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If there's one thing I really love in older Japanese games was often times the translation got completely butchered when coming to English countries. Sometimes it was a simple sentence (I feel asleep!) to the entire game being an abject disaster (Whatever the heck happened with that Sword Art Online game). Usually it fell into a few categories as to why it was bad: 1. The translators weren't native English speakers and were working with what they knew 2. The translators were under a time constraint and there was no QA overlook To me, there's something charming about a bad translation. A bad translation gets so ingrained that becomes canon / isn't removed in future updates (see: FF4's "You Spoony Bard!" has remained in future versions) Anyway, I wanted to talk about my favorite bad translations: Zero Wing  Despite all the hilarious memes, I've always wanted someone to track down who did the translation and ask them what happened there. The game itself is a surprisngly fun shoot em up, by the way! Final Fantasy V, Playstation  /Update%2005/45-064.png) /Update%2005/102-140.png) For whatever reason, someone thought it upon themselves to give Faris a pirate accent throughout the game for this version. Not only that, but there were hilarious mistranslations elsewhere. Karabalos became KARL BOSS, and Wyvern became Y Burn. Even more egregious was that 3 high schoolers beat them to the punch by doing their own translation of the game on SNES and put it into a really well translated romhack, which arguably made it the most popular romhack of all time: https://kotaku.com/how-three-kids-beat-the-odds-and-translated-final-fanta-1794628286 Square Enix finally fixed the translation in the GBA release and beyond but I'll never forget you, Karl Boss. Breath of Fire II    Everything about the translation of this game was an abject disaster. It's a shame because BoF2 deep down is a decent JRPG (a little grindy, for sure, and could some quality of life improvements) with a decent overarching story about a corrupt church inflicting evil on the world. One more bizarre thing was that Nintendo had rules about no talking of killing, mention of religion, and other rules, and this game completely just overlooks that. But there was weird punctuation, tons of mispellings, bad localization (game tells you to alternate between red and yellow buttons based on Super Famicom, North American SNES buttons were blue and grey). It truly is fascinating how everything went wrong did. Capcom had a chance to redo the translation when they remastered the game for Game Boy Advance - this edition featured a running button, as well as monsters dropping double XP and coins, but they left the translation exactly the same. Legends of Localization did a write up on it: https://legendsoflocalization.com/breath-of-fire-ii-super-nes-localization-review/ Someone did a re-translation of the game that improves it a lot, and I've been meaning to play it. Anyway, let's talk about them. Also, horrible fan translations absolutely should be discussed too.
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Oct 24, 2019 21:10
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For fantranslations, I'll throw my hat in the ring as one of the people out there who think DeJap's translation of Tales of Phantasia terrible. They completely changed some lines, added things that weren't there, and is just generally not great. The GBA official translation has its issues (hello, kangaroo), but people think it was censored. When really, it's dry, but far more faithfully to the original script.
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Oct 24, 2019 21:57
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There was an FF4 hardtype translation released to much acclaim back in the early 2000's I think. I think it added some swears and wasn't all that memorable outside of playing OG FFIV, but there's one thing that always stood out to me: Cure was translated as Keal. e: Like, yeah, I can see how that Katakana can kinda do that, but what the hell?
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Oct 24, 2019 21:59
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:There was an FF4 hardtype translation released to much acclaim back in the early 2000's I think. I think it added some swears and wasn't all that memorable outside of playing OG FFIV, but there's one thing that always stood out to me: Ha, that's great. I can see where they might get that, though, if they just had absolutely no idea it was supposed to be Cure. Cure is one of those "Japanese expect a bit of English in their games" things, and is written out as kearu.
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Oct 24, 2019 22:01
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Favorite bad translation is still Lux-Pain, a DS visual novel that was so poorly translated that it was incomprehensible. I played through that whole drat thing trying to see if anything would ever make sense, and to this day I have no idea what that game is about or what was going on, just that you occasionally hit the stylus against something as part of some minigame. Unfortunately it was never memed so I have no examples. AngryRobotsInc posted:For fantranslations, I'll throw my hat in the ring as one of the people out there who think DeJap's translation of Tales of Phantasia terrible. They completely changed some lines, added things that weren't there, and is just generally not great. The GBA official translation has its issues (hello, kangaroo), but people think it was censored. When really, it's dry, but far more faithfully to the original script. Yeah I never actually had that much of a problem with the GBA version. Obviously the sound and graphics on other versions end up being prettier than it but I appreciated the dry type of translation it (mostly) got.
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Oct 24, 2019 22:10
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Oh, let's not forget that dubbing wasn't immune from some bad translations: https://youtu.be/3IPIPLM8ELY
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Oct 24, 2019 22:25
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You don't even need retro for god-awful translations. Meet Sword Art Online for the Vita: It was so bad it had to be relocalized for future releases.
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Oct 24, 2019 22:26
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flyboi posted:You don't even need retro for god-awful translations. Meet Sword Art Online for the Vita: I read up on that. The PS4 release got a patch that fixed most of it, but as always Vita owners got the shaft.
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Oct 24, 2019 22:32
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the characters' facial expressions in that screenshot 
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Oct 24, 2019 22:43
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 The issue, besides not being entirely correct German? That there's the English version Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town.
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Oct 24, 2019 22:47
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It was linked in the OP, but I can't stress enough that Legends of Localization is a must-read for a detailed look into how things change in the translation process.
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Oct 25, 2019 08:07
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This guy are sick
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Oct 25, 2019 13:33
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flyboi posted:You don't even need retro for god-awful translations. Meet Sword Art Online for the Vita: Ys 8 similarly had a terribly translation when it first released, they patched in an entirely new translation later
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Oct 25, 2019 15:23
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There's a preliminary translation of Final Fantasy II that was made before it got cancelled in favor of focusing on FF4 instead./2-2460.png) AngryRobotsInc posted:
The early Harvest Moon games had tons of those kinds of mistakes. Never forget the Harvest Moon 64 title screen, where Natsume couldn't even be assed to spell their own name correctly! 
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Oct 25, 2019 20:01
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To be fair to Natsume, in this one instance, Natume is a correct romanization of ナツメ under the Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki systems, which are more popular in Japan itself, while Hepburn is more popular outside it. So less a...misspelling, more a consistency mistake, where whoever was doing things didn't know Natsume uses the Hepburn romanization. It's the same reason you sometimes see Yoshi written as Yossy on some Japanese stuff.
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Oct 25, 2019 20:06
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seiferguy posted:Zero Wing quoting http://shmuplations.com/toaplan-yuge1/ quote:—Toaplan also ported Zero Wing to the Megadrive. Who came up with the broken English “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US” from the overseas attract mode?
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Oct 25, 2019 20:19
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Illusion of Gaia had a very wonky translation, as did Soul Blazer before it. IoG had a real problem with mincing first and third person, though, which made some of the plot very hard to follow! Great games, though.
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Oct 25, 2019 21:13
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oh no, he's become Riverson!
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Oct 25, 2019 21:14
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The Soul Blazer trilogy desperately needs a translation comparison, but poor Mato has too much already on his plate. It's not easy work and I don't envy anyone in that position.
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Oct 25, 2019 21:46
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Not a Children posted:Illusion of Gaia had a very wonky translation, as did Soul Blazer before it. IoG had a real problem with mincing first and third person, though, which made some of the plot very hard to follow! It also suffers a bit from the tall-style Enix font that makes it a bit difficult to move words and sentences around. Iconic, but it also pops up slightly with a few strange choices in Robotrek.
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Oct 25, 2019 22:53
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From the DuckTales prototype, courtesy of The Cutting Room Floor:
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Oct 25, 2019 22:53
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flyboi posted:You don't even need retro for god-awful translations. Meet Sword Art Online for the Vita: Cline is awesome
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Oct 26, 2019 00:57
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Not a Children posted:Illusion of Gaia had a very wonky translation, as did Soul Blazer before it. IoG had a real problem with mincing first and third person, though, which made some of the plot very hard to follow! I never could figure out what "Riverson" was supposed to be. Later I found out it was a crappy romanization of "Leviathan". I played Illusion of Gaia in Japanese and honestly it doesn't make much more sense that way, it's just a weird plot but I really enjoy it. Alxprit posted:The Soul Blazer trilogy desperately needs a translation comparison, but poor Mato has too much already on his plate. It's not easy work and I don't envy anyone in that position. I think someone did do a side-by-side once, I think I read it on some lovely fan forum at some point. Shibawanko fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Oct 27, 2019 |
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Oct 27, 2019 15:43
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Victory Position posted:It also suffers a bit from the tall-style Enix font that makes it a bit difficult to move words and sentences around. Iconic, but it also pops up slightly with a few strange choices in Robotrek. Robotrek is another... not great game that really had a basic English translation:  That said, there wasn't as much time put into Robotrek itself considering it's a middling RPG with a decent combat system but no post game, side quests or anything so I suppose that it got the translation it deserved.
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Oct 28, 2019 01:15
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Phantasium posted:Unfortunately it was never memed so I have no examples. If a game is never memed, did it ever really live?
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Oct 28, 2019 01:35
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That Legends of Localization site is amazing, and I just realized it was founded by Tomato from Starmen.net  That's awesome.
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Oct 28, 2019 22:27
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seiferguy posted:Final Fantasy V, Playstation rude foe 
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Oct 28, 2019 22:35
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havin' a rage at this drat golem
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Oct 28, 2019 22:37
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The best awful fantranslation going (because it's probably a joke). I played through a good chunk of that at one point.
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Oct 28, 2019 22:47
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Mega64 posted:The early Harvest Moon games had tons of those kinds of mistakes. Never forget the Harvest Moon 64 title screen, where Natsume couldn't even be assed to spell their own name correctly! it wasn't just the early ones. a wonderful life still had a godfuckinawful translation.
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Oct 28, 2019 22:58
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I recently replayed through Vanguard Bandits and it was a real crash course in how bad a lot of '90s Working Designs localization is. It's just non-stop dated pop references and slurs. Having the overweight character make self-depreciating fat jokes and quoting The Rock to having another character make Triumph the Insult Dog references while calling enemy soldiers gay. It's pretty crazy that this stuff flew back then. It isn't a great game by any stretch of the imagination, like most of it is bog standard mecha anime storylines with ultra-condensed characterization because the game's really short but I did enjoy the few days it took to replay it. My favorite part of the localization is during the final turn of the game where, out of nowhere, the protagonist and the villain have a minutes long choreographed in-engine mecha sword fight set to a really goofy English rock song complete with extremely amateurish voice acting (where there hasn't been any voice work in the game prior) which sounds like they recorded it VIA web cam and none of it is subtitled. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNaHdcjc1vk
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Oct 28, 2019 23:39
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DEEP STATE PLOT posted:it wasn't just the early ones. a wonderful life still had a godfuckinawful translation. Confirm the origin of fire!
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Oct 29, 2019 17:50
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My favorite Legends of Localization article is the one where they talk about bad translations from English to Japanese, specifically for the part where Japanese people tried to explain what a very literally translated "Hell yeah!" meant. https://legendsoflocalization.com/games-with-famous-bad-translations-into-japanese/ quote:First, “hell” is mostly an emphasizing slang word, much like like “heck”, “gently caress”, or “freak”. It’s often translated in subtitles and dubs of Western movies as “kuso”.
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Oct 30, 2019 18:08
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Here's one that happens to be about translation from English to Dutch, but demonstrates a common failure mode:quote:I once did a translation about a space ship simulator - in this context space is translated as ruimte (space as in universe). The client copied and pasted the word ruimte to a message popping up every 3 seconds, instructing the user to press SPACE (as in space bar) to jump, without consulting me beforehand. The result was that the user was instructed to press the universe every so many seconds. (source)
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Nov 9, 2019 22:05
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Legends of Localization is a cool site. I always used to wonder about why old game credits would have lots of seemingly normal Japanese names but then have stuff like "Big Ben" or "Mr. Egg" or whatever just peppered in. https://legendsoflocalization.com/unusual-english-in-japanese-video-game-credits/#funny-staff-names
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Nov 9, 2019 23:28
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Phantasium posted:Favorite bad translation is still Lux-Pain, a DS visual novel that was so poorly translated that it was incomprehensible. I played through that whole drat thing trying to see if anything would ever make sense, and to this day I have no idea what that game is about or what was going on, just that you occasionally hit the stylus against something as part of some minigame. My favourite thing was that the text was 'localised' to be in America but the voice acting wasn't ( or the other way around). The text would say Chicago but the voices said Tokyo, etc
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Nov 10, 2019 00:28
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AngryRobotsInc posted:The GBA official translation has its issues (hello, kangaroo), I've been doing P&P roleplaying games my whole life. For a very long time, a personal running joke of mine that nobody ever got or will ever get, is to include a very powerful sword named 'Kangaroo' with an Australia-shaped crossguard, with the description reading 'Sword from the end of the world.' Geographically speaking, that is.
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Nov 12, 2019 05:10
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Nov 12, 2019 06:26
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Sit on my Jace posted:Here's one that happens to be about translation from English to Dutch, but demonstrates a common failure mode: Speaking of different languages, in Poland we had access to actually pressed (as opposed to burned) bootleg CDs - not only collections of ripped games made for professional pirates to copy piecemeal, but most of the popular poo poo for PC and PSX. There was a whole industry around So, why the hell am I talking about that in a localization thread? Because not many games were localized into Polish those days - partly because they weren't programmed less with that in mind, partly because the piracy made it less profitable. So enterprising (most likely from the ex-Soviet countries) hackers took the matter into their own hands. With varying, and sometimes hilarious results. Off the top of my head I can cite two very different examples: 1. Red Alert 2, message says "Brakuje ci władzy". Translation from "not enough power", no problem with that, except they used a very different word for "power to rule", as opposed to electrical power. The game was rife with that and it wasn't the only title with those problems. Basically imagine one of those manga scanlations done shoddily just to claim the first release, in game form. In dozens of titles. 2. Soul Reaver. This one had a surprisingly decent translation, in that there were no glaring errors and mostly ones of tone and style. However, they didn't stop at translating the game - I don't know if it lacked subtitles, or if they just wanted to go the whole nine yards, but the pirates actually dubbed the game. Again, maybe not good, but surprisingly not-poo poo for the time. EXCEPT they took whoever was on hand, which meant Russians and Ukrainians. Hearing Raziel speak with a very noticeable eastern accent was.. an unforgettable experience. (to elaborate: those accents sound funny in Polish because of an old association with uneducated countryside hicks. Imagine if a fantasy game was localized for American release and half the cast had a very noticeable Southern drawl for no reason). Pierzak fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Nov 15, 2019 |
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Nov 15, 2019 04:20
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Samurai Shodown for the SNES had some great ones, I used to love the dialogue in Hanzo's story. It includes "Come, join the Dark Guy" and Hanzo shouting "Oh, Junior!" But the best line is one that appears in every character's story. Amakusa waking up from her slumber and saying "Tokugawa, you filth, I despise thee!" Thank god someone put it online: 
FactsAreUseless fucked around with this message at 06:27 on Nov 15, 2019 |
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Nov 15, 2019 06:25
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