#localisation

Y'know what? I'm gonna say it: I hate the way that the Western side of the DR fandom writes Kokichi.

Now, hear me out! I usually don't like to police how people write characters in fics, as developing and expanding on an existing character is one of the many joys of fandom works. But for the love of god, I hate the way people write Kokichi.

Why, you ask?

The English translation for NDRV3 was... awful.

During the localisation, the NDRV3 team had four separate translators working on the script. And in a Reddit AMA, it was revealed that they were dividing the 16 main characters between themselves, with each translator being assigned four characters.

Having more translators working on a game might sound like a good idea, but it’s not. The more translators that are assigned to a work, the harder it is to provide a consistent translation. In situations where there are multiple ways to translate the same word in a conversation, communication between translators is essential in making sure the script flows well.

However, the NDRV3 English translators apparently couldn't be bothered to do the most basic of communication within their team. It's blatantly clear that they did not reference each other’s work, and the translation suffered because of it. This is clear in the many lines of dialogue that were made confusing to read when the same word was translated two separate ways during conversations between two characters.

Some of the translators were able to pick which characters they wanted to translate for, creating a clear bias that influenced their work. Because translators were assigned four characters each, this meant that whilst they were enthusiastic about translating for one character in particular, they were less enthusiastic for others. This is obvious in most characters, though I'll be focusing on Kokichi here.

One of the most frustrating things for me, is that the translators decided to make Kokichi (and Miu) say incredibly rude and downright offensive terms. These were not present in the original Japanese script.

Miu only ever refers to Gonta as “ばか” (idiot) or occasionally, “あほ” (a slightly ruder way of saying idiot, though can be used affectionately amongst friends in certain regions). However, her translator decided to add multiple instances of her calling Gonta a r***** and a “Mongoloid,” which are both incredibly offensive and outdated terms.

Kokichi’s translator similarly took lines and decided to insert insults like “bitch” and “whore.” Like Miu, he never says anything remotely like this. It's as if they couldn't be bothered to do their jobs and decided to come up with their own narrative for each character.

Consequently, these translations have become the sole personality for these characters when it comes to English-speaking fans writing fanfiction.

Kokichi actually speaks in a very unique and interesting way. He uses the very masculine pronoun “オレ” (ore), whilst referring to almost every other character by their surnames and the childish honorific “ちゃん” (chan).

“ちゃん” is usually seen as a very feminine way to refer to someone else. It's usually used amongst school girls, but can also be used by older people when talking to a child, and when referring to other things they find cute, (such as pets).

The fact that Kokichi uses “ちゃん” to refer to almost everyone is very notable. Boys don’t use this term to refer to other boys unless they're very young. Using “ちゃん” to refer to anyone you’ve just met or don’t know very well is frowned upon, but a boy using it to refer to other boys is especially rare. This immediately establishes Kokichi's character as someone who is incredibly casual with others (something that is uncommon in Japanese culture). Considering Kokichi values his childish and light-hearted traits and how much emphasis is put on him having “a very innocent, childish streak,” it makes sense then that he would be written to talk like this.

Kokichi also refers to a few characters as “大好きな___ちゃん” (daisuki na ___-chan), a phrase which can be translated as “my beloved.” He uses this phrase with Shuichi most often, but does also use it with Rantaro, Kaito, and Kaede on occasion. This is the phrase he's using on most occasions when he is translated as saying “because I love you” or “because you’re my favourite.”

In chapter 4, Kokichi refers to Shuichi as “好きになった人” (suki ni natta hito), meaning: “the person I fell in love with.” This line was changed in the translation to, “when there’s a person I like.” Though I wouldn't say this is correct, as ““好きになった” has explicit romantic implications. It is often used in Japanese love songs and manga/anime love confessions.

A mistake often made by non-Japanese speakers is that "好" only means "like." However it is almost exclusively romantic when referring to people, especially the full phrase, "好になった人."

I think it should also be noted that this is the exact same phrasing Maki used when describing her romantic feelings for Kaito. Since Maki’s feelings for Kaito are considered canonically confirmed, I don't see why Kokichi’s feelings aren't considered to be equally canon. Though I suppose you can't blame people for not knowing, considering how awful the translation is.

This translation issue even stems to the fact that Kokichi's motive video was completely mistranslated and provides a very poor idea of what his motivations and ideals were like for the player. This includes them straight up omitting a line stating that Kokichi and DICE have a rule against murder.

This is one of the first lines in his motive video. The Japanese version makes it very clear that DICE were forbidden to kill people, and that abiding by this rule is extremely important to them. In contrast, the translation just talks about him committing “petty nonviolent crimes and pranks.”

Saihara later references Kokichi’s motive video as evidence in the chapter 6 trial and states that Kokichi and DICE “have a rule against killing people,” despite the game… never mentioning it up until that point. This not only completely changes Kokichi’s character at a crucial moment, but also just lies to the localisation players and expects them to be able to work through the shitty translation errors to come to the same conclusion. It could also give off the impression that Shuichi was lying to cover for Kokichi, leading localisation players to assume this plotline instead.

To end this long rant, I will include one of my favourite lines here:

“Come on, it’s not a big deal! I’m like a fairy, so it’ll be fine!”

And its disappointing translation:

“Come on, would I lie to you?”

The localization just feels kicked up a notch? Usually its damn good, but this chapter just feels... different? And I mean diffirent good, like they let the localizer have more freedom with the writing

What I mean is, ok so buckle in:

so one of my big gripes about modern day localization of japanese games/anime/manga is how weeaboos from the 90s, who grew up worshiping japan, now get to have control over the translation/localization industries. Back in the 90s when shows like Pokemon, DBZ and Sailor Moon were airing outside of japan for the first time, all of them were severely altered/censored

Yes theres the obvious stuff like covering up boobage and removing blood and gore, but then there was whats called the removal of "Cultural Odor" (heads up, that link is litterally someone's thesis, it is LONG)

Thats a fun name for the thing they did with Phoenix Wright back in 2005:

And so because of all this obscuring of the original "pure" japanese versions of all these media, baby weeaboos (i know, i was one of them) became downright fanatic and obnoxious about how THEY (the ominous they) ARE CENSORING THE CREATOR'S ARTISTIC VISION! THEY ARE KEEPING THE REAL VESRION OF THIS THING FROM US! THEY ARE CHANGING THE ORGINAL DIALOG! THEY ARE REWRITTING THE PLOT! THEY ARE DUMBING IT DOWN AND HANDING US A MUTILATED VERSION!

how dare they

so we've gone from localization that takes media from japan and figures out how to best make it vibe with westerners and their culture, smoothly and naturally...

...which often means obscuring japanese things that the normie mainstream has no knowledge of, and would just leave them confused. Or outright rewriting certain dialog, because differences in cultural norms could alienate westerners who can't vibe with the original, but still trying to keep the spirit of what the og source material what going for...

to now,

with how they talk english during a nintendo direct. You know, that perky unnatural, fluent english speaker trying to copy the exact vocalizations of a japnese va?

Or what I call "Anime Voice" which is the same as "Nintendo Direct" voice: They have the english va listen to the japanese va's audio and go ok now sound just like this, but in english!

That, in tandem with the the localization (often run by the grown up outraged baby weebs) now aggressively keeping the translation as close to the original japanese as possible, results in a new type of headache inducing media experience that makes listening to modern day english dubs in anime and games sound like listening to somthing that aliens wrote and voiced

The best example of the above?

This is the best damn example of "They just had the english va listen to the japanese va and said do it like this!" but the thing is? In Japan, a cool calm stoic hero who shows little emotion, even in times of duress? Thats whats cool over there, thats how we got fucking Squall Leonhart, mr "i don't care" teen supreme. Being in control of your emotions is seen as a sign of strength, as icy and calm as the frozen surface of a lake

but westerners don't vibe with that very much, we want our main hero to get mad, to express joy, to cry, to feel. To holler!

westerners couldn't vibe with Samus in this game because to us that voice acting came off as robotic, like she was some kind of unfeeling alien. This is somthing that localizers back in 2009 probably had huge arguments about with the devs, and if there was ever an example of how important it is to listen to the people trying to bring your game to a foreign audience, other m is it baby

One of my best examples of a smooth and natural english localization? So this part from the start of Lunar: Eternal Blue at 2:56-

"Was it good for you?"

that line didn't really stick out to me until I replayed the game 4 years ago (on the ps1, which has some differences from the og sega version). It struck me, after years of imbibing dialog from recent rpgs(like Fire emblem Fates or Persona), how natural that line sounded in english

for an evil villain who just stripped a woman of her powers forcefully, whom had violated her, it was the exact perfect awful thing to say (in english) because of course "was it good for you" is a phrase associated with sex. the implied rape, the casual cruel and mirthful way its said, all of this perfectly informs the player of what kind of villain Zophar is in a way that is quickly noted

In fact that line and pretty much every thing that Ronfar's va says is very devoid of faithfulness to the japanese (as in the line readings, not the actual plot, just how things are said) and more of "hey lets make these characters sound natural and understandable to english players" (which is wat localization is supposed to do duh)

wat i'm trying to articulate with all these wordz here is that I've reached an point in my life where the stringent adherence to the exact writing/vocalization of the source material is now impacting my enjoyment of the things, because of how fucking aware i am of them. The unnatural line delivery, the jarring statements that don't fucking work in english because people don't talk like that-

-and now serious scenes become absurd and no longer carry the weight they were intended to >:/

I don't want to go back to the 1990s/2000s era of localization, but i do want a return to the mindset of "how can we make this more natural sounding while still keeping the spirit of what the original is conveying"

I wrote all this because that latest chapter of Spy X Family fucking quenched that want, thats how i want to see it done!

zoethebitch

everyone needs to stop doing fan edits trying to recreate the theatrical cut and updating the special effects and find the 03 Chilean cut immediately

imperfectlibrarian

Ok. Hang on. I had to search "Star Wars cerveza Cristal" to see if it was real and

hey Pathologic fans! i'd like to make a Hungarian fan translation/localization of Pathologic 2 (and eventually classic HD). i have read this article on how to make a translation, but it's very bare bones. if anyone has experience in the following, please contact me at [email protected] or in this tumblr blog

experience in translation and localization (i think i know the difference between the two)

experience in packaging mods for pathologic

experience in Unity (i need to get the hungarumlaut (ő,ű) working in the game)

knowledge of the Russian language. i am comfortable translating from English, but i don't know a word of Russian (but hey, this is a great way to learn a language)

i have little experience in translation, having only translated boardgame rulebooks (that's how i learned English). i have a vague idea on how to start:

first pass would be to map out pathologic dialogs and link references between texts to preserve as much context as possible

secondly a meaning-to-meaning translation would take place (translation)

finally i would revisit dialogs and texts rewriting it to be more natural in Hungarian, diverging from the word-to-word translation

if this is not how a localization should be done, please let me know

in a few days i'll set up a GitHub repo for the fan translation. please suggest me workflows for tracking dialog and context for the texts. any additional help is welcome

So funny story, the entire reason Lookouts got any translations was because the first person to ask about it was the wonderful translator Mae (@verycoolmae), who got in touch about localising it into Arabic. And I (Hawky), thought, well if I can implement an Arabic translation then every other translation would be easy to add as well. My work on changing the game to handle translations started with Arabic and all the challenges unique to it, and right-to-left languages in general.

(More info under the cut)

Unity and TextMeshPro still has very poor support for RTL and languages like Arabic, which sucks. I relied on an asset called 'RTL Text Mesh Pro' (link) to handle all that, with a few extra tweaks to fix weird edge cases of mixing English characters with Arabic. The biggest bit of work was converting all the text boxes to use the new one, but after that was done, Arabic worked great and all the other translations were indeed super easy to do afterwards (comparatively).

I've had my fair share of "[SHIP] are [married/soulmates/fated/FANCY TERM], it's text!" "[CHARACTER A] calls [CHARACTER B] [ENDEARMENT/NICKNAME], it's text!" and every time. Every time I'm just like. Do they though. Is it though. And a lot of the time, this means seeking out alternative translations, or translation meta from fluent or native speakers, or sometimes from language learners of the language the piece of media is originally in.

Why does it matter? Maybe it doesn't. To lots of people, it doesn't. People have different interests and priorities in fiction and the way they interact with it. It's great. It matters to me because back in the early 2000s, I had dial-up internet. Video or audio media that wasn't available through my local library very much wasn't available, but fanfiction was. So I started to read English language Gundam Wing fanfic before I ever had a chance to watch the show. When I did get around to watching Gundam Wing, it was the original Japanese dub. Some of the characters were almost unrecognisable to me, and first I doubted my Japanese language ability, then, after checking some bits with friends, I wondered why even my favourite writers, writers I knew to be consistent in other things, had made these characters seem so different … until I had the chance to watch the US-English dub a few years later. Going by that adaptation, the characterisation from all those stories suddenly made a lot more sense. And the thing is, that interpretation is also valid! They just took it a direction that was a larger leap for me to make.

Loose adaptations and very free translations have become less frequent since, or maybe my taste just hasn't led me their way, but the issue at the core is still a thing: Supernatural fandom got different nuances of endings for their show depending on the language they watched it in. CQL and MDZS fandom and the never-ending discussions about 知己 vs soulmate vs Other Options. A subset of VLD fans looking at a specific clip in all the different languages to see what was being said/implied in which dub, and how different translators interpreted the same English original line. The list is pretty much endless.

And that's … idk if it's fine, but it's what happens! A lot of the time, concepts -- expressed in language -- don't translate 1:1. The larger the cultural gap, the larger the gaps between the way concepts are expressed or understood also tend to be. Other times, there is a literal translation that works but isn't very idiomatic because there's a register mismatch or worse. And that's even before cultural assumptions come in. It's normal to have those. It's also important to remember that things like "thanks I hate it" as a sentiment of praise/affection, while the words translate literally quite easily, emphatically isn't easy to translate in the sense anglophone internet users the phrase.

Every translation is, at some level, a transformative work. Sometimes expressions or concepts or even single words simply don't have an exact equivalent in the target language and need to be interpreted at the translator's discretion, especially when going from a high-context/listener-responsible source language to a low-context/speaker-responsible target language (where high-context/listener responsible roughly means a large amount of contextual information can be omitted by the speaker because it's the listener's responsibility to infer it and ask for clarification if needed, and low-context/speaker-responsible roughly means a lot of information needs to be codified in speech, i.e. the speaker is responsible for providing sufficiently explicit context and will be blamed if it's lacking).

Is this a mouse or a rat? Guess based on context clues! High-context languages can and frequently do omit entire parts of speech that lower-context/speaker-responsible languages like English regard as essential, such as the grammatical subject of a sentence: the equivalent of "Go?" - "Go." does largely the same amount of heavy lifting as "is he/she/it/are you/they/we going?" - "yes, I am/he/she/it is/we/you/they are" in several listener-responsible languages, but tends to seem clumsy or incomplete in more speaker-responsible ones. This does NOT mean the listener-responsible language is clumsy. It's arguably more efficient! And reversely, saying "Are you going?" - "I am (going)" might seem unnecessarily convoluted and clumsy in a listener-responsible language. All depending on context.

This gets tricky both when the ambiguity of the missing subject of the sentence is clearly important (is speaker A asking "are you going" or "is she going"? wait until next chapter and find out!) AND when it's important that the translator assign an explicit subject in order for the sentence to make sense in the target language. For our example, depending on context, something like "are we all going?" - "yes" or "they going, too?" might work. Context!

As a consequence of this, sometimes, translation adds things – we gain things in translation, so to speak. Sometimes, it's because the target language needs the extra information (like the subject in the examples above), sometimes it's because the target language actually differentiates between mouse and rat even though the source language doesn't. However, because in most cases translators don't have access to the original authors, or even the original authors' agencies to ask for clarification (and in most cases wouldn't get paid for the time to put in this extra work even if they did), this kind of addition is almost always an interpretation. Sometimes made with a lot of certainty, sometimes it's more of a "fuck it, I've got to put something and hope it doesn't get proven wrong next episode/chapter/ten seasons down" (especially fun when you're working on a series that's in progress).

For the vast majority of cases, several translations are valid. Some may be more far-fetched than others, and there'll always be subjectivity to whether something was translated effectively, what "effectively" even means …