Wow the localisation subtitles in the story mode are hilariously bad if we're looking from the translation pov

[sekai]

I'm very new to this game, in fact, today is my first day. And as a weeb as I am, the first thing I did right after booting this one up for the first time, was to change the voice to Japanese, which I managed to do after a bit of fiddling. And the thing I found is that sometimes, the translated subtitles run into serious mismatch with the original context of the scene on display when I'm playing through the story-mode.

Now I don't claim to be a speaker or an expert of the Japanese language, but I've at least seen a couple anime and listened to it enough to know that sometimes the localisation text simply has very little to do with what the characters are actually exchanging in dialogue. More often than not, the spoken line is far longer than what's displayed on-screen (2 sentences of spoken dialogue vs 5 written words in subtitle) which is obviously just wrong, or that they're completely referring to different things (the worst I've noticed so far is that in Arisa's compaign, the "nisemono (fake) Eris" is for some reason, translated to "Eris's sister").

I mean, I'm pretty sure we're not living in the 90s where localisations are pretty much expected to change up a ton of things with awful translation in the subtitles. This is just not cool man. Sure, the story isn't really anything to write home about, it's just okay, but at least give the content some proper respect would be nice. It's just a given that no one likes their work to be mistranslated and misrepresented.

/rant

Game so far kick ♥♥♥ though, it's most noticeable and probably greatest upside is how much freebie they give you right out of the gate, makes for very accessible and positive first impression. I do hope its awesome level stays up consistently.

[Zu]

We had a similar topic not too long ago. The general consensus is that most players don't care so Cygames don't have to care either.

[Sm Izumi]

My sister saw that some dude card are voiced by female in US ver, i'm glad i have the JP xD

[sekai]

Originally posted by Sm Izumi:

My sister saw that some dude card are voiced by female in US ver, i'm glad i have the JP xD

Well to be fair, this is a common practice in voice acting industry in general, it's not region specific. In fact, using female VAs to voice male characters is most seen in the Japanese anime/game industry (most teenager and some adult male characters prior to the late 2000s were pretty much all voiced by females, it's starting to change though but kids are all still voiced by female VAs for obvious reasons), they just usually make it less obvious most of the time.

[Sir Fluffykins]

The Eris "mistranslation" you're referring to, actually helps the interweaving story.

In Arisa's campaign you get this odd Encounter with Eris, not knowing you, and talking about about her sister -then getting upset, then in Eris's campaign you get the whole "you're the fake!" thing you're complaining about.

Like with Arisa thinking Erika is after her boyfriend or something, then in her story she's after a Vampire she thinks is after her Princess.

Direct translation don't always work. Take for example "Heroman" - I think only got dubbed in Malaysia or something - but in there the cheerleader girl goes "oni-chan" to her borther constantly in the first few episodes, but that would drive people nuts so the translation is every way you can refer to your brother. "Will", "Brother" or simply ignoring it because the viewer gets she's talking to her brother.

[ElziEpsilon]

It's not subtitles.

[Sefik]

Direct translation just doesn't work a lot of the time. There are a lot of sentences in Japanese that would make little to no sense in English. Just because you watched a few anime it doesn't mean you actually do know what's being exchanged.. Please don't be a weeb.

[Ｂｏｏｂｓ]

the problem here is all dialogue are made up rather than direct/literal translation (or any translation at all) as you may think

[sekai]

Originally posted by κƶ | Velvet︼:

Direct translation just doesn't work a lot of the time. There are a lot of sentences in Japanese that would make little to no sense in English. Just because you watched a few anime it doesn't mean you actually do know what's being exchanged.. Please don't be a weeb.

Now don't use someone's humble-ness against them, obviously when I said "sometimes" I actually meant "a lot of times", that the content of the spoken dialogue and the supposed translated version simply don't match up in more ways than one.

There is a difference between context localisation and outright mistranslation. The former is what you're referring to, where they change the subjects during the translation without altering the context because often 1 thing in a language can't be directly translated into another language without losing some contextual bits, and that's okay. What's not okay is altering the actual content while you're translating, because it effectively changes the original intended whatever, that and it's just plain disrespectful to the source as well as its creator(s).

While most of the alterations in the story-mode seems like over-simplification on an already base-line story, which well I suppose is just annoying and nothing too major. But there are many instances where they flat out changes the intended design of the story-mode's content.

Sure, this is "localisation" and "technically" it's all allowed, and seeing there is no response from the dev, they don't seem to care either. However, as I've stated in the title, the localisation subtitles in the story mode are hilariously bad if we're looking from the translation pov because this statement is true.

[Sefik]

You're right. Please accept my apologies, perhaps I jumped the gun a bit. Weebs are just annoying but it's obvious I misunderstood you and your rant on this subject.
Cute dp btw. What is her name?

[sekai]

Originally posted by Sir Fluffykins:

The Eris "mistranslation" you're referring to, actually helps the interweaving story.

In Arisa's campaign you get this odd Encounter with Eris, not knowing you, and talking about about her sister -then getting upset, then in Eris's campaign you get the whole "you're the fake!" thing you're complaining about.

Like with Arisa thinking Erika is after her boyfriend or something, then in her story she's after a Vampire she thinks is after her Princess.

Direct translation don't always work. Take for example "Heroman" - I think only got dubbed in Malaysia or something - but in there the cheerleader girl goes "oni-chan" to her borther constantly in the first few episodes, but that would drive people nuts so the translation is every way you can refer to your brother. "Will", "Brother" or simply ignoring it because the viewer gets she's talking to her brother.

I would disagree, it only damages it imo.

The point of interweaving story is that everything are intentionally segmented and the pieces would be presented periodically over the course of the story, and we have to stitch/puzzle it up ourselves.

It's quite clear that the devs intended the players to go through all story-modes from left to right, starting from Arisa and end with Eris, judging from the way all of their stories are constructed and presented, it is quite obvious to see it being that way. Hence the identity of the second Eris is therefore meant to be only revealed at the end in Eris's own campaign, which makes perfect sense. This would also play into why the encounter is left ambiguous, where Eris ran away in panic after Arisa merely raised the question about who was it that she'd just met, leading to speculations that would be solved later; but instead of that, the localisation just spits half of the fun out, even though there already isn't much to begin with.

So I wouldn't say that in this particular case, it's a trans-iteration or something along that line, but rather, it's just changing things up because they'd thought that they're doing this better, which is really not the type of mindset a translator should be having. And this is where I'm getting to, because this localisation subtitles are not translation, hence from a translation pov it really kinda sucks.

But oh well, idk.

[sekai]

Originally posted by κƶ | Velvet︼:

You're right. Please accept my apologies, perhaps I jumped the gun a bit. Weebs are just annoying but it's obvious I misunderstood you and your rant on this subject.

No worries bud.

Originally posted by κƶ | Velvet︼:

Cute dp btw. What is her name?

Kanata Sorami from Sora no Woto (Sound of the Sky). The show is one of the best slice-of-life, one among the most mysterious setting and background lore, and being also among the most underrated/under-radar anime of all time (all because it came out at a bad time where people confused it with being a K-On rip-off, it's really not, it imo has way more similarity to All Quiet on the Western Front than it has with K-On). Do watch it, I'm sure you won't regret it.