Japanese just fundamentally doesn't translate well to English and many things are straight-up lost in translation no matter how you do it. You can't translate an entire script, keep the message completely in-tact, AND have it make sense to a non-Japanese reader/listener.
There is no "right" or even "good" way to translate a game from Japanese to English, and if the translator takes no liberties at all to alter parts of the script then it will be practically nonsensical altogether.
I'd like to hear your arguments and why any given one only-partially-accurate method of translation is superior to any other given only-partially-accurate method of translation and/or "localization."
There is an idea behind the words that are spoken, that is what you convey while trying to keep the tone of the original lines.
Caleb Gutierrez
I'm hoping this isn't a (1) a done bait OP.
John Anderson
But you can. The only thing you can't translate well are the puns, because the nips have billions of them. A direct translation is stupid, but keeping the context and intent are the goals. Too bad most localizers only care about inserting their opinions.
Jackson Scott
the fuck you want from me?
"Tone" is something you can't fucking translate. These are people who were raised in a completely different society with a completely different language made up of completely different sounds and gestures.
There isn't even a satisfactory fucking translation for "desu" that means anything or explains anything in any way. You could spend days or even weeks trying to read explanations of it and never figure it out.
Joseph Ward
Start learning Japanese then you can realize how fucking retarded you sound.
Grayson Davis
Except (You), as an English speaker who knows nothing about Japanese – and certainly can't read or speak it fluently – have no fucking clue in the first place what the original context and intent are or even could be.
You might "get" that something doesn't match up if you're familiar enough with the language, but you have to go online and ask other people what the context and intent was in the original Japanese version because even if you played the Japanese version complete to the end you wouldn't understand a goddamn thing.
For all you know, it's people with a less-than-perfect understanding of the language unintentionally false-flagging about something they only have very limited exposure to because they're still learning, but they're just pompous and narcissistic enough to spread it on the internet as the gospel truth anyway.
Do you know what "The" means? If you had to explain it to me only in text and without examples or context, could you? And even if you were good enough at explaining it, would I be receptive enough to figure it out?
There are so many factors involved in teaching and understanding a language to begin with, much less trying to "translate" them. You're jamming a round peg into a square hole.
Joshua Nguyen
KEK
Blake Moore
Thats fucking bullshit and heres why: Otsukaresama desu directly translated sorta says like When saying that to someone in japanese it sorta means The best way I would translate that to english is probably Its a greeting that makes no sense in english but among japanese coworkers its common because work ethic is huge over there. The translation doesnt QUITE mean the same thing but its close enough to the true meaning instead of just slapping a HEY WHATS UP or a TOP OF THE MORNING TO YOU on there.
t. Foreign Broker for 2 years
Juan Williams
ROOOOOOOOOOOOO
Chase James
archive.is/2u6ar Fuck out of here Connor, just like the website you made, this thread isn't going to work Have fun being laughed at and bullied.
Xavier Thompson
Didn't you kinda sorta just prove my point though?
My point being the clearly stated point in the OP (Accurate translation is difficult if not impossible in most cases), not the "implied" and/or misunderstood "point" I'm apparently making to some anons (DUBS ARE BETTER, PLEASE LOCALIZE MY GAMES NISA!!! I HOPE CLEVER user DOESN'T FIGURE OUT MY CLEVER SHILL RUSE!!)
I hate how self-important you pseudointellectual faggots are sometimes
Logan Cooper
You don't need to have a direct fucking translation for です to know that 猫です is not, "Gee willikers, this here is a Siamese!" you prancing faggot.
Josiah Cox
You're an idiot. Just because different languages have different sentence structures doesn't mean you can just write in whatever you want.
Andrew Myers
The fuck game is this a quote from?
I'm not standing up for horrible translations in any way. If anything, I'm far more in favor of just playing games that were made in your native language you fucking communist but I have to admit I enjoy playing an occasional weeb game and when I do I typically just swallow any pride I may have at the time and stifle any vaguely political thoughts I might have about the translation and just fucking find something to enjoy in the game.
Jack Brooks
This is like using Superman 64 as an example of the best that western game development has to offer. Fuck off, colonist.
Colton Mitchell
there is a difference between filling in the gaps to make the subject matter fit in a more descriptive language like english, and shoehorning in bullshit. even if we completely disregard the bullshit like the infamous moogle xe xir garbage there are still tremendous gaps between the original message and what we get here half the time
go ahead and be a NISA apologist all you want but you have to understand why people would be pissed that instead of even the original message we're getting stale memes and socio-political commentary the nips who wrote it never intended
Zachary Hill
You claim to be talking about fundamentals but aren't you really just picking very specific examples? You're talking about 'desu' and 'the', not the reason people claim translations are 'bad' or 'good'.
The reason why people were pissed off about stuff like the support conversation between those assassins in Fire Emblem wasn't because they failed to accurately convey the Japanese phrasing into English. It was because they completely changed the dialogue, and that's why people bring up tone. The tone and subject of that conversation were completely different than the tone that the English version presented.
Do you really not understand why people call those kinds of translations shit?
Jason Wright
Go away, Connor Your kind aren't welcome here. Even pretending this blatant bullshit was even remotely true (hint: it isn't) I'd rather take a literal translation over the shit that gets passed off under "localization". imgur.com/a/X2w49 This isn't even touching the crap Funimation gets up to these days.
Joseph Moore
Are these better examples?
Anthony Collins
Your whole point is a strawman, since nobody means "direct one-to-one translation" when they mean "accurate", what they mean is keeping the meaning and intent the same.
Brody Carter
*when they say "accurate"
Noah Davis
again, please kill yourself Connor
Jose Gray
You have no idea what the original script even looks like, much less what it actually says.
Granted outright ad-libbing the dialogue is the worst thing you can do when translating.
John Brooks
Thanks for proving my point.
Luis Adams
Thats because tone and context also mean something like what this user said Im going to write two sentences here, tell me if you can tell them apart and what im trying to say in each: Just looking at it there is absolutely no context so the sentences look identical. Now if i add: The words have remained the same but the meaning has completely changed. Same shit with tone: Due to the punctuation, the tone of these words have changed from excited to depressed or possibly pleasurable. Thats when you look at the context of the words around it to decide what is most appropriate.
Go back to fucking school because clearly you are too retarded to be browsing an image board.
Eli Rogers
nip should just make all their games in english
Alexander Rodriguez
Steins;Gate is 90% memes.
Here, I'll just drop 5 random fucking screenshots from my folder.
Are THESE examples any better?
Jordan Price
Fuck off, I know first hand how inaccurate translations are.
Samuel Parker
...
Aaron Cook
...
Blake Murphy
Just found a super long and autistic post (likely by Krammer) on reddit when persona 5 came out, and even there it was dead in the water and couldn't get any traction, and laughed out of it
You don't have to "translate" tone. Tone is implied through situational context and the conversation taking place. The gist of what someone is saying can be easily communicated even without a direct translation between languages. That's why you can say (仕方が無い means something like "There's noting you can do about it", or the classic "It can't be helped" even though directly translating it would get you something like "There's no method (to do a thing)" or "There's no way (to do a thing)". The job isn't to bring over word for word and phrase for phrase, it's to keep the intent of the message between two languages intact which is perfectly doable for anyone who isn't retarded
Jayden Brown
If you truly believe this what is even the point of this thread? If nothing matters and there is no objectivity then this is just a waste of time.
Yup, this is their go to strawman whenever you criticize inaccurate localization, presume their position from the beginning is wanting a literal translation.
Andrew Brooks
Actually, I can look at the fucking Japanese version of the game and see what the original text looks like. And I don't even need to take a class in a language to know that multiple characters from its language don't translate to "…" over and over again.
Kayden Clark
Yeah but I don't so I'm usually pretty okay with whatever as long as it isn't overly and overtly political
And 90% of anons that jump on the outrage train also have no experience whatsoever, but they can't take it easy like me.
Jordan Thompson
wow you basically proved yourself wrong in your own post and i didnt realize it. 10/10, made me reply and got me buttblasted, hopefully mods will delte this thread soon.
And my point still fucking stands since you decided to greentext the one mistake i made and ignore everything else
Aiden Evans
I think maybe I'm not very good at explaining myself…
Nolan Davis
So basically you're just a shit taste EOP who has stockholm syndrome for shitty localizers in the hope they they don't abandon you. Even more reason to hope the whole localization industry dies.
Jackson Richardson
You're a goddamn train wreck
Dominic Diaz
A serious tone A sacastic tone A happy tone A are you a fucking retard tone
You know, normal shit? Thats where is lies to the translator to find something appropriate and not just wing it. How is this something you cannot wrap your head around, yes there are thing that don't translate well, or for that matter at all but there is a meaning that is conveyed. From what I've read in this thread you weren't really asking a question, just trying to win an argument.
Michael Bailey
It's because you're not making sense. Just learn the goddamn language a game is in if you want to fully enjoy and understand the whole script. Most games are no literary masterpieces in the first place.
Blake Bennett
I think you're just making shit up as you go along because you've gone from "I don't fundamentally understand this" to "Well I don't pay attention to multiple examples of outright rewriting of text or poor/low effort translations, so I'm ok with it, and you should be too :^)"
You're either retarded or merely pretending, either way great thread.
Mason Moore
I was gonna say this, but I'm not in a good position to say that.
Joseph King
Relativist please kill yourself
Nicholas Barnes
how could I literally possibly be anything else, I'm not omniscient
Cooper Rodriguez
No.
Lucas Wright
Fine, so it should be translated as "I appreciate all your hard work" and not, let's say, "capitalism is a system of exploitation of the working class." A translator's job is not to add his shitty political agenda to whatever he's working on.
Caleb Watson
I'm nearly at an N1 level. I know exactly what the original script says.
For example, say we have the context of a boy chatting with a girl, and the following dialogue:
いい天気ですね
It would be more accurately translated as something like: "The weather is nice, huh." instead of something like this: "AY GIRL LEMME HOLLA AT YA!"
The former is a much more accurate adaptation of the original than the latter, even though Japanese doesn't have "articles" and English doesn't conjugate verbs to show politeness to the listener, that doesn't somehow mean that "all translations are equally inaccurate". Accuracy isn't a binary value, you kike-sounding commie faggot. A translation should be as accurate as reasonably possible while still being understandable for speakers of the other language.
Caleb Sanders
OP, you are a useless gay nigger and I will take the bait. I work as a translator, granted it doesn't involve Japanese, rather it's my mouther tongue and English, but when you translate from any language into any other language the same basic rules always apply. First of all, anyone saying that word-for-word translation is preferred is retarded, mostly because they are strawmen, the idea is to translate as precisely as possible, keeping in mind 2 things, that the translation is accurate and that it is in the spirit of the language you are translating to. Now the first is self-explanatory, what the second one entails is that you shouldn't use constructions that are unnatural in the language you translate to, for example my language passive sentences are very stylistically marked and used for a certain specific purpose, so in most cases you just turn the passive sentence into an active one, the meaning is literally the same. Another frequent example - sayings, proverbs, metaphors, you don't translate them word-for-word, you translate their meaning by finding a proverb that MEANS the same thing. For example, there's a saying in my language which word-for-word is translated into "Help the poor on your own shame", which to most people here means absolutely nothing. The ENGLISH saying you would have to use which has the SAME MEANING is "No good deed goes unpunished". Nobody who bitches about inaccurate translations bitches about that sort of thing since that's an accurate translation.
Yes you can, nigger. Different languages convey the same tone differently, again the meaning here lies on the tone along with the words used themselves, again like the example of sayings and proverbs you just express the same tone in the way the language you're translating into. Again: THIS IS NOT INACCURATE TRANSLATION AND NOBODY CLAIMS IT IS
Hunter Rogers
My native language doesn't have articles (the is the definitive article in the English language I expect you don't actually know that because you're a nigger), the syntax, morphology and general grammar for one language is completely irrelevant for the purposes of another language. In the same way you as an English speaker shouldn't give a fuck about the 7 cases my language has. Now you cranked up the retard dial from "word-to-word translation" to "word-to-word translation, also you should completely conform to the entire grammar of the language you're translating from".
Your point is never proven in this entire shitshow of a thread, the thing that this all comes down to is that you have absolutely zero idea what an accurate translation is as opposed to what an inaccurate translation is, thus you can't even fathom what people who bitch about inaccurate translations are actually bitching about on a fundamental level.
Cameron Smith
Explain how humour translates from Jap to English then retard.
Jason Ward
None of which have anything to fucking do with "tone", you goddamn fucking retard.
