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First of all, I will say that my sympathy goes out to everyone who has ever undertaken the rather ardurous task of attempting to translate from Japanese to English. Between the fact that the two languages aren't even remotely related, the insanity of the kanji system, the various levels of linguistic politeness and social status which have no real English equivalents, and the often wacky rules of English itself, producing a literal or near-literal translation is often impossible. Even with my fairly pithy knowledge of Japanese, I can see how it's simply unrealistic to expect perfect literal renditions of dialogue-- especially taking that conversation styles in Japanese and English tend to be radically different. However, none of this excuses the crap that Square has been trying to foist on us for the past few years. There's taking some liberties with dialogue to produce something equivalent in intent to the original Japanese (which is apparently what the Vagrant Story translators did, and more power to them for it, sez I), and then there's just plain stupidity. In fact, I would argue that taking some liberties with dialogue is necessary because Japanese conversations often tend to rely on nuance and suggestion, while English is more direct. Thus, something that would make sense to a Japanese speaker often, when translated literally, means almost nothing in English. Anyway. Back to the issue of /stupidity/. (Yeah, that's the thing that gets me every time.) For a primary example of a translation which is not blatantly bad but frequently stupid, I point you in the direction of the Final Fantasy Anthology version of FF5. The main problem here was not so much that the dialogue was bad or Daravon-esque as that they changed a lot of things which didn't need to be changed. The most blatant example was Faris's stupid pirate accent. Now, Faris in the original is a good, strong female character. She obviously had enough charisma and presence to lead her crew, she was a good enough actor to fool everyone into thinking she was a man, she was resourceful, and she had probably the most interesting backstory of any character in the game. Anyway, our friends at Square of America took this interesting, likable character and made her incredibly annoying, by giving her a "pirate dialect" rather reminiscient of a Disney movie. She calls people "landlubbers" and "mateys" and randomly inserts "arrrr"s into her dialogue. I wept for this game. Poor Faris has probably lost a lost of potential fans due to the crack-smoking translators who brought you Plofessor Daravon's Wonderfur Tutolial. And on a similar note, why did they change the name of Syldra-- Faris's sea serpent who makes those incredibly annoying screechy noises-- to "Hydra"? It doesn't even look like a hydra. It was called Syldra in the original; I doubt that the Final Fantasy writers would have made so gross an error in spelling if they had intended it to be Hydra. I suppose it was owing to some vague notion that American gamers were too stupid to figure out what the damned thing was if it wasn't named after a large mythical serpentine beast. Well, it is obviously not a hydra, and all you really need to know about it at all, for the purposes of plot, is that it's a Big Monster Living In The Water. Another sterling example of cut-rate translation is, once again, related to poor Faris, who really got screwed over in the "official" English version of FF5. I'll avoid giving away too many spoilers here, as I know some people haven't played the game yet, but Faris's original name-- before she changed it to Faris-- was Sarisa, as spelled in the original version. Somehow, the translators took this and mutilated it into "Salsa." There is one character in the game who actually goes around referring to Faris as Salsa. She doesn't mention whether it's Mild, Medium, or Extra Hot. (Okay, kick me for the bad pun. Now.) The point is, not only does it sound stupid, but it's just plain wrong. As is fairly well known, there is no "L" sound in Japanese, so all foreign words containing that sound must be transliterated with an "R." There are very few consonant clusters, and most consonant sounds are combined with a vowel. However, in the case of all but a few letters, syllables and words which end with a consonant in English always end with the letter "U" in Japanese. Thus, Faris would be "Farisu." Salsa would be Sa/ru/sa, NOT Sa/ri/sa. That's just plain sloppy. Even a first-year Japanese student (such as myself) ought to be able to spot that error. The fact that professional, paid translators made that mistake is really pathetic, and I don't know what else to say about that. Then there's our friend "X-Death." Blarg. X-Death sounds like the name of a comic-book villain. Exdeath was already enough of a cipher villain without the translators having to give him such a spasm-inducingly cheesy name. I suppose we can only consider ourselves lucky that Gilgamesh was not romanized as "Girugamess" or some such monstrosity. There are also the dragonlike enemies that you fight, fairly close to the beginning of the game, which are (according to FFA) called Y Burns. I think I can say without much doubt that this name probably left a considerable number of people staring blankly at the screen muttering "What the hell is a Y Burn?" They do not burn anything, and there are no X or Z Burns. Well, it makes sense if you realize that the enemies were originally known as Wyverns. Yeah, like the name of Ramsus's gear in Xenogears. Why could they get it right in that game and yet not in FF5? There are things that man was not meant to know. There is also a Dwarf Kingdom in FF5. There are seven dwarves living in it. Far be it from me to speculate how they maintain a stable gene pool, especially taking that all of them appear to be male, but I digress. Anyway, as anyone who has ever played FF2US (and I would guess this constitutes a majority of the people who bought FFA) knows, dwarves say "Lali-ho." They said "Lali-ho" in the original. For some reason, our friends the translators struck again and changed this to "Tally-ho." Is there any way at all that "Lali" can be mistaken for "Tally" in Japanese writing? Not if you're familiar with katakana. Again, I suppose it must have been the assumption that American gamers would have gone into a blank stupor at the sight of a nonsense word like "Lali" and needed something more familiar to keep their brains from shorting out. I know this is an awful nitpick, but little details like that just crawl on my nerves. Finally, last but not least, anyone who has played Final Fantasy 7 or 8 knows what a Tonberry is. Chances are that the initial acquaintance was not a happy one, but it's a reasonably safe bet that any player of either of these games would recognize one of those little squatty, lantern-carrying, bug-eyed, disturbingly pupilless hellspawn on sight. There were Tonberrys in FF6 too, although they were renamed to "Pugs" in English for reasons that are beyond me to speculate about. However, even "Pug" is a rather decent name by comparison with what they called them in FF5, which was "Dinglberry." For those of you who don't know what a dingleberry is, you're better off not knowing, because it's disgusting. Really, it is. (Okay, for the morbidly curious: dingleberries are small bits of fecal matter which get stuck to the hair around your arse. I told you it was disgusting. And this is what they named them after.) I never thought there would come a day when I would weep for those little pupilless demons, but I did. Why Dingleberry? At least "Tonberry" fits properly into the name-space restrictions! Assumption of American Stupidity strikes again, I guess, although this time it seems to go hand-in-hand with the Assumption That All American Gamers Have The Mentality Of Butthead. (Huh huh huh. They said dingleberry. Huh huh.) Or, equally dismally, it may be a reflection of the relative maturity of the translators themselves. FF5 is by no means the only case of translation stupidity to be found in the annals of Square history. Quite a few gamers have accused the depiction of Barrett in FF7 of being a racist stereotype-- he looks like Mr. T, swears frequently, and talks in a very stereotypical "inner-city gangsta" dialect. However, the most questionable aspect of Barrett's depiction-- his gangsta speech-- was, you guessed it, added by our translator friends in the good ol' enlightened, politically correct U.S. of A. In the fan-translated scripts for FF7 that I've read, Barrett is actually a pretty nice guy. He's a bit of a loose cannon, but then he has reason to be, and he doesn't swear nearly as much as Cid. Nor does he sound like a white suburban guy's impression of what gangsters talk like. (Hell, as far as stereotyping goes, about the only thing the translators didn't have him do was say "motherfucker" and refer to Aeris and Tifa as "bitches" and "hos." And I wouldn't be surprised if they had tried but Sony had actually put their foot down on that one.) I'm not a purist by any means-- as previously emphasized, the differences between Japanese and English make a "perfect" translation wholly impractical-- and there are some changes I don't mind, such as changing the name of a character because the original name would have certain connotations to an English speaker ("Butz" to "Bartz", for example). But when a change is just plain unnecessary (Syldra to Hydra) or utterly stupid (Tonberry to... well, I don't really have to say it, do I?), I find it rather insulting to my intelligence as a player. And when a translation team makes such gross errors in romanization as Square's-- we're talking about English words here, for crying out loud!-- I'm forced to say that they aren't worth whatever Square is paying them for the job. I know of at least one person who stopped playing the game because she was so annoyed by the translation. Is a good translator really THAT hard to find? I find it extremely pathetic that fans working with original Japanese ROMs, doing translation work because they want to and not because they're getting paid for it, are turning out better products than an official, paid team of professionals. (Of course, this is not to say that the fans are always flawless, either-- I was rather upset by a particular ROM version of FF4j which added quite a lot of unnecessary jokes and innuendo into the script. But the point is, most of them turn out good work.) I want to hope that our beloved RPG company has finally managed to land a good team of translators. Interestingly enough, I noticed recently that Vagrant Story is the only game in recent Square history which specifically credits the translators in the ending staff list. Quite frankly, I can hardly blame them for withholding the names of the guilty parties in their previous attempts. (Actually, I want to send money to the VS translators. Really. That was a damned brilliant translation-- if I hadn't known the game was originally Japanese, I would have wholeheartedly believed that it had originally been written in English.) And all I can say is if Square is really willing to settle for so low a level of quality in translation as they did with FF5-- if they honestly don't care if the story is well-rendered, just so long as the game makes a tidy profit-- then it pretty much answers the debate about whether they really have sold out, as a company, or still care about their products. I'm holding out hope for them after VS, but I suppose only time will really tell. |