Community MetaSteam | March 2022 - Try Finger But Hole
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Decided to take a break from Nier Replicant after getting Ending B and started Mass Effect Andromeda. First impressions are good, the game looks nice and plays well. Story-wise the premise has a lot of potential but it probably wont deliver in the end. The writing seems to be pretty meh. I'm looking forward to seeing how the game develops from here, it's always fun to see new planets and alien races.
Is there actually something else happening?
does anyone actually give a fuck after yesterday’s wet fart?
does anyone still listen to insiders after nonsense like the switch pro? Or after Jon Cartwright proved how easy it is to fake this stuff?
That people still fall for the “I know something you don’t know know!!” schtick from wankers like Greg Miller who know exactly what they’re doing (and of course then say it’s all your own fault for getting hyped) is amazing
That was a joke.
A joke based on I keeper reading "it's just 1 hour more", "30 min to go", "6 hours to go" every time.
Im tired of hints from journos and insiders, also them using emojis, trying to make people hype and it ends up being nothing.
Fair enoughThat was a joke.
A joke based on I keeper reading "it's just 1 hour more", "30 min to go", "6 hours to go" every time.
Im tired of hints from journos and insiders.
The cycle of crap like yesterday just really bothers me
oh the west and their custom translations...
PS: image is from ghostwire tokyo.
PS: image is from ghostwire tokyo.
OP
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Ok, that makes sense, I was like "weird expression, isn't it?" loloh the west and their custom translations...
PS: image is from ghostwire tokyo.
it's NMH3 PC TIME, BBY!!!!
Yep, that line felt totally out of place.
I usually cannot stand localization, would be nice games were just translated and not localized, if not we get things like Persona 5 royal, Neo: The World Ends With You or 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim rewritten dialogues that affect the story or even the gameplay.
The screenshot is misleading since it's a single line that is probably taken out of context. I believe there must be a good reason to have certain localisation choices like these.
On that note, Elden Ring suffers a fair share of TL issues as well. Even one which wrongly contextualizes a whole ending. (Possibly the most important ending no less.) 
almost certainly. Showing a single line like that out of context shows pretty clearly how most people don't understand what goes into translation. Localisation is translation. Japanese is drastically different langauge then English, with completely different expressions. A one-to-one direct translation is usually the worst choice and sounds like complete gibberish.
I guess some people are just used terrible scanlations and are just fine with "translations" that barely constitute as English.
That being said, the real issue with "bad localisation" in games isn't that they dare to change the glorious Japanese. It's that there isn't enough time (and therefore money) given to the editing process. The reason that for example XSeed was able to elevate the incredibly boring Japanese script in the Trails games was because the company actually took the time it needed to polish the enormous script of those game. Almost every single NPC in those games reads incredibly well and sounds like a real person. That's what happens if you give translators and editors the time they need.
OP
I don't really understand the criticisms people have towards this game's localization. Nothing about it is any different from how TWEWY was handled from my experience with both games. Both games use a lot of modern teen lingo with punk vibes because thats...what the game is really. A game set in modern Shibuya about teenagers trying to be hip (you even get better stats based on how trendy your clothes are in particular areas) while they survive a 7 day game.
If Square Enix ever gets purchased by another company, let alone Sony, I will die. I don't want companies meddling with their games. Their games are too good.
I overall agree with you but I think the bad rep some people have towards "localization" as a term is due to how some dialogue in games wind up significantly different in meaning than their originally intended dialogue during the localization process, at least more different than they need to be to still understand what's trying to be conveyed. It's not that people are asking for things to be translated very literally down to the sentence structure, but want things to convey as similar a meaning as possible, which tends to get lost on occasion during the localization process. Like there's gotta be a balance between sounding natural in English and being true to the intended meaning of the phrases. I think a lot of people with these kinds of desires just don't seem to know how to convey these feelings in an articulated manner, so they wind up saying things like "I want a literal translation" and other silly things like that.
More extreme examples of this have happened in games like Fire Emblem Fates, a sort of goto for this kind of thing, but this sort of thing still happens today with some lines of text in some games.
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I don’t want to play games that read like they’ve been through a machine translation.
Good localisation captures the tone and flavour of the original text in the language it’s being translated into, where that would otherwise be lost with a more literal one.
Good localisation captures the tone and flavour of the original text in the language it’s being translated into, where that would otherwise be lost with a more literal one.
I think most of these egregious examples are just that the translators didn't get enough time and had to rush. If you notice a line being off, then you can bet the people that translated it and read the script many times knew about it too. And "fixing" it might require changing many other things too, and thus needs some thought and time. But if you are under a time limit and there are other parts of the scripts with bigger problems, then you compromise and leave some things for later. And as the deadline comes closer, that "later" turns into "never".
I'm annoyed. The most recent Windows 11 insider update added a bunch of nice stuff... And also broke whatever made injecting AA into DariusBurst CS through Nvidia's drivers work. I suspect it's from whatever bullshit they're trying to replace regular fullscreen with this time.
I thought it was a great line.oh the west and their custom translations...
PS: image is from ghostwire tokyo.
Sources - NetEase to Acquire 100% of Quantic Dream
NetEase, the Chinese internet technology company will reportedly acquire 100% of Quantic Dream, with an announcement likely to come this summer.
exputer.com
Such a waste of money.Sources - NetEase to Acquire 100% of Quantic Dream
NetEase, the Chinese internet technology company will reportedly acquire 100% of Quantic Dream, with an announcement likely to come this summer.
Even Shueisha starts producing indies
The whole issue of localisation vs translation is a fine line.
I started with anime back in the VHS (god I feel old) days where you used to get liner notes with the VHS. One of my favourite anime, Urusei Yatsura, used to have the most densely packed liner notes due to the nature of the series. However it was a catch 22, if you read them before hand then the joke was kind off ruined. Read them after and the joke was lost on you.
Another area was creative designs (working designs?!?!? Can’t remember their name) had a nasty habit of leaning heavily into the localisation and horrible memes. Worse was that they where very Americanised as well so you needed more notes for American bits than you did the Japanese side. The first thing this does is date the game and sometimes dated the game before it even released. Oh and I hated how they frigged about with difficulty in the games.
The other issue comes down to sales. If you do more of a translation it is very difficult to expand your market outside of people curious about JRPGs. Go too much of a localisation and you risk pissing off the more dedicated fans.
Ultimately a good localisation should be able to tell its story without you scratching your head while not straying from the original intent and themes. Oh and maybe to have the sense to remove the fucking homophobic bullshit if it isn’t relevant to any of the plot (looking at you Atlus).
My final thoughts on this come down to the games themselves. If you are translating something like DQ games I think you have a bit more leeway to lean into the localisation. However if your game is embedded into Japanese culture (ie set there) then more towards translation than localisation.
The final reminder is that the next person to buy your game may not be as involved in anime, jrpgs, Japanese culture or Puff Puffs so it may be best to take these people into account.
I started with anime back in the VHS (god I feel old) days where you used to get liner notes with the VHS. One of my favourite anime, Urusei Yatsura, used to have the most densely packed liner notes due to the nature of the series. However it was a catch 22, if you read them before hand then the joke was kind off ruined. Read them after and the joke was lost on you.
Another area was creative designs (working designs?!?!? Can’t remember their name) had a nasty habit of leaning heavily into the localisation and horrible memes. Worse was that they where very Americanised as well so you needed more notes for American bits than you did the Japanese side. The first thing this does is date the game and sometimes dated the game before it even released. Oh and I hated how they frigged about with difficulty in the games.
The other issue comes down to sales. If you do more of a translation it is very difficult to expand your market outside of people curious about JRPGs. Go too much of a localisation and you risk pissing off the more dedicated fans.
Ultimately a good localisation should be able to tell its story without you scratching your head while not straying from the original intent and themes. Oh and maybe to have the sense to remove the fucking homophobic bullshit if it isn’t relevant to any of the plot (looking at you Atlus).
My final thoughts on this come down to the games themselves. If you are translating something like DQ games I think you have a bit more leeway to lean into the localisation. However if your game is embedded into Japanese culture (ie set there) then more towards translation than localisation.
The final reminder is that the next person to buy your game may not be as involved in anime, jrpgs, Japanese culture or Puff Puffs so it may be best to take these people into account.
Sorry for the off topic, but this topic is a bit of pet peeve of mine.
Thus if you want to translate some book or story from Spanish to German, you probably don't need to do much heavy lifting on cultural notions and often not even on idioms. Thus we get the idea that this is just how translation works, understand how sentences are structured, what the words mean and there you go, Bob's your uncle. Language contains way more tricky things than just grammar and the meaning of words. We express lots of cultural ideas that absolutely require the other person to know lots of things about how people express themselves. Every time you utter the word "God", you reference whether you understand it or not, thousands of years of a particular religion affecting your culture. To someone else without that background, this use of the word would seem very strange, they might assume people here are very devout if they constantly speak of this deity.
To go back to the original point, since Japanese and Japan are about as far removed from the Western cultural sphere as you can be, with a history beyond the 20th century that again could hardly be more different , with religious influences that have no connection to Christianity and many cultural norms and ideas different to our Western ones, any decent translation will have to do some heavy lifting to make things intelligible and sound natural in the target language. And often that might even mean cutting some things. Certain jokes might simply not work, you'd have to try to find something else entirely. Puns are a completely lost cause and many common phrases and saying, will simply have to be replaced or completely worked around.
This is why these comparisons where one word in Japanese will be rendered as multiple sentences in English you see sometimes are so stupid. They might be able to express something with a simple shorthand or metaphor, that we simple can't (and vice-versa).
If someone in English says "sticks and bones", they reference a Children's rhyme. If you wanted to say this in Japanese, you'd necessarily need more than just three words. That wouldn't mean you failed as a translator, it means you actually understood what it is that translation has to do: render a natural text in your target language.
That's not saying that all decent translations are then naturally perfect. Using lot's of memes that are not going to age well might not be a great choice (though I guess it depends on whether the original Japanese had something like that too, it might be authorial intent). You can still mess up translations in many ways. All I'm saying is that good translation from Japanese in particular has to be localisation too and that's true of translations of any two languages from different cultural spheres. You'd have the same issues if you went from Chinese to English.
I disagree. This notion that these are two different things is very Western centric. If you look at Europe, and pick any two countries, say Spain and Germany, you are looking at cultures that have a ton of similarities, like religion, very close connection in their history, with things like WW1 and WW2 affecting both heavily and the way people live is not crazy different relative to all cultures on this Earth.
Thus if you want to translate some book or story from Spanish to German, you probably don't need to do much heavy lifting on cultural notions and often not even on idioms. Thus we get the idea that this is just how translation works, understand how sentences are structured, what the words mean and there you go, Bob's your uncle. Language contains way more tricky things than just grammar and the meaning of words. We express lots of cultural ideas that absolutely require the other person to know lots of things about how people express themselves. Every time you utter the word "God", you reference whether you understand it or not, thousands of years of a particular religion affecting your culture. To someone else without that background, this use of the word would seem very strange, they might assume people here are very devout if they constantly speak of this deity.
To go back to the original point, since Japanese and Japan are about as far removed from the Western cultural sphere as you can be, with a history beyond the 20th century that again could hardly be more different , with religious influences that have no connection to Christianity and many cultural norms and ideas different to our Western ones, any decent translation will have to do some heavy lifting to make things intelligible and sound natural in the target language. And often that might even mean cutting some things. Certain jokes might simply not work, you'd have to try to find something else entirely. Puns are a completely lost cause and many common phrases and saying, will simply have to be replaced or completely worked around.
This is why these comparisons where one word in Japanese will be rendered as multiple sentences in English you see sometimes are so stupid. They might be able to express something with a simple shorthand or metaphor, that we simple can't (and vice-versa).
If someone in English says "sticks and bones", they reference a Children's rhyme. If you wanted to say this in Japanese, you'd necessarily need more than just three words. That wouldn't mean you failed as a translator, it means you actually understood what it is that translation has to do: render a natural text in your target language.
That's not saying that all decent translations are then naturally perfect. Using lot's of memes that are not going to age well might not be a great choice (though I guess it depends on whether the original Japanese had something like that too, it might be authorial intent). You can still mess up translations in many ways. All I'm saying is that good translation from Japanese in particular has to be localisation too and that's true of translations of any two languages from different cultural spheres. You'd have the same issues if you went from Chinese to English.
Don't sleep on this one. I've only played Thea 1 but that was a fantastic (and unique) experience.Free game on GOG
Thea 2: The Shattering
Thea 2: The Shattering is a follow-up to the successful Thea: The Awakening, which bringswww.gog.com
while it may not come across too well in my original post (or at all). I agree with everything you say. I am not very good with words and the intent can end up somewhat mangled. I will always favour a good localisation.
My Gold standard for localisation is the UK translations for Asterix the Gaul. There is a lot of love and care in them. Yeah they do fall into your point of them being very western centric but they are still the height of how to convert jokes from one language to another.
some new DLCs for the games I own have been released:
I was expecting new Captain Tsubasa DLC would be new National Teams. Some of them from original Holland Youth OVAs are missing. That new DLC is meh.
I was expecting new Captain Tsubasa DLC would be new National Teams. Some of them from original Holland Youth OVAs are missing. That new DLC is meh.
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While I agree with most of what you write, I don't think it completely invalidates the distinction between a "translation" and a "localization". I think the "distance" (in a non-geographic sense) between two cultures mostly affects how much extra (meta-)information a translation needs to include in order to be understandable. (While a localization should require none)
That said, while the whole "translator's note" thing is a meme for a reason, I personally believe that it is sometimes more appropriate to go go for something on the spectrum between translation and localization rather than 100% localization. An example would be when a game takes place in Japan, and derives story-relevant elements from that. Ignoring/working around that cultural setting in the localization rather than explaining it in a translation might make the initial hurdle of understanding the scenario when it first comes up lower, but it might also lead to consistency issues down the line.
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I agree, in the case that the cultural notions are not just subtext, but context, you need to make it available to the player. A lot of VN games, like the Science Adventure games, include essentially an in game encyclopedia explaining references to the players. While it's a bit crude, it's probably the best way of dealing with that situation.
A pretty extreme example is probably the Ace Attorney series, and how it handles the city of Kurain, set in an somewhat achronistic rural Japanese town). While I generally like the translation of those games, it does lead to some silliness since they chose to set it in America officially.
Speaking of translations and localisations. I used to buy Urusei Yatsure way back on VHS and those always included a little booklet that explained the most Japanese jokes. Thought those were amazing.
I started appreciating localization a million times more ever since I started dealing with traditional chinese media. It's so telling when someone is just doing a normal translation, shit gets borderline unreadable, specially when proverbs and idioms come into play - it's nigh impossible to translate some of them without using a western proverb with a similar meaning.
Project Spartacus aka the new PS Plus tiers
Ace Attorney was actually exactly what I was thinking about while writing that paragraph. I enjoyed playing the English version nonetheless, but that initial localization choice becomes increasingly dissonant with later episodes.
in very recent news that nobody is talking about
METAL GEAR 35TH ANNIVERSARY 公式WEBサイト
betting 5 dollars that this is NFTs
METAL GEAR 35TH ANNIVERSARY 公式WEBサイト
betting 5 dollars that this is NFTs
well it's konami, so ...
I raise you a PerttiCoin! Much much more valuable than measly dollars.
It reminds me of really early game translations, like Nintendo 64 prior. Y'know, when games were translated with tons of liberties and basically no oversight by the original developers, up to not communicating if there might be a sequel down the line. Except it's generally of good quality rather than a mess of stilted, horrible grammar.
I need to play through The Great AA Chronicles...
however, to the shock of everyone involved, something can be found in the js code for the site, referencing to purchases and selecting retailers (in contrary to the usual nft thing of just linking to opensea)in very recent news that nobody is talking about
METAL GEAR 35TH ANNIVERSARY 公式WEBサイト
betting 5 dollars that this is NFTs
my sources tell me that i have no clue what i am talking about, because the monkey in the walls whom speaks to be in egyptian (who is my source) is telling me that i do not know javascript code, and that this could merely be just a placeholder thing
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