The Final Fantasy Thread

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
Alexander O. Smith is a pretentious faggot and I don't care for him. Shit like Vagrant Story is pure verbal masturbation. There's nothing interesting about reading a bunch drivel running in circles to convey basic information because it makes it sound le Shakespearean. If the original Japanese writer just wrote in everyday fucking Japanese, then you should be doing the same. Trying to "punch up" the script is just the translator jerking themselves off trying one-up the original writer so people will praise the translation instead of the person who actually wrote the fucking story.

That nigger is also responsible for the Final Fantasy IX translation, the worst one in the entire series that frequently has wild mistranslations and complete rewrites over entire scenes that completely changes the takeaway for the viewer all done for literally no reason whatsoever.

X Prime said:
because oftentimes you're punching up what in all honesty is usually dry Japanese dialogue in one way or another.
Click to expand...
Nice opinion parroted by every jackass that doesn't know any Japanese. There is literally nothing about Japanese that is any drier than English. At all. It's a completely false idea based on nothing but localizer cope. Japanese has such varied ways to say things that a character saying a simple three word sentence from offscreen is often enough to immediately clue the viewer in as to what character said it before it's shown. The Japanese language has dozens of speech patterns that reveal the speaker's personality and status, and plenty of synonyms with varying nuances to be used as appropriate. If you're translating something that was at least decently written in Japanese and your English translation sounds like everyone is talking the same, that's a you problem, not a problem with the Japanese language.
 
Last edited:
Yea Japanese has dozens of speech patterns. But they are overall far drier than what you see differentiating English. The differences are far more based in extremely vague and esoteric grammatical differences as opposed to English that is far less structured and more fluid. It isn’t anything inherently wrong with the language but acting like Japanese isn’t way more clinical than English is silly
 
One Winged Pear Farmer said:
Yea Japanese has dozens of speech patterns. But they are overall far drier than what you see differentiating English. The differences are far more based in extremely vague and esoteric grammatical differences as opposed to English that is far less structured and more fluid. It isn’t anything inherently wrong with the language but acting like Japanese isn’t way more clinical than English is silly
Click to expand...
What does any of that mean in practical terms? The differences in speech in Japanese are "vague" and "esoteric"? As in, they're unclear and only understood by a small group? Yeah, if you don't fucking know Japanese, then yeah anything related to the language is going to be unclear to you. I think it's safe to say native speakers find the grammatical differences to be obvious and known by everyone.

English is less "structured" and more "fluid"? Yeah, those adjective don't have any formal definition in relation to languages. Maybe in relation to how someone talks, but not in comparing different languages to each other. What makes a language more structured or fluid than another language? Are you suggesting that English has more ways to express the same idea than Japanese? I have my doubts on that. If you say something like "I'm going to go to the store." you could modify that by contracting or not contracting certain words, replace the verb "go" with something conveying the same basic idea like "head" to the store or "leave for" the store, or speak in more roundabout way that adds some extra information like "I plan to go to the store". In Japanese say we take 私はお店に行く as the starting point, we could change the first-person pronoun to half a dozen others that each signify something about the speaker, drop the first-person pronoun entirely if the speaker thinks it's obvious they're talking about themself, drop the は signifying the subject of the sentence, using が instead which signifies the actor of the sentence thereby putting emphasis on the action or who's doing it, possibly drop the honorific お before 店 (store) for extra informality, use に or へ depending on if you want emphasis the store as the place you're going or as the direction you're heading, use other verbs in place of 行く (go) like 向かう (head towards) or 出かける (leave for), you can add extra information like saying you're planning to go (つもり) or that you're planning to come back (行って来ます), or add various sentence endings that can add emphasis, politeness, or signify other things about the speaker in relation to the listener.

Was it autistic of me to write all that out? Yeah, but anyone can just make vague, generalized assertions about something. I'm giving some basic concrete examples to show that in the end, it seems like there's at least just as many ways to express this in Japanese as there is in English, so I don't see where English-speakers are more "free" with their speech.

And Japanese is more "clinical"? That means "in relation to medicine" or sometimes "done with precision and cool dispassion". So you're trying to get across, what, Japanese sounds unemotional and like professional talk at all times? Well that's just wrong based on the fact that Japanese has any sort of casual speech and slang, which is has plenty of.

There's nothing "dry" about Japanese that needs "punching up" in English. If you translated a bunch of Japanese dialogue into a bunch of super literal word-by-word sentences that all read the same because you completely ignored the variances that get across information about who's speaking, how, and why, then that's you're own fault, not the Japanese language. The same exact thing can easily happen going from English to Japanese as well, and often does in poor Eng-to-Jap translations.
 
GigantorUnitron said:
Do you have any funny or infuriating examples I can look at?
Click to expand...
Not really anything funny from something I've played, off the top of my head. I remember that Legends of Localization had a page on a few funny examples. Which reminds, there's a Japanese wiki page on all the mistranslations in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. In addition to them infamously turning "Remember, no Russian" into "Go kill all the Russians", there's some stuff like a character saying "What the hell?" in confusion to what you're doing getting turned into "What's wrong?" like they're worried about you, or someone calling a place "the Wild West" to mean it's a dangerous, lawless place getting turned into "this is Western" like the movie genre, or something screaming "Back up!" to mean retreat getting turned into screaming for back up as in reinforcements.

Also, I remember there's a Japanese wiki page for mistranslations in Skyrim. It's pretty long, but skimming through I see some things like a quest called a "A New Order" where "order" is supposed to be like a new power structure getting translated to order as in a command, "Unearthed" getting translated as "not dug up" cause I guess the translate misunderstood the word as meaning the opposite of what it does, or "Silenced Tongues" getting translated as "Thinly Sliced Tongues".

When it comes to stuff I've played, I did play the Japanese versions of all the Metroid Prime games. There's nothing funny in there, but they are really mediocre translations that can be hard to read. Like often the grammar and word choice was weird and too directly close to the original English lines to where I would need to mentally replace with words in the sentence with literal English equivalents to understand what it's saying. If I'm remembering right, I think there was one instance in the first game where the word "system" as in a computer setup was translated to system as in an organization. The third has many instances of characters wishing you good luck, and every time the subtitles would translate that as ご武運を祈る (literally: I pray for your luck in battle), which is a normal Japanese phrase but I've never seen it used in any where close the frequency as in that game, so it really stood out. I guess similar to frequent use of "It can't be helped" standing out to people in English.
 
Your example of how many changes you can make to that one Japanese snippet is exactly my point lol changes in English are far more streamlined and consistent than the eldritch abomination that is Japanese conjugation. It’s ok to be a retarded weeb, just don’t be such a faggot about it
 
One Winged Pear Farmer said:
Your example of how many changes you can make to that one Japanese snippet is exactly my point lol changes in English are far more streamlined and consistent than the eldritch abomination that is Japanese conjugation. It’s ok to be a retarded weeb, just don’t be such a faggot about it
Click to expand...
There's almost nothing about the English language that I would describe as streamlined and consistent. It's well known to the point of jokes that massive influence multiple other languages had on it led to all sorts of weird and inconsistent spellings, and tons of words having strange or inobvious verb forms or plural forms. Japanese conjugation is simple in comparison, there may be a bajillion verb forms but once you know them for a few verbs you automatically know them for all the others because they all act the same. There's 2 exceptions and 3 partial exceptions in the entire language.

And how does any of this tie into the original assertion that Japanese narrative writing automatically sounds dry and lifeless? There's plenty of languages with very different conjugation styles than English. Plenty of European languages do things like have different verb tenses for first, second, and third person, or even singular vs plural, and stuff like perfective vs imperfective. Are all those languages drier and more lifeless than English?
 
Spellings oddities are really the only major confusion in English mechanically, which is also due to the fact that English uses far more sounds than Japanese; which is also true for pretty much every European language. You can also say that most Japanese rules behave the same consistently but given both the sheer number of different rules you need to follow and how differently it interacts based on things like I vs na adjectives and different verb families it becomes an extremely needlessly complex endeavor. I like Japanese but it is anything but simple or efficient as languages go
 
One Winged Pear Farmer said:
Spellings oddities are really the only major confusion in English mechanically, which is also due to the fact that English uses far more sounds than Japanese; which is also true for pretty much every European language. You can also say that most Japanese rules behave the same consistently but given both the sheer number of different rules you need to follow and how differently it interacts based on things like I vs na adjectives and different verb families it becomes an extremely needlessly complex endeavor. I like Japanese but it is anything but simple or efficient as languages go
Click to expand...
Is i vs na adjective really a source of confusion? Na adjectives are literally just nouns that you can put な after to turn into an adjective. They work exactly like other nouns in any other grammatical context.

But anyway, none of this answers the original problem I have, which is how is Japanese narrative writing "drier", like inherently across the board supposedly, than English narrative writing?
 
Retarded Weeb said:
Is i vs na adjective really a source of confusion? Na adjectives are literally just nouns that you can put な after to turn into an adjective. They work exactly like other nouns in any other grammatical context.

But anyway, none of this answers the original problem I have, which is how is Japanese narrative writing "drier", like inherently across the board supposedly, than English narrative writing?
Click to expand...
It doesn’t help that most of their fiction is either lacking in complex character interactions or lean on the same dozen or so cultural cliches rooted in super old Confucian/shinto shit that no one outside of their culture would give a shit about
 
Berrakh said:
Vagrant Story didn’t exactly follow the Nipponese and it’s regarded as a triumph.
Click to expand...
Retarded Weeb said:
Alexander O. Smith is a pretentious faggot and I don't care for him. Shit like Vagrant Story is pure verbal masturbation. There's nothing interesting about reading a bunch drivel running in circles to convey basic information because it makes it sound le Shakespearean. If the original Japanese writer just wrote in everyday fucking Japanese, then you should be doing the same. Trying to "punch up" the script is just the translator jerking themselves off trying one-up the original writer so people will praise the translation instead of the person who actually wrote the fucking story.
Click to expand...
Nigger (the latter one of you), Yasumi Matsuno literally fucking told Smith to make the dialogue Shakespearean (or "Biblical") in the English translation, which is something you can't do in Japanese because nobody would understand a goddamn word of it anymore.
https://www.vg247.com/make-it-biblical-how-vagrant-story-changed-game-localization
 
Maniacal Foreigner said:
Nigger (the latter one of you), Yasumi Matsuno literally fucking told Smith to make the dialogue Shakespearean (or "Biblical") in the English translation, which is something you can't do in Japanese because nobody would understand a goddamn word of it anymore.
https://www.vg247.com/make-it-biblical-how-vagrant-story-changed-game-localization
Click to expand...
Read the context of what you yourself linked closer.
USG: At what point did the translation process start? Was it very deep into development by then?

Alex: It began in fits and starts. The very first thing we had to do (back when I was still understudy to Endo-san) was translate the opening scroll text. Our instructions were to make it sound "biblical." Endo-san translated it, I rewrote it, and then the project stopped for about half a year, during which I picked up Parasite Eve 2 from a translator who left the company. Development was still ongoing by the time I started translation in earnest, however. I remember going in to talk to Matsuno a few times about adding some English to the Japanese version of the game—mostly silly achievement-style titles, and there were team members still around (in those days, once a game got approved, most of the team would go on a well-deserved vacation) to help pick the English font and otherwise assist with the technical side of things.
Click to expand...
The instruction to "make it sound biblical" came from a brief work period where all he did was translate some opening text. Presumably, this text that appears at the start in English even in the Japanese version (with Japanese subtitles).
screen.webp
This text is written in a poetic style in the original Japanese, so the instructions to make it sound classical make perfect sense. And the English translation doesn't deviate at all in what it says. And on that front, it should be pointed out that Smith didn't even translate it directly, just rewrite it to make sure it sounded classical. The first pass translation was done by a Japanese staff member who likely had no reason to try deviating from the original meaning, he just wasn't confident he could make read in English the way it reads in Japanese.

And I should also note that Smith doesn't explicitly say Matsuno himself even gave those original instructions for the opening text. Reread it. He just says he and others were given instructions, with no specification as to who exactly from, and then mentions separately in the paragraph that he talked with Matsuno a few times about small bits of English text in the Japanese version and the font used. It sounds like you conflated the two sentences in your head so that Matsuno gave those first instructions. It could have been for all we know, but it also could not have been since Smith didn't say, so saying "Yasumi Matsuno literally fucking told Smith" as if it's some kind slamdunk against me is just you being hasty and presumptuous.

There's nothing in the interview that suggests Smith was given any specific instructions when it came to the rest of the game, which he translated himself under a different process several months later. And in contrast to that opening text which doesn't deviate in translation at all, look at these lines that Smith uses as an example of the embellishing he did.
A direct translation of these two lines would sound something like:

SOLDIER A
Is this "magic" stuff really that easy to use?
SOLDIER B
If you believe the studies of ancient legend, there were these "grimoires" that let anyone use it.


This is exposition, sure, but couched convincingly in dialogue that helps build the characters of the two soldiers, so classic Matsuno. Good stuff, doesn't need any fixing.
The direct translation is fine too, really, very clear and doesn't stray from the intent or characters as presented in the Japanese, as long as we're just looking at the text. But consider the setting, and we start wanting the text to do a little more to flesh out our world in English.

Here's the final text:

SOLDIER A
...Swine'll take wing ‘fore the likes of us use magick, my friend.
SOLDIER B
Aye, but with a grimoire, your fattest sow could outfly my swiftest falcon—if ye believe the chroniclers.
Click to expand...
The direct translation could probably be rewritten a little to read better, but the bottom final text is so fucking overwrought, and being done to some incidental NPC dialogue that doesn't need it.

tldr
All you did was make me even more sure of my original position, which is probably not what you intended.
 
Retarded Weeb said:
but the bottom final text is so fucking overwrought, and being done to some incidental NPC dialogue that doesn't need it.
Click to expand...
I'm speaking just for myself, but I unironically prefer it that way. The text being as poetic as it is and demanding as much from the reader as it does, in my opinion, forces the reader to pay more attention to what's being said. It's harder to accidentally tune out without realizing when parsing the script at a basic level is more effortful, and old thoughts being written in new words also makes them more novel and more compelling to the senses to engage with. That's also aside from the fact that adding more beauty to the script and imbuing the setting with a stronger sense of voice is its own victory, especially when sat next to a genre full of painfully sterile scripts devoid of personality that all sound exactly the same.

If you handed me those two scripts side by side and asked me which one I'd prefer to live with for the duration of a 100-hour game set in a fantasy world that you want me to be immersed in and take seriously, it's gonna be the latter.

I can understand why you disagree, though.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom