On the matter of Localization Issues

[Hyde 'n Seek]

Firstly, to pose a question:
Did everyone here drop the first Suikoden game as soon as you saw "Feel the power of the science!"? No, you probably didn't. Although the translation was flawed, the meaning was understood, and you still were able to form a connection with that game.

That being said, no such issues exist in this localization. I've played so far with english text and japanese voices, as I've studied the language enough that this is a quick way for me to get a good general basis for translation quality.

I'm sure anyone who knows anything about japanese already knows this, but its literally impossible to do a one-to-one literal translation of japanese into english. We do not have various linguistic elements, such as nuanced tone-indicators and honorifics. We also don't have nearly the same depth of onomatopoeia, nor is it natural for us to make up words or repeat them twice for emphasis. This translation will change some words at different parts of dialogue to get across tone or emphasis that would otherwise not come across at all. This isn't an odd practice.

To bring up an example, Lian's "Rub-a-dub-dub, open up ya schlub." Yes, this sounds somewhat unprofessional...As does most everything Lian says in either language. Its important to note that Lian uses an onomatopoetic chant when trying to use her lens in japanese as well, to indicate she's rubbing it and trying to activate it. I've seen someone here claim what she says in this specific line is "literally open sesame." This is true, but she doesn't only say that. She uses her little chant as well. As I said before, we don't use doubled onomatopoetic phrases nearly as frequently in english as they do in japanese. The current translation does its best to incorporate the feeling of the entire line into english, even if it means changing more literal parts of it. To be honest, it would have felt more natural were we not to have translated Lian's little rubbing chant into anything at all, but then you'd all have something else to complain about as not being literally one-to-one. We'd also have lost the nuance of this as something she does repeatedly. Something like "rub rub, open sesame" comes off as so stiff and unnatural, but the line she does say in english gets across the exact same idea as the japanese while maintaining Lian's intended personality quirks.

There's no "this guy are sick" level issues here, its ridiculous to act like this is literally unplayable when the two most noteworthy suikoden games have legitimate issues with translation to the extent some of what the game tells you is straight up incomprehensible.

In conclusion, fine thanks, the enemy formation is sorry I don't know.

[Cless]

Are you really comparing a small niche game from like 30 years ago to a modern game with all the recent advancements in translation technology/tools/databases at their disposal?

[三Akiyama]

Meanwhile I'll be playing a version with a good localisation because I'm fortunate enough to be born in a non-English speaking country.
♥♥♥♥ wokism, but the game itself is good. (playing on PS5 hence why I don't own it on Steam)

[Zeo]

Suikoden 2 translators did a miracle, I read long ago that they only had 6 months to translate the whole game.
As for Suiko 1, it aged bad even during the PSX era.

Other than the obvious woke stuff, the saturday morning cartoon dialogues also are terrible and it's something that both sides are complaining overall, we can't have mature speech on modern games anymore.

[Zio]

Yeah it's wild. In our localised version (German) of Suikoden II the whole town of Gregminster is suddenly in French. Among other weird but much much more minor issues, like runes or skills etc having different names or cut off text. I can get behind some of the criticism of some things, but most of it is just the usual people throwing a massive fit. A thing I personally hated was in the Final Fantasy movie Advent Children when Tifa says her shilly shally dilly dally line, I thought it's way more than just weird but I shrug it off and that's it. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever even publicly said this, so you won't se me going into every FF related place online complaining about how this is everybody's issue somehow.

[NightShade]

English is my fourth language i learned, so it is far from perfect.

Your first example from a game made 30 years ago while cringe, is at least in proper English language so i can understand it. Your example from this game is like an alien language to me. The only thing i understand is "open up".

I rather have bad Japanese puns intact, even if those lose most of it comedic effect in english language, rather than some internet meme language as im getting older and im not termianlly online and dont understand most of them.

At least with puns i get a chuckle here and there. When those jokes are "modernized", most of the time im left with is "Huh?" "What the heck those that mean??

I played a game once that had "lol" and "omg" in its translated conversation.
You want me to immerse myself in a game world and believe that two people talk to each other and say "omg" to one another?? Not "Oh my god!" but omg....

[AshCosgrove]

Rub a dub dub, you are a schlub!

[Hyde 'n Seek]

Originally posted by NightShade:

English is my fourth language i learned, so it is far from perfect.

Your first example from a game made 30 years ago while cringe, is at least in proper English language so i can understand it. Your example from this game is like an alien language to me. The only thing i understand is "open up".

I rather have bad Japanese puns intact, even if those lose most of it comedic effect in english language, rather than some internet meme language as im getting older and im not termianlly online and dont understand most of them.

At least with puns i get a chuckle here and there. When those jokes are "modernized", most of the time im left with is "Huh?" "What the heck those that mean??

I played a game once that had "lol" and "omg" in its translated conversation.
You want me to immerse myself in a game world and believe that two people talk to each other and say "omg" to one another?? Not "Oh my god!" but omg....

"Rub-a-dub-dub" *IS* an accetpable translation of what she says in japanese though. You wouldn't have understood it any better if they kept her literal japanese phrase. "Schlub" isn't some kind of online slang, its a legitimate english word, in this case calling the door unreliable or lazy for not being open. Its not a very common word anymore, which is probably why you haven't heard it.

I've played games with "lol" and "omg" in their translation as well. Ace Attorney has an incredibly bad example of this. But the thing is...in this example, thats how his japanese sounds. Its difficult to comprehend what that character is saying in either language because of these speech patterns. That's the point. And for people like you who don't have english as a first language, it would be beneficial if we instead went for more common words in translation. But then that's going to lead another problem, where people will be angry we didn't properly capture the japanese version's nuance. Translation for a general audience is a difficult thing to do, and its hard to say there's a "right" way to do it, in spite of the fact many people in threads like this one will insist they know best.

[jeg918]

Originally posted by 三Akiyama:

Meanwhile I'll be playing a version with a good localisation because I'm fortunate enough to be born in a non-English speaking country. :Emily3_Like:
♥♥♥♥ wokism, but the game itself is good. :wink_eol: (playing on PS5 hence why I don't own it on Steam)

Interesting. Could I get a middle easter or playasia version and avoid the English localization? I remember Spidey 2 they changed some stuff for the middle eastern version

[Noir]

it's so dumb to keep comparing releases from 30 years ago to today. The means of communication alone have advanced so incredibly much that it's not even comparable. But if you really want to go that route - yes, we also managed to play FF VIII without issues and 'understand' Squall and his character. All you have to do is to completely ignore that all of his dialogue was changed making him a completely different character with a different personality in compraison to the J original. You know why nobody complained back then? because they a) had no internet and no place to do so and b) didn't know because they had no internet and place to educate them.

[Defective Dopamine Pez Dispenser]

OP has hit upon the real crux of the issue imo. In any translational work intended for the purpose of creating a coherently readable mass market product (as opposed to, say, an academic work) - and that goes for everything from film, to games, to literature, to religious texts - there will always necessarily (as in, it is entirely unavoidable and inevitable) be terms, concepts, scenes, nuances, fragments, emphases, or what have you, that lack reciprocal equivalents in the language being translated to.

In those moments, choices have to be made. Well intentioned people can disagree about what those choices should be, and then after the fact how those choices are read or received by audiences will differ subjectively from person to person more than some wish to acknowledge.

There's a distinction between those subjective readings of the resulting product, and the intended conceptual or thematic (or whatever) thing the translator was actually attempting to convey.

So there are at least two different stages where error or misinterpretation can occur. Failure (or impossibility, as in the example OP used, where no reciprocal exists at all in English) to completely capture the authentic essence in the original can occur during the translation itself, sure. But an additional failure can occur on the part of the reader/listener receiving that translation as well, if they interpret it in a way not intended.

That's why some people are fine with the localization and some aren't. Not everyone is going to read into something what others do. Not everyone experiences the same connotations, meanings, implications, or biases. (And yes, everyone without exception has biases.)

Without being able to ask the person responsible for the work directly, we only have inference and our own interpretations and lenses to go on with respect to intent. And that's on top of it already being one step (or more) removed from the original text due to the aforementioned process.

At the end of the day, even the most ostensibly "objective" localization work will not be a 100% authentic capturing of the essence of the original text. The only way to experience that is in the original language as authored. And even then, unless you sit down with the original author and interrogate their process and authorial intent, we're still interpreting in terms of connotations and meanings.

As OP points out, for all these reasons, determining the "right" way to go about localization or translation is not as simple as people want it to be. The only question that matters to me personally is whether the author(s) are knowledgeable enough about how the industry and the localization process works to have reasonably understood and consented to this process that happens all the time.

And given the the author(s) in question have been in the industry for decades and know how this goes, have shipped games before, have had their work localized before, in the absence of any evidence they're sitting somewhere seething over their work being "vandalized" as some suggest, I see no reason to assume they didn't.

That doesn't mean they sat their and micromanaged and oversaw the process or had creative control over every line translated, obviously. That would be extraordinarily unusual. It would be cool if that were how things worked honestly, but generally it just isn't.

It does mean this wasn't their first rodeo in the world of shipping a game and it needing to be localized for multiple reasons, and that they aren't uninformed or oblivious victims or some such, though. They understand that having their works localized for other markets means departure from their direct, personal, authorial voice.

As stated in other topics, none of this means anyone has to like this localization. Nor does it mean people can't advocate for different translations. I'm all for people making their own fan translations or requesting an alternative, more literal set of subtitles or what have you, if that's their preference. I want people to enjoy the game, and if that's what they need to do so, I say go for it.

To me, it's no different than people preferring the KJV or Young's Literal or NABRE or whatever version of the bible. (Or corollaries to that in any other faith, that's just an example.) Take your pick. But as in that analogy, the only way to fully experience (or come close to experiencing) the original authorial intent and context is to perform contextually and historically accurate textual criticism in the original languages, while also understanding the literary styles used and audiences they were composed for and why.

In lieu of that, any translation or localization is going to involve degrees of interpretation and creative choices. However much or little.

Personally, knowing and accepting all this, as usual, I'm fine with just experiencing the localization as it is. I don't personally regard any of the examples offered as the sorts of enormous, egregious departures some apparently do. I don't see the intentions in them some apparently do. People's mileage will vary. 🤷‍♂️

[Hyde 'n Seek]

Originally posted by Noir:

it's so dumb to keep comparing releases from 30 years ago to today. The means of communication alone have advanced so incredibly much that it's not even comparable. But if you really want to go that route - yes, we also managed to play FF VIII without issues and 'understand' Squall and his character. All you have to do is to completely ignore that all of his dialogue was changed making him a completely different character with a different personality in compraison to the J original. You know why nobody complained back then? because they a) had no internet and no place to do so and b) didn't know because they had no internet and place to educate them.

the fact that you think squall's character is drastically different tells me you haven't actually played ff8 in japanese. a few extra "whatevers" does nothing to change his aloof stand-offish personality and how he grows into a good friend and leader by the end of it all.

but lets talk about final fantasy for a second, lets talk about what happens when you translate lines directly for a second. In the original final fantasy 7, when cloud is losing himself in front of aerith, if you have yuffie with you, her line in english is "stooooop!" This is a literal direct translation, she says the english word "stop" in the japanese script. This is how a machine would translate it, and it sucks as a translation. Because the nuance of her using the english word "stop" here is not just that she is yelling for cloud to stop, saying it like that informs one that her personality and speaking habits are trendy and youthful, that even in a crisis that's simply the way she speaks. Many of ff7's literally translated lines like this that didn't add in extra for nuance absolutely misrepresent what a character's personality or feelings are, and the lines where they change words often tells you more than when they don't. Red XIII has a line after cosmo canyon, I don't exactly remember it because it makes no sense in the english script, but he essentially says he's now comfortable talking more like himself... which doesn't mean anything and comes out of nowhere in english. This is because his natural speech style is different in japanese, but we have no way to accurately reflect it in english. They would have needed to change words and add lines in to get this across effectively. But they didn't, and now its nonsense. Because a 1-to-1 translation from japanese isn't actually possible, you *have* to make changes for personality to properly come through. Squall's personality didn't change, his lines changed to properly reflect his personality to an english audience. You'd have a less accurate impression of squall if every dismissive and non-comittal apology he gave got straight translated to "I'm sorry."

[Zenbaby]

While I fully intend to go back and play "I'm actually playing on console". I saw an example of how Franscesca could have had dialogue translated with swear words etc. Changing the tone quite a bit, obviously this could be an attempt to keep E rating. I just found it funny because the first interaction with her made me roll my eyes and stop playing. Though this is mostly because nothing has hooked me yet and I was more interested in playing something else before going back.

While this doesn't really bother me that much, it does raise some concerns for me personally. I just want as good of translation as they can do without altering how a character is perceived. It came off as TOO goofy to me. I'd much prefer the "Revy" style :)

[Wolfman-RIP]

Originally posted by Zenbaby:

While I fully intend to go back and play "I'm actually playing on console". I saw an example of how Franscesca could have had dialogue translated with swear words etc. Changing the tone quite a bit, obviously this could be an attempt to keep E rating. I just found it funny because the first interaction with her made me roll my eyes and stop playing. Though this is mostly because nothing has hooked me yet and I was more interested in playing something else before going back.

While this doesn't really bother me that much, it does raise some concerns for me personally. I just want as good of translation as they can do without altering how a character is perceived. It came off as TOO goofy to me. I'd much prefer the "Revy" style :)

Why did you bump a Localization thread thats been inactive for past 2 weeks when we have half a dozen others on front page?

Oh i see you belong to the SBI detected group.

[Complete Domination]

Originally posted by Wolfman-RIP:

Originally posted by Zenbaby:

While I fully intend to go back and play "I'm actually playing on console". I saw an example of how Franscesca could have had dialogue translated with swear words etc. Changing the tone quite a bit, obviously this could be an attempt to keep E rating. I just found it funny because the first interaction with her made me roll my eyes and stop playing. Though this is mostly because nothing has hooked me yet and I was more interested in playing something else before going back.

While this doesn't really bother me that much, it does raise some concerns for me personally. I just want as good of translation as they can do without altering how a character is perceived. It came off as TOO goofy to me. I'd much prefer the "Revy" style :)

Why did you bump a Localization thread thats been inactive for past 2 weeks when we have half a dozen others on front page?

Oh i see you belong to the SBI detected group. :happycthulhu:

Why would you care which steam group someone belong to?

[roachit]

Originally posted by Hyde 'n Seek:

I'm sure anyone who knows anything about japanese already knows this, but its literally impossible to do a one-to-one literal translation of japanese into english.

Because a literal one-to-one translation is impossible doesn't justify actively going out of your way to ignore the original script and tone. The aspirational goal should always be to translate something as close as possible to what the original feels like, and that goal was not only abandoned in this localization, but actively worked against.