Video game translation has come a long way from the “all your base are belong to us” era. While back in the day most games translated from Japanese went for the ‘general gist’ approach, these days publishers are expected to provide a clear and accurate translation that’s as emotionally charged as the original.

Given the sheer scale of games made today – particularly those made in Japan, many of which are text-heavy JRPGs – you’d think many companies would have turned to technology in a bid to cut down on the workload. But not so.

Instead, many of the games we play are painstakingly translated by skilled localisation specialists, working line-by-line to achieve near-perfect results. Some publishers achieve this in-house, but many smaller games are handled by external companies that specialise in such work.

XSEED Games is one such company, and arguably one of the best. Specialising in Japanese-to-English translations, the company is behind an array of JRPGs and other Japanese games, including The Legend of Heroes: Trails series, the Ys series and a number of recent Earth Defense Force games. The supremely excellent The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel is one of its most recent releases, and has been out on the PS3 since December in the US and February in Europe.

XSEED sets the bar for translations incredibly high, producing brilliantly written and often very funny text that easily makes you forget a game was ever made in another language, and yet its translators are dealing with seriously challenging conditions.

AI translation is getting sophisticated, but it’s nowhere close to what XSEED achieves. We caught up with XSEED Games localisation specialist Tom Lipschultz to find out where the bar really is.

How to translate a game

Thanks to the incredible variance in content and style, there is no set length of time or number of people it takes to translate a game.

According to Lipschultz the timescale “is based largely on the quality and complexity of the original writing, the amount of text there is to translate, and – for Japanese in particular – how easy it is to discern context, since a lot of Japanese relies heavily upon implication rather than direct statement.

“Our usual rule of thumb is that for every 100,000 characters of Japanese text, we’ll try to allot at least one month of time to get it properly translated and edited – but that’s not always possible, since we typically have to coordinate our efforts with the Japanese dev team, and their availability, or lack thereof, often necessitates speeding things up a bit.”

When it’s crunch time and translation needs to be sped up, additional people will be brought on board, although even this can create challenges of its own.

“It’s when we have to speed things up that we start adding new translators and editors into the mix, since it’s usually best to keep that number as low as possible, with one translator and one editor being ideal,” explains Lipschultz. “The reason for this is because each translator and editor has his/her own style, and it’s often tough to fuse multiple styles together into a cohesive whole.

“When it does become necessary to split the work, we usually try to split it along the path of least resistance, so maybe one translator will work on all story-advancing dialogue, another will work on all optional NPC flavour text, and another will work on system text – menus, item descriptions, and so on. This way, the divide among their differing styles will be much less noticeable to the end user, making it easier for an editor to go in and harmonise the text into something that’s consistent all the way through.”

The company also keeps a “terminology bible” for each game to help ensure consistency, which editors both reference and add to as the project progresses, and an editor will oversee each section to iron out any inconsistencies that the rest of the process has missed.

“Once a section of the game is translated, it’ll usually be handed over to an editor for at least one full pass to ensure there are no typos or grammar errors, no loss of unique voice, no mistranslations or unclear passages, and so on,” says Lipschultz. “And then the text gets passed on to the developers in Japan, who will add it to the game itself on our behalf – since we’re a bit lacking in programmers on our end – sending us updated roms on a hopefully regular basis for testing and revision.”

Capturing the mood

While the entire process would most certainly be a challenge to program AI to do, there is one aspect to XSEED’s translations which is hands down impossible to match with current technology: the nuance.

For Lipschultz, the path to achieving this is very different for each project.

“We start by asking ourselves, what is the tone of the game? Is it a silly game? A serious game? Somewhere in between? And how is that mood expressed in the Japanese? Is it overt? Subtle?” he explains.

My personal motto has always been, ‘Translate the meaning, not the words.’

“Based on the answers to these questions, we try to come up with the best possible English equivalent. My personal motto has always been, ‘Translate the meaning, not the words’ – so rather than focusing on expressing exactly the same sentence as the original Japanese, I’ll instead read the original Japanese, process what’s being said, and to whom, and with what degree of joy or anger or confusion, and so on, then write an English sentence from scratch that conveys that same basic information in that same tone.

“The end result of this tends to be something that differs from the Japanese to some extent, but – hopefully – fully captures the feel and intent of the Japanese line while still getting the same ideas or concepts across.”

However, he is keen to stress that this is only his process. “Every translator has his/her own style and technique, though, so this varies a lot from person to person,” he says. “The only real generalisation I can make is that here at XSEED Games, absolutely none of us are literalists.”

With a language like Japanese, which has such different roots and sentence structure to English, a direct translation would never be able to capture the nuance of the text, something that is very important to text-heavy, story-based games.

“When you’ve been around for a while, it becomes abundantly clear that Japanese isn’t a language which lends itself well to direct translations – try as you might, you can never capture the nuance of a Japanese line by translating it word-for-word, because Germanic and Asian languages are just far too fundamentally incompatible with one another,” says Lipschultz.

“Adaptation is the only way to really remain true to the intent of the original work, and while there’s a certain degree of interpretation inherent in that, it’s still better than giving a flat, confusing, rote translation and depending on the player to know enough Japanese to suss out its subtler nuances.”

As yet, AI-driven translation is nowhere close to achieving this, although companies will need to pay increasing attention to this approach to translation if they are ever to hope to match the quality of XSEED’s work.

Use of technology

We now live in an age where webpages in any language can be automatically translated for you in milliseconds, so it seems incredible that a professional translator would have no use at all for automatic translation software. But for Lipschultz, the technology is nowhere near good enough to be useful.

“I don’t think anyone here has ever really worked with automatic translation software to any great extent, though I hear that’s very common in more technical translations,” he says.

Sometimes, the subtext alone is the most crucial part of an entire passage

“With creative works, though, it’s nearly useless, as it’s the more human elements of the original text that define the work we do – we’re not just robotically instructing the end user on how to program their VCRs – a reference that clearly dates me – but rather telling stories. And with stories, interpretation and localisation is far more important than simply translating the meaning of what’s being said. Sometimes, the subtext alone is the most crucial part of an entire passage.”

However, that doesn’t mean that translation technology is never used in the process, albeit in a rather minor way.

“There are certainly tools we use to make our lives easier, though. One of my personal favorites is a plug-in for Firefox called Rikaichan, or Rikaikun for Chrome, which allows me to mouse over any Japanese word or phrase I don’t immediately recognise and have a tooltip pop up at my mouse cursor with readings, definitions, and so on,” he says. “I can’t even begin to express just how incredibly useful this is, as a lot of the games we work on use some pretty obscure or archaic language.

“But programs like that are pretty much the extent of what most of us will use – programs that help facilitate our work, as opposed to outright doing it for us.”

This is very much in line with what many of the less radical predictors of AI’s impact have been saying: it provides tools to assist people’s jobs, rather than replacing them outright.

Translation’s future

At present Lipschultz is reluctant to try automatic translation software, as he fears it would jeopardise the level of quality more than it would help.

“I guess I just haven’t yet been convinced that automatic translation software and the like would actually help me do my job,” he says. “Even the software I’ve heard about that auto-completes cells for you when it finds duplicate text in the files is something I’ve always been hesitant to use, because duplicate text won’t always have the same translation from one instance to the next in such a context-heavy language as Japanese. In short, technology could speed up the process, but it would do so at the cost of quality control, I feel.”

However, he won’t rule out the use of translation software in the future, although it would have to be seriously impressive to consider trying.

“If a program comes along that seems like something I could make use of to facilitate better, faster work, then I’ll certainly give it a try. But I don’t anticipate changing the way I translate or edit anytime soon, as the current methods work very well for me.”

Nonetheless he can see a time when AI translators do play a major role, particularly between less contrasting languages.

“For technical translations from a language with the same ancestry as the destination – German to English, for example – yes, I think technology could more or less do the job with at least an adequate degree of accuracy and readability.”

However, for Japanese to English, he sees this switch taking far longer.

“For more creative translations, however – and especially for translations from a language with a totally different ancestry, like Japanese to English – I think the human touch is absolutely required. Without it, the end result may very well make sense, but it’ll lack the ‘soul’ of the original work, coming across almost like ideas in a vacuum,” he says.

“Context, particularly of the emotional variety, is something that can’t easily be defined by algorithms and logic trees… at least, not with our current level of technological advancement.

“The sophistication required for AI that could adequately discern nuances and quirks, and adequately render those nuances and quirks in another language with a completely different structure, history, and cultural identity, is simply beyond the capabilities of modern computers. And while I have no doubt computers will continue to be iterated upon until this sort of sophistication is possible, I don’t see that happening for at least another few decades, and… frankly, I’m also kind of afraid of the ramifications of such advancement.“