Some seriously weird translation issues?

[Cruna]

It is a VN game based on investigation, solving a mistery, where things that are being said matter every step of teh way.

However wile some times the dialogue and the rest of teh text seems well written to me, other times it feels like some realy bad translation being done with Google Translate by someone who doesn't speak english.

Or the game is supposed to be like that? Maybe it's me who's missing something here?

-"My Mark's vanished like it never was"

-very often so far in chapter 1 the chosen partner in the investigation is referred to as "them" instead of -she or -her ( "grab them shake their shoulders and yell" )

So I'm not sure what's going on there, maybe I'm missing some important bits in the story and dialogue, because of poor translation in some parts because of realy low grade translation? Or it was supposed to be that weird by design, because it seems like an A+ game to me, not some cheap VN with some dude google translating the whole game

[grr]

the pronouns stuck out to me as well. regarding the partners being referred to as "them," i have a feeling that in these instances the original text may have used either the names of the partners or a non-gendered pronoun. therefore, there may simply be no code in the game to switch the text in those places according which partner you have. the localization team may just have had no control over this, resulting in using "them" as a compromise. this is just my best guess though.

[ATKOtter]

The translation is absolutely messy (played it when it came out on vita, so some puzzles were unsolvable because of the translation) but what you pointed out aren't actually issues.

"My Mark's vanished like it never was." isn't grammatically incorrect. It's just using a somewhat uncommon (and archaic) phrasing, presumably trying to be poetic about it. "Never was" is being used as a negative form of "to be". So it's saying that the mark vanished like it had never existed.

They opted for gender neutral pronouns because you can select who your partner is, but Japanese does not gender people constantly like English does, so system text like that is shared among all the partners. Singular they is quite common in regular English, so it's not an issue to use that as a way to contextual issues in system text.

[Cruna]

Originally posted by AlexHusky:

Singular they is quite common in regular English, so it's not an issue to use that as a way to contextual issues in system text.

No. Singular "they" is not common in regular English at all. Far from it. I mean when I wrote this post in 2021, I never heard it being used as singular in my entire life, which is why it was confusing the hell out of me. Lately... well for some uhhh... reasons, people try to use it in singular in some select groups but, I personally never heard that before I made this post. So it was not common by any means in regular English, so I kept wondering who is the text talking about? Who are they. Eventually I figured it out back then, that for some reason, it is talking about one person as "they" which I saw as some ridiculous translation issue.

[etch]

I've heard they or them used singular many of times all my life even I say it a lot, I can understand why it may be confusing if you haven't though.

[Cruna]

Originally posted by etch:

I've heard they or them used singular many of times all my life even I say it a lot, I can understand why it may be confusing if you haven't though.

Indeed I haven't heard it being used in singular, nor I know anyone who had. "they" was used in plural for multiple persons, or for unknown number of persons of unknown gender. Like for example: "Do you have the number of the caretaker?" "No, sorry. Ask someone else. They might know it" In this example the conversation doesn't signal the number of persons you will ask, or can't know the gender of the person you will ask. So "they" is used instead of she/her.

As far as I know, these are the only ways to use the "they" pronoun. Not when a specific person is named, because in that case we know his/her gender, and of course we know the number of people we are talking about. Like it is the case in this game. So it was just confusing at times for me trying to understand who is the text talking about. And I see it as bad translation maybe. Since many foreign languages don't have gender based pronouns like English language has. I am Hungarian, we don't have gender based pronouns either. But English has. So maybe it's some weird direct translation error or something.

[Waffael]

they us they/them because its using the same text no matter which partner your using. its a bit unusual but not really a mistranslation since its still correct english.

[Cruna]

Originally posted by Waffael:

they us they/them because its using the same text no matter which partner your using. its a bit unusual but not really a mistranslation since its still correct english.

I understood, but this sort of issue was sorted out in much older VN games, they simply have a code replacing the pronoun if another character was part of the story, Just like replacing names when based our choices the characters are different. So if they can replace names, I don't understand why couldn't they fix this pronoun issue, making the story confusing at times

Anyway the topic is quite old, and I did enjoy this game. I just found this sort of odd language weird.