function/sprintf format for possessive/of the/gender specific/other idioms that didn't translate well with just substitution so I merged that back into the source code/text data and didn't have to touch the source code after that for localization text resources and we released the game worldwide mostly simultaneously (I think we had a slight delay for Far East for some reason) in 2000. We just used Excel for most of the data driven parts of the game like Vagrant Story and the game could read a text csv file in debug mode and a binary excel file in production. I imagine most games that are something like this now.
This is why it's really an art. Games have tried using "medieval" dialogue before, but that usually entails something that sounds like 20th century dialogue with a couple substitutions of "thou" for "you" and an occasional "-th" ending on things.
Alexander Smith's translation took some care in making it a thorough--I even spotted a few instances where he used an implied verb of motion. In earlier forms of English, verbs of motion like "to go" could be implied rather than explicitly stated (cf. Taming of the Shrew: "Come, Kate, we'll to bed."). It still exists in languages like German but has long since fallen out of favor in English .
I'm thinking it'd look something like, "kannst du Deutsch?", where the sprechen is implied. I'm not sure I've ever seen it with gehen or other motion verbs, though... And I'm not a native speaker so I can't rely on intuition to say whether something like, "werden wir ins Bett", sounds right without gehen.
> I'm thinking it'd look something like, "kannst du Deutsch?", where the sprechen is implied.
What I can imagine what you might have had in mind when you wrote your post is something like "Willst du nach Hause?" or "Ich will nach Hause", where indeed that verb of movement is missing.
In my opinion (but I am not a linguist or teacher of German) is that in German these verbs "können" (as in your example) or "wollen" are used somewaht differently in German than in English:
If one asks "Willst du nach Hause?", one only asks whether the person would prefer to (with which method is undefined) to get home. If you ask "Willst du nach Hause gehen?", it asks the question with a concrete way to get to home ("gehen").
Similar things (though more subtile) hold for your "kannst du Deutsch?" example. Formulated this way it does not specify in which way the other person is capable of German (speaking, understanding, writing etc.). The answer will to this question will often give a hint in which way the answerer is capable of German (speaking, understanding, writing etc.). If you want to ask specifically whether the person is capable of German in a specific way, you add this to your question, such as "Kannst du Deutsch sprechen" (though it would be more idiomatic to formulate this as "Sprechen Sie (auch) Deutsch?").
> I can't rely on intuition to say whether something like, "werden wir ins Bett", sounds right without gehen.
This is clearly not correct German. I think you perhaps meant "Wollen wir ins Bett?", which is nevertheless still rather colloquial (better use "Wollen wir ins Bett gehen?"),
And that's an interesting note about the specific ambiguity about how something is done. I think the difference in English is that a verb like "to go" is already extremely general. That is, "to go" encompasses pretty much any method of "going", and one would use a more specific verb to relay a more specific method, like "to walk" or "to drive" or "to take the train". But there's not always a general verb to fit the situation.
I agree it fell short. I thought the party about using more imagery in English than Japanese was interesting. I didn't know that was uncommon in that language.
It seems like a wild exaggeration to me. Japanese definitely has it's share of imagery and wordplay. It's just that most video game scripts - especially from that era - tend to employ a language that is straightforward and functional at its best and uninspiring and dull at its worst.
Japanese does have many forms of imagery though. For a prime example of cheeky imagery in wordplay like the one in the sodliers' dialogue you can probably look no further than Rakugo - which employs wordplay so much that it's notoriously hard to translate.
For people deeply interested in video game translation, particularly with some knowledge of Japanese, I highly recommend the “Legends of Localization” books, where the author goes into extreme details about how Zelda (first book) and Earthbound (second book) were translated. There’s also a website with similar information (but not as deep) for a whole plethora of games, and a third book (for Super Mario Bros.) is in the works.
I like Vagrant Story, and most of the games in its setting (Ivalice) are my favorite in the Final Fantasy series.
For a more emblematic example of the script quirks these games employ, The Final Fantasy Tactics remake (War of the Lions) goes much more Shakespearean, for good and ill (you lose some of the most classic lines in the original, like Don't blame us. Blame yourself or God., but the entire thing is more cohesive and vivid)
All translation is a creative act and respect for the original work is likely going to counsel taking some liberties with regards to "literal" translations.
Here's a line:
> そんなに簡単に使えるものなのか、"魔法"ってヤツは？
> Is this "magic" stuff really that easy to use?
That is a literal translation, to a point, but it is a lossy translation. You've substantially lost the characterization of the solider, who is obviously lowborn/uneducated/crude/etc in the original (to a degree that "stuff" does not capture -- the giveaway is ってヤツは？, which is content-free and hence murderously difficult to translate). The shipped translation makes a nod in the direction of that characterization, and (correctly) captures that Solider B is the sophisticated one of the two, by a fair but not impossible margin.
Also, to the extent you believe authorial intent is a function of authors rather than of texts, this translation (like many!) is a joint creative endeavor of the author and the translator, and (again, if you believe authorial intent matters) the author's direction trumps your aesthetic preferences.
(Disclaimer: comment informed by professional experience as a J->E translator/interpreter.)
I don't think anyone would argue for word-level translations without any grammar - that wouldn't even be possible, since there isn't a 1-1 mapping between words in different languages. But for a translation, I think most people want you to do the minimum possible to preserve the original meaning. So no switching "ramen" to "spaghetti" because you think people won't understand.
Or as I saw misattributed to Keynes in a comment here:
"It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong."
-Carveth Read
With humility for one's own skills and respect for the author, there are many times a literal translation would not accomplish the author's intent (in the target language).
> A literal translation of many sentences from Japanese to English (and vice-versa) reorders words to the point of gibberish.
To be clear, by not taking liberties what I meant is preserving both meaning and intent. So called localization does often screw with one or the other.
Eh, I remember watching a 'literal' fan translation of the scene in Dragon Ball Z where Majin Vegeta explains the impetus for his continuing feud with Goku. The script simply lacks power compared to the Funimation dub. I think it might be more respectful to the source material to consider intent, as opposed to linguistic parity.
People would be pretty pissed if someone did that to a book wouldn't they?
But at least they aimed for accuracy. Not too much American culture and memes. And actual respect for the product and creators! Unheard of in some contemporary videogame localization circles.
Overall nice post, though. Translation is hard, and especially getting the feel of a particular place in time.
It was neat to see their examples of turning plain Japanese into a quasi-Elizabethan English in order to match the vaguely medieval setting of the game. That's something that's really hard to do (because it's more than translation, now you're reinterpreting the original text)...