Someone asked I look at this line when I got to it in my Nipponese playthrough of the Golden Sun series

Fanbase size doesn't really matter, more than that what fans it has are devoted enough to get a game already out in some form of English into a more accurate translation. Otherwise, I doubt there would be much of an effort to fix Ar Tonelico II, given how niche that series is even for JRPGs.

But as for Golden Sun, aside from name changes and people complaining how verbose it is at times, I think people have only recently been looking into a more direct comparison of the Japanese and English scripts.

Might dig through the credits if I can find them on youtube.

Bill could not contain richs fuckery

Looked at GS1's credits thus far. Could have been any of, or a combination of, these.

One thing I can't show in an image is that Golden Sun's script, especially in the first game, has quick lines expanded out into entire paragraphs. It looks to be an attempt to make it flow better in English, but it doesn't work.

As for the translators, the editor was Rich Amtower (I think he admited on Twitter at one point it was one of his first projects), who is SJW maxiumus and prime suspect for all the shit going on at NoA now.

well if we're talking about dialogue its probably rich or nate but considering the tweets i've seen i'd put my money on rich

From TLA's credits North American Localization:

Also messed up reading Scot's name in the prior one; was Scot there, not Soot. Not sure why Soot didn't strike me as not being a name.

Honestly, I would expect the blame would lie with the editor, as the initial translation work would have likely been close to the Japanese script, leaving it up to the editor to tweak, and perhaps management for approving the changes.

Oh one thing I didn't mention (because it's fairly well known in comparison) is that "Breath" (ブレス) was repeatedly mistranslated as "Blessing" in the first game

well then there you go its rich because hes said himself that he doesn't know japanese.

Bless and Breath are both entirely valid readings of those katakana. I don't really blame them.

I swear the only time I've ever heard this word "caucus" is on Holla Forums in reference to something that happened in the states.

Has this fuck been plaguing gaming for that long?

Oh yeah, that one's also a well known one. Same with Death Size. But those stuck out as being obviously wrong, as opposed the whole scripts being fucked with.

Still could have been something pointed out in testing, unless the idea that the enemy was "blessing" the characters with elemental damage was that much a possibility.

Reminds me of how in Tales of Zestiria, apparently the team there translated one art as Final Player, even though that arte's been documented since Tales of Destiny 2 (which we admittedly didn't get here) and even a quick search at Aselia wiki would show that fans had accurately determined it to be Final Prayer.

True, but between the context and fact that they dance around mention of deities in the first game's translation (but not the second for some reason).

"Dark Blessing" might make sense as an attack. Better than when Final Fantasy Tactics made the same error and used "Bracelet" instead.

To be fair "caucus" is used correctly. That's the door to the Lemurian senate (It's actually called a "congress" in the Nipponese script, but congress and senate are synonymous for this purpose and "senate" keeps the feel of an ancient civilization better given Rome had a senate but "congress" referring to a group of people instead of a one off meeting only started around the American revolution)

*so I'd say that's a good change

Tales had a lot of arte name fuckups before they fired 8-4.

Certainly seems like the biggest possibility, as well as Swan and/or Miller for approving it. Though I suppose that's provided they even knew those changes to the script were being made.

Technically, the people inside that building are, if memory serves, the governing body of Lemuria, but it seems a bit of a stretch compared to the original wording going by what OP's got, which doesn't mention them being particularly loud (and as such, argumentative) about the goings on.

You want just western vidya or Japanese ones brought west? According to mobygames, the oldest game he was involved with was a thank-you credit in Warcraft II; oldest localization he was involved in being one of the following as editor:
All of them being 1999 releases here.

He did work QA on FFVII, Chocobo's Dungeon, and Brave Fencer Musashi slightly earlier, but I suppose wasn't involved with the translation itself in those cases.

He hasn't left the industry either, and as late as last year was doing localization management (I guess he got promoted from mere editor?), as well as voice over supervision and doing dubwork for additional characters in XCX.

Welcome to what being a fucking Dragon Quest fan feels like.

How many puns and retarded wordplay shit do localizers add to Dragon Quest? All of it, or just 90% of it? There's no way japs are that fucking retarded, and they probably wouldn't have just suddenly started doing it with the DS games and later.

What's so stupid about it is that now it's kinda expected, the localizers "have" to add shitty puns because that's a part of the series now.

99% of it, easily. Sometimes characters show hints of accents, but it's usually for dramatic effect.

My moon is limited so I don't know how much they change regarding enemies and items and stuff, but I know for a fact they go out of their way to rename main characters and locations for the sake of shitty puns, alliteration, or no fucking reason at all.

he also did vagrant story

Funny thing is that, as far as I'm aware, Zestiria wasn't even done by 8-4.

If anything, 8-4 generally took the arte names Symphonia had been using and turned them into standardized western names starting with their works on Abyss (their first time working with the series, according to their wikipedia page) and reused most of those names in later games as well, as prior to that, the translations for Destiny and Eternia had used whatever their translation teams wanted (Majinkin for example, went from "Missile Sword" in Destiny, to "Sonic Blade" in Eternia, to the now standard "Demon Fang" in Symphonia), which was nice since before, various artes would have been hard to keep track of with all the different names. Which makes it all the more baffling how Xillia (which 8-4 also worked on) wound up ditching various ones, replacing "Light Spear" with "Tornado Drive" and some other instances. There's also some issues with the arte names in Xillia 2, but while 8-4 is listed in the game credits, it seems like another team actually handled most of the game (Xillia 2 isn't listed on their wiki page, either). Still, I'm not sure how whatever the team for the game was came up with Time Disintegration (which, according to Kajitani-Eizan, is named similarly in Japan to what we know as the Sword Rain arte family here; he suggests something like "Sword Rain: Lambda" could have worked as it's more advanced than basic Sword Rain, but not the same as Sword Rain Alpha or Beta) as a basic arte name.

I suppose the big thing is that Tales arte names aren't the sort of ones that can translate literally from the Japanese name and still come off as memorable (Majinkin and a few others I suppose get a pass, but others like Senkuureppa come out to "Flash Empty Fissure Destruction" translated literally, going off Aselia wiki), at least for the melee artes (magic ones seem to be phonetically Engrish and can translate in a literal sense better). Those are the sort of changes I don't mind much since it makes it easier to identify the arte, provided they remain consistent. When stuff just starts being changed up for no good reason between entries, that becomes an issue.

Note that I'm not defending 8-4, I'm just saying that standardizing arte names was a pretty good decision, given how a lot of artes have kept the same names in Japan, but out here had been whatever, not making for the best recognizability.

He's done a lot.
mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,33392/

Oh, and on that note, something I don't get. How the fuck is Amtower listed as having worked on Threads of Fate in 2010? That was a PS1 game. Did they screw up in listing it, is there re-crediting when a PSN version comes out (I don't see any other PS1 games oddly placed into the late 2000's, early 2010's on his page), or did he wind up re-editing the script for the rerelease?

Reminder Advance Wars: Days of Ruin was an actual good localization that purely enhanced the exact wording of dialogue along with adding more humanity and personality to the characters.

The only thing I can think they actually censored was changing Caulder wanting Forscythe to use some kind of gas to wanting him to fucking freeze your troops solid with a weapon.

Yeah, standardizing arte names, which was done by a Namco brand manager, was good. The problem is 8-4 broke from the conventions a ton

How so? They generally seemed to do a pretty good job up until Xillia/Hearts R with the series. I've taken it as them either being better back then, or that Namco was more willing to hold them to a tight leash, as some companies have proved they can squeeze quality out of 8-4, provided they give enough of a shit to do so.

Just remembered the "Why?" generated as a translation mistake during trial road and I'm coming up on it now. Anyone have a good screencap of that so I don't have to cap a youtube video for it?

Isn't he the guy who told XSEED not to localize Senran Kagura or something?

I would think it would be a good way to practice one's Japanese translation and reading skills as you got two scripts to work with as a frame of reference to reduce any errors.

But was it a official meeting or was it an informal one? Personally if I didn't know, I would go with meeting as using Caucasus could screw up any plot points if it's important..

Is Richard amtower that bad?

Different guy.

You probably shouldn't use caucus no matter the reasoning. The word is simply too obscure for the intended audience every which way you look at it.

Just got a piece of Dragon Skin which allowed me to the two "Dragon Shields". The Nipponese version uses two different names that both mean "Dragon Shield". Broken Seal's shield is written using Nipponese words for dragon and shield, while Lost Age's is English written phonetically.

The hard part of fan translations is more often hacking in a script than the actual translation.

All I've got is the old reaction image. As far as I've heard, in the Japanese version, Felix just responds with "?" or something.

I'm honestly not real sure. I've heard the name before this thread, but I can't quite remember anything specific he might have directly said/fucked up with. I suppose he doesn't have the notoriety someone like, say, Vic Ireland has.

Looking at the mobygames listing of what he's done, the stuff that actively jumps out at me are him doing Localization Management for Fire Emblem Awakening and XCX.

I have that too and unfortunately the quality isn't great.

That's another thing I noticed about the script in generally actually. There's a lot of complicated words compared to the Nipponese script.

"Felled" is ridiculously obscure when the more common "defeated" works fine (even for capturing the ambiguity of what your victory can mean).

"fell" is probably a more literal translation of 倒す, even if it's not as common in English.

The Nipponese script is around a sixth grade level. The English script throws out obscure words like it's nothing.