Localizers Suck But So Do You

 

I was browsing a certain video game forum when I came across this image complaining about the quality of the translation of the upcoming Vanillaware game Unicorn Overlord.  To me, the image at the top of the post seems fine.  Certainly a great deal more flowery than the original Japanese script but not wrong, you aren't being given a greatly different script to the original Japanese.  However this thread was full of people, who I assume don't speak Japanese, absolutely frothing at the mouth at how the translation was "wrong" and going off on conspiracy theories about how "they" are using video game translations to push agendas or whatever weird terminally online bullshit these people like to go on about.

But to some degree I can sympathize with what they are saying.  Not the conspiracy part, that is absolute lunacy, but there does seem to be a severe lack of skill within the field of media translation that needs to be adressed.  I have played some absolute fucking STINKERS in my time, the chief example which really sticks out in my mind in recent years has been Fire Emblem Three Houses.  Never have I quite had an experience where the Japanese voices that I was listening to compared to the English text boxes I was reading felt so wildly different.  I covered it in a blog post I did previously on the game 

https://identitygaming.blogspot.com/2021/04/fire-emblem-3-houses.html

Fire Emblem seems to be famous for it actually with 2 characters basically having a support conversation stripped from the game entirely

You can basically take any game from recent memory, give it to someone who knows Japanese and I guarantee they will be able to find some pretty bad errors in it.  Hell, even in games with generally good translations like Triangle Strategy there is one mission where the dialogue is basically flipped to have the opposite meaning.  It's only a small scene and doesn't really affect anything but the idea that someone who is supposedly fluent in Japanese who is being paid to put the game into English making such a basically Genki Book 1 level error is embarassing.

You aren't free from these problems though by avoiding official translations because Fan Translations are even worse.  While a few good ones do exist, most of these fan translations are done by hobbyists who probably couldn't pass the JLPT N3 desperately sitting there with a kanji dictionary and google translate cobbling together whatever they can to provide an obscure game to western players.  The only reason I don't rag on these guys harder is because what they are doing is actually pretty cool and fan translations are generally aquired for free.  For example, there's a fan translation of one of my favorite Sega Saturn games, Baroque, and while it's probably awful (just assuming, I've not played the translated version, maybe/I hope I'm wrong) I would rather it exist and allow people who can't read Japanese to discover a great game like that than have it fade into true obscurity on a shelf in a Super Potato.

But on the flip side of all this are the people actually making the complaints.  Most people on social media or in forums who are levelling these criticisms at a games translation do not speak Japanese.  Someone with Google translate or a very surface level understanding of the language will tell them that it's wrong and then treat that as absolute fact when, a lot of the time, the things they are complaining about are daft.  Take that Unicorn Overlord screenshot at the top of the post.  Nothing that the guy is saying in English isn't reflected in the Japanese.  What I imagine happened is that someone on production looked at the setting to that game and said "ok we are going with ye-oldy flowery bullshit for the English" and then made those demands to whoever was actually doing the translating and English script writing.  In the few cases of game translations that I have personally been a part of, stylistic requirements for writing are usually made by a higher up who usually would have a mental break down if they tried to order a plate of spaghetti in a resturant.  I'm not sure if that's how it works in a much larger studio like Vanillaware but someone not related to the work making those stylistic demands is a situation I can easily imagine from my own experience.

That's sort of beside the point though because when you waste your time arguing so passionately about stuff that is generally fine not being 1 to 1 is that people who are within those circles will use idiotic rantings like this to dismiss large swathes of criticism and therefore things will never get any better.  I have known people who worked for Nippon Ichi who can't pass the JLPT N5 working on translations for Disgaea Mobile and another guy who had the creative writing skills of a well weathered rock claiming he worked on Scarlet Nexus and One Piece Odyssey.  The field is FULL of people like this who either suck at writing or suck at Japanese or both but the field is so underpaid that it only attracts these kinds of people.  Anyone who is worth a shit at Japanese language goes into things like Engineering or Computer Sciency type shit, you'd have to be a failiure or a weirdo to have a decent JLPT result and still want to do that.  What the field needs are skilled lingusts calling out the awful translation quality and maybe fighting for some actual decent salaries but that'll never happen so we're just stuck with this bullshit.

The best thing you can do if it bothers you that much is just learn Japanese.  I can promise you that it won't take anymore than about 2 years of study to get to a point where you can start playing most games without much issue and having language skills outside of just your mother tongue is never a bad thing.  

Hit the books, ya fuckin nerd