What's up with the Japanese in this game?

[Velorien]

If I didn't know the devs were German, I'd think this was a Japanese game. It's not just that the spoken Japanese is flawless, varied, and idiomatic, but comparing the JP audio to the EN text, the English comes across as a translation.

Example 1: The Japanese has a wider range of honorifics. Mugen addresses people with the high honorific suffix -dono, which in the English keeps getting turned into -san or -chan, presumably because those are more common and recognisable. Yuki calls Hayato -sensei, which also gets elided, even though the word "sensei" is used as a standalone noun elsewhere.

Example 2: When Yuki tells Hayato she's going to lure a guard with her bird call, she says, "Umaku iku yo", "It'll work like a charm", and afterwards, she says, "Umaku itta", "It worked like a charm". The English text for the former is "They like that", which doesn't make any sense and is a plausible mistranslation.

[parent child bowl]

I actually got the impression that the japanese audio is the translation. While the voice acting is really good, characters say things that don't make much sense in japanese or use words that wouldn't be used in the setting of the game. So I disagree with your statement that the japanese was flawless and idomatic.

It's especially evident with japanese sentences that can only be direct translations from english like Hayato"s "個人的な恨みではない". Yuki using "サプライズ" in an edo period setting is out of place too.

I think the suffixes were just improved to be more fitting in the japanese audio.

[Velorien]

Originally posted by parent child bowl:

I actually got the impression that the japanese audio is the translation. While the voice acting is really good, characters say things that don't make much sense in japanese or use words that wouldn't be used in the setting of the game. So I disagree with your statement that the japanese was flawless and idomatic.

It's especially evident with japanese sentences that can only be direct translations from english like Hayato"s "個人的な恨みではない". Yuki using "サプライズ" in an edo period setting is out of place too.

I think the suffixes were just improved to be more fitting in the japanese audio.

"個人的な恨みではない" appears to be normal Japanese usage, at least based on the Google results. "サプライズ" is anachronistic, true, but it's common for Japanese media to use modern Japanese in historical settings, just with flourishes like archaic pronouns.

The suffixes are just... all over the place. Like, someone will call Yuki "Yuki-sama", and the English will say "Yuki-chan", and then a few lines later Yuki will say "Mugen-sama" in English herself.

[parent child bowl]

The game was written in english and then translated to japanese.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/418240/discussions/0/1692669912399073755/?ctp=2