Legends of Localization

Mato's brilliant. If you haven't seen his Legends of Localization website, where he discusses various issues related to translation, and even does simultaneous playthroughs of games with different translations (including machine translation!) and compares and contrasts them with the original...you're in for a treat. https://legendsoflocalization.com/

Neat article. For people deeply interested in video game translation, particularly with some knowledge of Japanese, I highly recommend the “Legends of Localization” books, where the author goes into extreme details about how Zelda (first book) and Earthbound (second book) were translated. There’s also a website with similar information (but not as deep) for a whole plethora of games, and a third book (for Super Mario Bros.) is in the works. http://legendsoflocalization.com

I have recently been reading three books by Clyde Mandelin. Clyde is better known online at Mato. He runs the excellent 'Legends of Localization' web site (https://legendsoflocalization.com). The two books I suggest are… • Legends of Localization Book 1: The Legend of Zelda • Legends of Localization Book 2: EarthBound [To clarify, when I say "Earthbound", I refer to the game that was released in Japan as Mother 2, with the translated release being called "Earthbound" in the US.] If anyone wants to make the argument that a real-time translation would work, then I have an additional recommendation: • press start to translate: This is what happens when you let a computer translate a video game? You can find all of the above books at https://www.fangamer.com/collections/books/partner_legends-of-localiza… I have technical concerns and non-technical concerns with the idea. With Zelda 1 that would indeed work; there was not much text in the first place, and the typeface was blocky and easy to detect. With Earthbound, things are much more complex. Ignoring text that is "baked in" to the graphics, the dialogue was much more interactive. The text was smaller, with thinner letter shapes, and when one of your characters was dead, the contrast between text and background was alot lower. You also have to deal with changes in coloration and highlighting, for example when you are selecting from a range of options. Earthbound also had another trick: The dialogue system was…

If you thought this was interesting, there's a lot more in this vein from the author (Clyde Mandelin aka Mato/Tomato) who is a professional translator as well as a ROM hacker (not to mention, his fame in internet Earthbound/Mother fandom). He has a great blog, Legends of Localization[1], where he talks about how games were localized into English, and streams interesting game hacks and unusual games from Japan on Twitch (usually with his wife, Poe)[2]. For instance, for the past few days they've been playing through an English translation of BS Zelda[3], a 16-bit version of The Legend of Zelda released on Nintendo's Satellaview service for the Super Famicom, which is long gone but the game has been put back together by enterprising programmers. [1] http://legendsoflocalization.com/ [2] http://poematocx.com/ [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview_games_from_The_Legend_of_Zeld…

> I was very taken aback when I first saw this comment, but these days I cherish it. It reminds me one of the first times my code had a big impact on a community. This is a great perspective. When I was a highschooler I worked on a fan translation project that, 20 years later, someone called a "god awful piece of festering sewage that should never have existed to begin with" [1]. I'm quite proud to have done something in my youth that generated so much online rage for decades. https://legendsoflocalization.com/which-final-fantasy-iv-translation-s…

A lot of it is due to: https://legendsoflocalization.com/redundant-translations-in-games-anim… But no, Hideo Kojima and Tetsuya Nomura are just inane writers and there's a lot of pressure to make games unnecessarily long by padding cutscenes out. The recent FFVII Remake I thought had great writing in both Japanese and English though, which is surprising since I didn't expect it out of that staff.

There's a great discussion of what a proper translation of Zero Wing might have been like here: https://legendsoflocalization.com/lets-take-a-peek-at-zero-wings-all-y…

Worth checking out Clyde Mandelin who used google translate on the Japanese version of Final Fantasy IV and documented the silly results. https://legendsoflocalization.com/funky-fantasy-iv/

https://legendsoflocalization.com/ is a blog all about this kind of thing.

The “smell ya later!” article is good too. https://legendsoflocalization.com/qa-smell-ya-later-pokemon/

Besides "spoony Bard" I think the other most famous one is probably the "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets" line from one of the Castlevanias. Personally I like it, but I guess it's pretty notorious. TFA discusses it here: https://legendsoflocalization.com/lets-investigate-a-miserable-pile-of…

Looks like the author from the OP has an article about that too [0], and it is not "smell ya later" in the original. It is just a causall goodbye, "Welp, be seein’ ya!". [0]: https://legendsoflocalization.com/qa-smell-ya-later-pokemon/

The SNES Final Fantasy games famously had some translation adventures. FF4 has "You spoony bard!". FF6 had a lot of mature edges smoothed off in translation (as well as more typical translation nuances). Here's an article/interview with the original translator for FF6 (https://www.usgamer.net/articles/ted-woolsey-localization-translator-p… and here's a piece (in fact a whole website about game localization...) going through different translations of FF6 (https://legendsoflocalization.com/final-fantasy-vi/)

At a bare minimum, you can buy games on the Switch with incomprehensible English translations: https://legendsoflocalization.com/this-be-bad-translation-19-refreshin… NES games often had some pretty rough translations, but I can't think of a single game in that era that was this garbled.

I was reading an article talking about book translation and translation styles a couple of days ago but I can't seem to find it again. In the meantime, have a link to some quotes on localization and translation: https://legendsoflocalization.com/literary-translators-comment-on-loca…

And here's what happens when one uses Google Translate to translate a video game: https://legendsoflocalization.com/funky-fantasy-iv/

Here's an article from the same site from last month showing additional progress that's been made on this tool, now called Wanderbar: https://legendsoflocalization.com/wanderbar/

They give a good example of a problem with translating politeness into English, and the different ways translators (mis)manage it, in one of the linked articles: https://legendsoflocalization.com/final-fantasy-iv/damcyan/#multiples

The biggest revelation for me for me here was on Metroid after clicking through to https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-problem-with-l-r-and-other-lette… (and by extension https://legendsoflocalization.com/a-look-at-the-metroid-series-varia-s…

Clyde Mandelin has done something similar, https://legendsoflocalization.com/wanderbar/ , but without claiming "AI" and by producing HTML in a sidebar instead of voice or screen-alteration. (also useful for non-translation things. needs per-game plugins for e.g. what memory area to look at. on the other hand, reading memory directly instead of using OCR means much less processing to to to get it running live instead of needing a button-press per-frame.)

Yeah, the differences are kind of interesting -- check out the last section of this article http://legendsoflocalization.com/funky-fantasy-iv/ for some comparisons of Google-translated Japanese text from Final Fantasy IV before and after the switch.

I still remember Final Fantasy IV even though I first played it around 30 years ago. Those novels I had to read for school? I don't remember half of them, and the half I do remember are not novels I remember fondly. Why? The game starts with a guy committing war crimes. He questions his king, is stripped of his post, and sent off on a suicide mission. Then, when he carries out his mission, it turns out he's committed yet another atrocity. That was fucking grim for a game that came out in 1991, and strong medicine for a sheltered kid who had grown up on TV that produced "pro-social" messaging like Dungeons & Dragons and The Get-Along Gang. Here was a game that gives you a taste of the kind of bad shit that can happen when you trust authority instead of your own conscience, and that was strong medicine. So, yeah, I think games can be effective storytelling media. Just bear in mind that FFIV didn't have full-motion video, anime cutscenes, or voice acting. Hell, the original SNES release didn't even have an accurate translation; as a pre-ESRB title it was censored to suite Nintendo of America's content policies. https://legendsoflocalization.com/final-fantasy-iv/

Opposite direction, but Super Mario RPG's localization team apparently didn't get half of the pop-culture and cross-game references of Mallow's "psychopath" ability and the net result is that English "psychopath" text is hilariously non-sensical. For example, if you use "psychopath" on Magikoopa, the English translation is "That's... my child?" which makes zero sense. A better localization would have been "You're that baby from that one time!?" - a reference to Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. There's also a Donkey Kong-looking enemy named "Guerilla" whose psychopath text is "Don't confuse me with someone else!" In Japanese though, the enemy's name is more like "Dankey Kang" and his psychopath text is "This character has no relation to any persons, living or dead. Any resemblance is purely coincidental." (apparently this particular case was more due to memory constraints than the localization team "not getting it" though) You can read more here: https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-pop-culture-obsessed-monsters-in…