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GAME: Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Review

Eiyuden Chronicle's localization is great when you don't have grifters who don't even speak Japanese bellyaching in your ear about it.

Eiyuden Chronicle's localization is great when you don't have grifters who don't even speak Japanese bellyaching in your ear about it.

there can be a 1:1 translation outside of slang and idioms.

scanlines wrote:

there can be a 1:1 translation outside of slang and idioms.

The problem with this is that the goal of translating artwork is to preserve the intent of the author, not their words, which can be different things. There are some cases where you can just do a dictionary replacement of words in a sentence when translating Japanese to English and you'll still get a sentence that makes sense, sure, but less often than you'd hope, and what you get will often sound awkward and stilted -- and if a character was supposed to sound like they were talking in a casual, conversational tone in Japanese, then they should also sound casual and conversational in English, not like robots.

But even on top of that, text in one language can often carry implications that do not carry over into another language if translated literally, or doing so can add implications that should have never been there in the first place. One of my favorite examples of this is in Akiba's Trip, where there's a group called the "KKK Witches", which has immediate, obvious, highly negative connotations for anybody who knows anything about American history. When the English publisher asked them about it, the developers said they were completely unaware of the reference, and it was intended to be a completely innocuous acronym, so they immediately changed it, but that didn't stop the usual crowd from getting upset that the game had been censored.

There are bad localizations out there, but in general I'd trust any professional translator over some dude on Twitter who pastes out-of-context phrases into DeepL and then asserts the professional translation is wrong.

I will try to take your word for it, because you at least argue in good faith. I believed that about UO, too... until I got to the part where the English adaptation started inserting a bunch of heterosexist BS into certain later scenes (resulting in actual plot holes). That was probably more a perfect storm of bad workflow decisions rather than actual malice, but it's kind of a sore subject for me right now.

And the exceptions Scanline made--slang and idioms--are really important because of how central they are to language. It's 100% true that someone in the US won't understand a Chavo del Ocho reference. That's why you replace it with the Dukes of Hazard or Hee-Haw instead. "You can have a 1:1 translation if you just ignore cultural context and backgrounds for the speaker!" is how you strip meaning and character out of a translation, not by changing the script so that Osaka compares Chiyo's dad to Bill Clinton instead of Prime Minister Mori.

FinalVentCard wrote:

And the exceptions Scanline made--slang and idioms--are really important because of how central they are to language. It's 100% true that someone in the US won't understand a Chavo del Ocho reference. That's why you replace it with the Dukes of Hazard or Hee-Haw instead. "You can have a 1:1 translation if you just ignore cultural context and backgrounds for the speaker!" is how you strip meaning and character out of a translation, not by changing the script so that Osaka compares Chiyo's dad to Bill Clinton instead of Prime Minister Mori.

Absolutely disagree with this stance. By this logic Dragonball Super had a bad English translation when it didn't change the Arale episode to make her Dora the Explorer or some other cartoon character since most American fans wouldn't know what Dr. Slump is.