wankgate | 252: imagine all the tags sitting neglected in inboxes for this

252: imagine all the tags sitting neglected in inboxes for this

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there is a huge amount of this with Japanese media and people who are just dangerous enough with the language to think that good official translation is wrong and opt for something more literal.

that's not to say there aren't things with bad localization, but bad official localization is generally a lot less common then some weebs who passed N2 on the internet will convince you to believe because they don't know how to translate for meaning.

lol that is very true

as someone who has in fact passed the n2 for real, yeah, it's this. i have consumed many, many canons in both languages, and for probably 95% of them the differences between languages are either nonexistent or so minimal as to be functionally irrelevant. this isn't 20 years ago, localizations these days tend to hew quite closely to the original source and when they don't, there's usually a reason for it.

a lot of times i notice people who complain about official translations fall under two camps: people who are mad that the translations aren't written by native english speakers (often the case with gachas) or those who have good english but take liberties with the localization by adding flavor text (so making a character sound more verbose than they are or use more poppy dialogue instead of direct ones)

While I get the issue with both (sometimes it's jarring to listen to localization when you can understand the original voice language, or non-native translations get spelling or word usage wrong) but I agree that functionally they are close enough to the original not to bother me. It is rare to see translation so bad it is unreadable or loses that much of the original meaning to be significant for me.

"so making a character sound more verbose than they are or use more poppy dialogue instead of direct ones"

to get an authentic translation due to context often something will feel more verbose in another language because it doesn't always have the same context that Japanese culturally will have. you have to provide that context or you end up with shitty direct translations.

Yeah, exactly! I'm playing a game now that got a lot of flak for the localization due to that, and while I agree some of the choices aren't perfect, overall the additional dialogue actual gets the mood across very well and the 'corrected translation' patches are so lifeless in comparison and loses some of the character personality as a result.

i feel like you've had better luck than me because i run into translators who just aren't proficient in japanese far more often

like, on the level of incorrectly mistranslating shit like おめでたいヤツ into "auspicious fellow," シャコ (in the context of sushi) into "giant clam," etc. just things that make it seem as if they just plugged words into a dictionary and picked the very first definition that popped up rather than understanding or considering the greater context

Are you sure it wasn't AI translated?

i'm talking about official translations by companies like atlus and nisa, so i would hope they weren't ai translated

AYRT

My bad I somehow missed it was about games. CrunchyRoll definitely uses AI so that's why I asked.

oh do they? i rarely touch anything cr does, but the last time i did, i remember being extremely baffled because they entirely mistranslated a song in the show i was watching (and i mean practically every word was entirely mistranslated)

so that honestly explains so much and was interesting to learn regardless

Yeah those are bad. I physically recoiled with シャコ because I actually eat that so I was all giant clam???

I wouldn't say I'm luckier, maybe just more tolerant? I'm ESL so I guess I am more forgiving of translations at times since my grammar isn't the best either.

I admit I have only ever played (and never finished) P5 from Atlus and I hear a lot of complaints about the localization for that one too. I will say I have seen really bad ones for gachas (for example, Ensemble Stars have some real issues with inconsistent terminology, some stories are just unreadable, and they have frequently spelled names wrong) but they are probably far less frequent than others encounter since I didn't see issues with other games that people I know had plenty to complain about translation-wise (usually some stilted grammar use but still understandable).

i think that's fair! people do often tend to overstate just how bad a translation is, often because they're really passionate about a particular canon and any deviation from what they expected ends up seeming like a really big deal as a result

(and then sometimes like an anon in another thread mentioned because they don't actually know japanese as well as they think and are the ones misinterpreting the original work)

da but i've also seen a lot of people missing the cultural context on things, too, in the sense that they may know textbook japanese but be totally out of touch with how words are used colloquially and so they think a translation is wrong because they're going off the dictionary definition rather than how the word is used in actual conversation.

rip to the characterizations of any character who uses たまえ, since the dictionary definition only gets across that it's supposedly a polite way of telling someone to do something and not all the stuff about how it comes off as antiquated and condescending nowadays because no normal person uses it anymore and it always comes off as a boss talking to someone he think is beneath him

yep that's one that's extremely context-dependent because in an old-timey canon it WOULD be polite/respectful, but like you said, anyone using it in the modern day would absolutely be doing so in a condescending way.

as someone who plays atlus games but not persona: they still seem fine for the most part, if a bit too much on the confusing prose.

Remember when the new Evangelion dub came out and it was extremely literal and thus awkward to listen to and so almost everyone disliked it.

People are clueless about localization.

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