IceBurner wrote: » On the subjective nature of localization :



As I'd said, I know some people who translate from Japanese. They don't work in games and I'm not privy to anything special except their second opinion on my own efforts. Well that and insight into the process and industry as a whole, which is a small world.



First thing to note is that the with outsourced translation, the translator isn't usually the editor and may not even know them, and can be overridden. How often and under what circumstances this will happen varies from outfit to outfit, by the customer's demand, by the agreement with the original product's creator/owner/publisher, and the alignment of the stars.



I know of one example by a fine and meticulous translator of Mr. Alex O. Smith's caliber (but not him) where they localized something idiomatic into very natural English and their editor brought the smack down and told him to go back and make it literal.



In many cases by translators I don't personally know, they chose to make something up. They can't always be faulted either, as sometimes it's a real bitch, but that's what separates a quality translation from passable (and horrible). That and the money being spent on said translation. One specific case in point, among Monster Hunter 2 equipment names:



Japanese [literal] My translation, with some prof. assistance/Capcom's official decision

双剣リュウノツガイ [Sword Set ryuu no tsugai] Mated Dragons/Gradios Ultimus

ゲキリュウノツガイ [geki ryuu no tsugai] Estranged Pair/Corpse Blades

The actual meanings implied by "ryuu no tsugai and "geki ryuu no tsugai" not only required understanding of the game and what this item is in particular to properly convey, but a 20-minute brainstorming session between myself and a professional to figure out how to fit it into natural, concise English.



At length: "Gradios Ultimus", as Capcom put it, is a pair of swords with the distinct visual theme of one sword being clearly made from body parts of the male variety of a wyvern species and the other sword from the female variety. "Ryuu" is "dragon", "no" is "of" and "tsugai" is "pair" but with an additional implication of "couple/birds of a feather" or "hinge/joint". If you were a hired gun for the translation and had never played the game, even with a visual guide to the items chances are you'd have no damn idea what was going on there from the words alone.



It's even worse when you consider "geki ryuu no tsugai". We narrowed "geki" down from "the breaking of an intimate relationship" to meaning something along the lines of "marital strife" quickly enough, but then putting that into a short phrase with meaning immediately apparent to someone playing the game took some of the above-mentioned brainstorming. Finally, we hit upon "sundered pair". Perfectly accurate? Hell no, that's not even possible without perhaps a full sentence. Does it get the idea across properly? Well, you tell me.



To compound things, these can also be misread as "killer pair" and "unsealed killer pair" if you're not careful ;) Now consider that outsourced translators are usually paid by the word and that spending 30 minutes in all between two item names is not very profitable.



All this effort was spent on the best possible result for two item names. This is nowhere near the complexity of character dialogue!



In-house translation has slightly different motivations and better access to source materials (possibly even the creators), but you're still under time constraints, there's still an editor (but you may actually know or be them), and writing for entertainment is still more art than science.

Okay, let's stop spazzing up the poll thread about games that won't be localized.The final goal of any localization is to beThis can be done without having a damned clue what the original script even looked like (see: Pizza Cats, Samurai), but changing jokes, dialogue flow, etc, to work across culture also works. Fixing things that the original fucked up royally is also an option, lest we forget the mangled mishmash the Japanese made of Valkyrie Profile's Norse mythos (and its godawful vocal casting). It's a little easier with games than, say... anime fansubs since they're not constrained by matching up dialogue lines as much and can add or delete them as seen fit.Just beingisn't neccessarily a bad thing either. A game like Viewtiful Joe is basically nonstop sentai jokes, which because of stuff like Power Rangers, most of the world doesn't bat an eye at or even really strongly associate with being foreign anymore. To a lesser degree, because of The Karate Kid, 'sensei' and '-san' have entered the vernacular and any normal guy on the street can give you at least a reasonable approximation. Other honorifics... not so much.The audience is also pretty important. If I can step on my high horse for a moment... having translated a [vidURL="Type-Moon SRW homage[/vidURL], even knowing that such a game exists pretty much guarentees certain degree of familiarity with basic Japanese foibles, like honorifics and the extended pronouns that aren't in use in English (onii-sama, senpai, etc). There are still things that don't have a good translation (the sword, Kuji Kanesada for example) that I had to sort of sneak in a description of what the Kuji was while they were explaining the sword itself, but 'Magical Buddhist Sword' is certainly a perfectly servicable description of it as well.None of this changes the fact that bad writing and/or bad editing will still fuck things up regardless of how technically accurate or clever your other localization voodoo is. Oftentimes, far far more than just a poor translation will. See Wars, Chaos. Seriously. Who did the editing on that one? A drunk fucking monkey?