This translation is awful...

[45]

There's so many liberties and things lost in translation here...

Changing "Super Duper High Schol X" to "Ultimate X" is a huge step down and misses the entire point of the titles which were to sound silly. It wasn't supposed to sound natural. Many of the titles are strange as well.

"pop sensation" idol is an English word, instead you now attributed a genre to the style of music where previously there was none.

"fanfic maker" Why not comic artist? fanfic is something entirely different from doujin.


Another weird thing is that everyone has a nickname because the localization team assumes you're too dumb to remember names. This has many knock on affects which detriment the story.

1. Hagakure's easy going nature and tendancy to use nicknames is lost in translation now.

2. The formal way people addressed each other loses that sense of the story being inherently japanese (though I guess that was out the window with the strange ways they translated their titles).

3. Characters who were growing close to each other were originally the only ones who used nickanmes when referring to one another. This clued readers in to which characters were getting close to each other in the story at certain parts. Those politics were so important for knowing who you could and could not trust because a good deal of their interactions occured off screen. This entire layer of the story is ruined now.

[platy]

You're nit picking. Yes, there's a lot of freedom taken with the translation, but it's hard to translate everything literally, it would not make sense/ meaning would be lost/ it wouldnt sound natural etc. you probably know this. I think the translation for dangan ronpa is well done, it serves its purpose which is to enable the player to follow the story. It gets the humour across, it gets the personalities of the characters across for the most part. Overall, i'm happy with it. If you can complain so much, maybe you should apply as a translator for the next release.

[Jack]

What about putting subtitles in the cutscenes? I somewhat thought that was a noticable flaw when looking at the game with japanese audio and make it harder to set stuff like that up. Would that have to be editing the cutscenes itself?

Not really saying that the dub or translation is better, but I wanna believe Danganronpa can be set up for everyone.

[Pikaman20008]

Originally posted by Snow Jack:

What about putting subtitles in the cutscenes? I somewhat thought that was a noticable flaw when looking at the game with japanese audio and make it harder to set stuff like that up. Would that have to be editing the cutscenes itself?

Not really saying that the dub or translation is better, but I wanna believe Danganronpa can be set up for everyone.

What cutscenes? Anything with audio already has text since it's a visual novel and the only cutscenes I can think of don't have any dialouge.

[Jack]

I was more of talking about Ultra Despair Girls, and the 'You got that wrong" stuff or some aspects where some extra wording would fit.

[DarkMoS]

Originally posted by Joebiggie:

...

Well written, having done anime fansub in the past this perfectly convey my thoughts on a good adaptation versus a litteral translation which needs 5 lines notes every 10s to explain puns, background story or expressions.

[Phantron]

Originally posted by DarkMoS:

Originally posted by Joebiggie:

...

Well written, having done anime fansub in the past this perfectly convey my thoughts on a good adaptation versus a litteral translation which needs 5 lines notes every 10s to explain puns, background story or expressions.

I never understand the fascination of the 'see foornotes on why this is funny in the original language', because if you actually get that kind of stuff, you wouldn't need the subtitles to begin with.

[megaman_the_pidgeot]

well to be fair the old one was a fan translation, so it was more about translating the japanese and less about localizing however the dangan ronpa 2 translation is more like the old fanslation of DR1 so we have that to look forward to on steam sorry if this made no sense :P

[MissDespair]

Not sure if anyone brought this up but Yamada calls everyone, (last name) (first name) - dono Ex: Naegi Makoto-dono. A direct translation would be "Lord Makoto Naegi". It supposed imiate a samurai back in the day and could be considered a bit too formal. The reason why they changed it to (Mr/Ms) (Last Name) was because of the third class trial.
SPOILERS FOR THE THIRD TRIAL:
the reason why was because Yamada was about to tell who the killers name was and said Yasuhiro. It made you believe it was Hagakure but it was actually Celestia since that is her last name. Since they had to westernize it a little bit so they wouldn't have to have a 4 minute lesson on Japanese to people who are new to japanese games, they changed it to simply last name. It would be really confusing for on-japanese speaking people to see Yamada refer to people with last name first.

[Q]

And it's gatsu kappa.

[Stoicism]

To OP
As someone who actually works in translation in Japan, lemme tell ya, its so easy to criticize, but for every single line of text, you have to walk the fine line between accurate translation and natural English. Not to mention the completely different grammatical structures and the wealth of nuances in kanji mean that often there is no way to include all the information without the sentence becoming long and rambling. Finally, there is personal taste. There is no right answer when translating. There are many ways to say things.

Its easy to nitpick. If you want the pure Japanese version, why dont you go learn Japanese?

[Stoicism]

Okay OP, let me walk you through it.
You have the following sentence, said by a yanki character:

お前何もわかっていないくせに偉そうなこと言ってんじゃね。

Now here are your options
a) Super duper literal translation:
You don't know anything so don't be talking big!

b) Natural equivalent English translation:
If you don't know what you're talking about then shut the hell up.

Now if you take option A, you sound like a bad translation from the 80s (or someone who can barely speak English) If you take B, guys like you who know a few words of Japanese will start moaning because "we're missing out on all the beautiful Japanese nuances!" and "the translators are taking liberties!"

At the end of the day, all you can do is try to keep in character, but then again, a character has various interpretations. Unless I have the game designers sitting next to me, I dont really know 100% what they intended for the character.

[Pikaman20008]

Originally posted by General Teddie:

And it's gatsu kappa.

What is? What does that mean?

[Q]

It's a translation joke.

[Phantron]

You can't just look up something like 'dono' and find that it can mean 'lord' and decide that Hifumi somehow was talking about traditions of 500 years ago when they still have lords in Japan. Certainly there's no indication that any of his contemporary classmates thought there's something weird about the way he talks, so while 'dono' could mean 'lord', the English translation of 'mister' is probably what was intended, e.g. something fairly unusual and formal but it's not like people will freak out if you call them Mr/Miss whatever.

Japanese tends to be slightly overembellished and it's not unusual to have say two guys get in a fist fight and then you have the two guys talk about how they'll kill each other and burn the other's home down and then desecreate their family graves. While they technically said all that, when you translate it to English it'd probably just be like 'I'll mess you up!' and that's not because the English translation is wrong or that the translator doesn't know what the words mean. Rather it's because English doesn't have this culture of wildly exaggerating how a fistfight is going to turn into ending someone's lineage.

In the typical Japanese sports manga you'll easily see a guy talk about how they must win this game even at the cost of their life. When translated to English that part will almost certainly be omitted, and again that's because it's well understood they're just talking big and even as hardcore as the Japanese are at sports manga, they're probably not actually killing themselves to try to win a game of baseball or whatever.

[MonoChaos]

Originally posted by 45:

Changing "Super Duper High Schol X" to "Ultimate X" is a huge step down and misses the entire point of the titles which were to sound silly. It wasn't supposed to sound natural. Many of the titles are strange as well.

About time someone felt the same way. I love Dangan Ronpa. But changing it from "Super High School Level" to "Ultimate" was such a bad decision that they will never be able to take back. "Super High School Level", I feel, had a certain uniqueness and individuality to it and I liked that. Changing it to Ultimate made them lose that. Now it just seems bland.