Localization is NOT Translation (and that's OK)

Comments · 34

• BU

  @bubbletea_ · 1 year ago (edited)

  “remember ash. even though people can raise pokemon, they can’t give birth to them.”<br>~brock (direct translation from “bye bye butterfree”)

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• KU

  @kurt9395 · 1 year ago (edited)

  My self, along with my wife, have done professional translations (i.e. for pay) of books from Japanese to English. (My wife does the initial Japanese to English and I clean up the English.) So here are my perspectives: The first thing is you have to do is approach it with some humility and respect for what the creator is trying to say. If you can&apos;t manage that, you shouldn&apos;t be doing this type of work<br><br>Sometimes you get an idiom or a metaphor that would immediately be understood in Japan, but be obscure or unintelligible to someone who is not Japanese. One example is the 70&apos;s anime &quot;Space Battleship Yamato&quot;, which was released in the US under the title &quot;Star Blazers&quot;. At the time this would&apos;ve been considered in the US as an under-12 kid&apos;s show, where in Japan, the target audience would&apos;ve been a wider age group. So the significance of the real battleship Yamato, which was the largest battleship ever built, would be understood by Japanese, but unknown for Americans, so I can give the producers a pass for changing the title. Another example is a joke they did in &quot;Samurai Champloo&quot;: In one scene, one of the characters says , &quot;I once came across this old dude who said &apos;Do you recognize this crest?&apos; and I said &apos;No&apos;, so I killed him.&quot; Now, if you had never seen the decades-long running TV show &quot;Mito Komon&quot; you would not have gotten the joke. But it&apos;s impossible to be Japanese and not know about &quot;Mito Komon&quot;. So they left it in as-is and if you get the joke, fine, and if you don&apos;t, no harm done. (I almost spit out my coffee). For those situations, you just try to come up with the best equivalent that you can think of. If you can&apos;t come up with anything, just leave it alone and count on your audience to be smart enough to figure it out.<br><br>The levels of formality in spoken Japanese are much more complicated than in English, but not completely absent. You have the way you talk to superiors, the way you talk with strangers of equal status, casual talk between friends, and the way you address inferiors although it&apos;s considered really rude and you only really see this in gangster movies. The name honorifics (-sama, -san, -kun, -chan, -dono, etc.) have no direct equivalents in English, but can be managed with things like &quot;Sir&quot;, &quot;Madam&quot;, &quot;Mister&quot;, &quot;Kid&quot;, etc. Performers will address the audience as &quot;Minna-sama&quot;, &quot;Minna&quot; meaning &quot;everybody&quot; and &quot;-sama&quot; indicating the superior status of the audience. I would translate something like this as the more or less standard &quot;Ladies and gentlemen&quot; and would convey close to what is meant in Japanese. Another example is in &quot;Yakuza 0&quot; when Majima says &quot;Okakyu-sama wa kami-sama desu kara&quot;. Literally, he&apos;s saying &quot;Because the customer is a god&quot;, but they translate it as &quot;The customer is king&quot;. Let&apos;s break this down: Customers (okakyu) are automatically considered as having superior status, hence the honorific -sama; the problem here is that &quot;kami&quot; which literally means &quot;god&quot;, but has a different connotation in polytheistic Japan and would be confused with the big-G God in the monotheistic West and would sound incredibly pretentious. So it&apos;s understandable that they rolled it back a little. Fortunately, we haven&apos;t had to deal with this to any extent in our jobs.<br><br>Now the example you show though goes far beyond that when the localizer replaced what that character said with &quot;cultural appropriation&quot;. First of all, there was nothing offensive or wrong with what the character said and actually makes him sound quite innocent. Second, The term &quot;cultural appropriation&quot; was unheard of ten or fifteen years ago and is a political term with negative connotations created by crypto-racist academics and regurgitated by people who came out of college more stupid than when they went in. Personally, I wish I could get a six-figure salary for working twenty hours a week (or less) spouting bullshit. This concept is completely alien in Japan which, ever since the Meiji Restoration, has taken the things they like from other cultures and altered it to make it their own. (By the way, did you know they had a professional baseball league in Japan (1857) years before National League in the US (1876)? And that baseball, the quintessential American game, was adapted from the English game rounders? So much for &quot;cultural appropriation&quot;.) So, in my opinion, whoever did this injected their own political jargon in a totally unnecessary way.<br><br>I spent a lot more time on this that I should have, but I hope it gives the perspective of someone who actually got paid for doing this type of work.

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• MI

  @Miju001 · 1 year ago

  I&apos;m going to copy-paste some bits I wrote in a comment below another video:<br><br>&gt;I love localization. Trying to solve the question of &quot;how do I communicate this same thing with this completely different set of language rules&quot; is so engaging to me, and it&apos;s so satisfying when it&apos;s actually done well.<br><br><br>&gt;I think a great &quot;localization compilation&quot;, so to say, is &quot;Legends of Localization: Undertale&quot;. I have only read that one Legends of Localization book, but it&apos;s a pretty unique one, because not only is it about an English-to-Japanese localization rather than the other way around, but also the localization was also very much done with the collaboration of Toby Fox! That makes the book more specific in its report, and it also means it showcases exactly what Toby Fox wanted to get across in his work, and how he worked to preserve that in the localization beyond the literal meaning of the text.<br><br>Thank you so much for this video! It&apos;s always a joy to see some talk highlighting the different moving parts of localization.

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• GA

  @GambeTama · 1 year ago

  Hats off to the guy in charge of Chrono Cross&apos;s localization, who apparently made a program that would adjust the translated line to have a different accent based on which character was saying it. As in, if the tough guy said it, it would include more contractions or slurred speech, and when the clown speaks it comes out sounding like a bad french impression. Im guessing this was used to cover up for limited dialogue having to be spoken by a massive variety of characters, and making it still sound immersive.

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• LI

  @liwendiamond9223 · 1 year ago

  I for one prefer translation over localization, since I am interested in exploring the Japanese culture itself. A direct translation gives me the best possible window into that culture short of learning the language proper and playing the games, watching anime, reading manga, et cetera, in their original Japanese. But I understand I am not everybody, and that some people might want another kind of adaptation. It seems to break down so :<br><br>Most avid Japanophiles : Will actually learn the language and consume Japanese media in its original form.<br>Japanese enthusiasts : Curious about the foreign culture, prefer direct translations that preserve cultural aspects.<br>Just your everyday Joe : Wants to play a good game no matter where it came from and doesn&apos;t want obscure cultural references to impede their experience.<br>Woke Lunatics : Want to inject their fetid agenda into everything under the sun, doesn&apos;t give a damn about authenticity or delivering a good product to the audience. Ruin everything they touch.<br><br>The first group is pretty darn small and rare. Very few will actually bother to learn Japanese since its so daunting (you have to learn 3 different alphabets just to get started, and one of them is humongous) These people however, are happy just to consume products in their original form. You don&apos;t need to help them, they&apos;ve done all the work themselves.<br><br>The second and third group are were most people are split in the two camps of &quot;Give me a direct translation and don&apos;t change anything else&quot; and &quot;Give me something that&apos;s not hard to understand, with references that are already intuitive for somebody raised in the West.&quot; Both are legitimate approaches, and I will concede the localizer approach did historically cater to the largest demographic, although localizers have been known to go too far in the past. 4kids adaptions for example, were hilariously exaggerated. They were so bad in fact I think they are responsible for the bulk of my generation&apos;s animosity towards the concept of localization. A good localization should be subtle so you barely notice it. Giving squirt guns to One Piece Marines, skipping entire arcs, censoring blood, the jelly donuts of Pokemon that don&apos;t like anything like any donuts I&apos;ve ever seen... Just call them rice balls and let the American kids wonder what those are and what they&apos;d taste like! What&apos;s the harm in that?<br><br>The last group I don&apos;t even want to discuss. But I must. Where 4kids aimed at removing friction and adapting the works to a much much younger than originally intended audience, which wasn&apos;t a inherently vile and wrongheaded idea, just a badly executed one, what the woke activists are doing is straight up evil. Hijacking someone else&apos;s hard work as a platform to push your ideology down the throats of unsuspecting fans is wrong no matter what it is you&apos;re peddling, but it doesn&apos;t help that Wokeism is a form of radical hatred of normalcy that calls evil good and good evil, promotes self harm and delusion, and can be best described as soul cancer upon the Western world. Spiritual Death, driven by envy, entitlement, despair, and a hopeless desire to remold reality itself into an amoral and illogical paradise that is not only impossible since we are not gods, but would amount to Hell on Earth if any approximation of it were ever achieved. I&apos;ll grant the Everyday Joe his right to have an easy to pick up localization of a Japanese game any day he wants it, but the maddening taint that is Wokeism must be scoured at all costs. Get these losers away from the media we consume, whether it be foreign or domestic.

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• NO

  @NovaKaiser21 · 1 year ago

  Great video, very topical. <br><br>When you started talking about Neku from TWEWY, I was reminded of another character: Yukari Takeba from Persona 3. In the ENG version of P3/FES, she came across as very snappy and abrasive. There are a lot of people who argue that the ENG version of Yukari is a mischaracterization as a result of a bad localization, that she was never intended to come across as rude. I never bought this argument because what is considered “rude”differs between different cultures. I think it is a similar situation to Neku, where her attitude was exaggerated to get the point across to an english speaking audience.<br><br>The sass and abrasiveness was very important for Yukari’s character. The way she was portrayed in Reload, where she comes off as “nicer,” may be more accurate to the literal Japanese, but I think it makes her a less interesting character.

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• BI

  @BigKlingy · 1 year ago

  The &quot;deku&quot; thing reminds me of the Pokemon anime, which got hit with this... in a far more extreme way. Kinda similarly to MHA, Dawn (Hikari)&apos;s childhood friend used to tease her with a nickname, in Japanese &quot;Pikari&quot;. The localizers saw this moment and thought &quot;okay it&apos;s just a cute alternation of her name, so in our version it&apos;ll be &apos;Dee Dee&apos;.&quot; <br><br>Then, over 50 episodes later I think, there was a flashback that explains Pikari had an origin story, she got called that when a Plusle and Minun zapped her as a kid, &quot;Pikari&quot; coming from &quot;pikapika&quot; (lightning sparkling) + &quot;Hikari&quot;. The localizers now had to make their version of the nickname fit an origin story they had no idea would exist when they came up with it. They settled on DeeDee actually being the letter D twice and short for &quot;diamond dandruff&quot; which... is awkward, but I commend them for finding something that at least kinda worked.

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• LO

  @Lokai777 · 4 months ago (edited)

  Another thing I want mention is this.<br><br>A common and hilarious defense for awful translations is &quot;what do want, a literal translation? You know localization is hard right?&quot;<br>Yes strawman I know a literal translation wouldn&apos;t work. I&apos;m not asking for a 1:1 literal translation. I&apos;m asking for as accurate translations.<br>Obviously yes you will have to change things because Japanese and English are completely different languages and i understand that. I want them to be as faithful as they can be, while also making the translation/localization (whatever they wanna call it) comprehensible to English speakers.<br>That&apos;s what their job is right?<br>There are many good translations/localizations that do that. I don&apos;t see why it&apos;s so hard for other things to get this treatment.

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• HO

  @Hooblashooga · 1 year ago

  I agree with pretty much everything you said in this video, but I do think it&apos;s important to discuss the bad actors in the industry. While there&apos;s less of them than the ones doing good work, there are people out there who think that localization gives them the right to change a work in their own vision, or remove parts that they personally don&apos;t agree with, even if it goes completely against the original author&apos;s intent. These are the aspects of localization that personally ruffle my feathers.

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• LO

  @Lokai777 · 4 months ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70cMmCaXdr8&amp;t=807">13:27</a><br>Nobody talks like this.<br>This is just twitter speak. The problem I have with localizers is that they intentionally mistranslate and censor things just to piss people off. Using memes, buzzwords, and getting on their soapbox making the characters talk in ways that nobody actually does in English speaking countries.<br>It&apos;s also very disrespectful to the original creators. How would you feel if you made a piece of art and it was used this way in other countries giving people the complete wrong impression of your story/world and characters.<br>I&apos;d be pretty mad.

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• KR

  @krayasou4630 · 1 year ago

  I was with you for a lot of this video. I agree that translation and localization have different goals. That complaining about localization is not the correct course and one should instead ask for more translation. But the example at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70cMmCaXdr8&amp;t=804">13:24</a> is ridiculous. Do people actually talk like that? I have to ask as I have never encountered someone that does so. Not once have heard the term &quot;culture appropriation&quot; uttered without a huge amount of irony or in a context where it made no sense. <br>One thing I also disagree with, though that is just personal opinion, is that the machine translation sound off. Perhaps that is because I&apos;m ESL but those example read mostly fine for me.<br>I personally just wish that more games gave the option to get a straight forward translation. I don&apos;t mind having to look up the meaning of words/phrases, I have to do that in englisch media sometimes as well. I don&apos;t mind reading translator notes. I know that not everyone agrees with that. Some people just want to experience a story with as few roadblocks as possible. I get where they are coming from and I don&apos;t think localization that tries to remove culture roadblocks should be abandoned fully. I just wish for more choice in this matter. And for people to use the correct terms to better distinguish the two.<br><br>Good video. Kinda weird that I stumbled on to your channel with one of your least viewed videos but I&apos;ll check out your other videos as well.

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• CR

  @criticalplat1num80 · 1 year ago

  The Pokémon anime’s “jelly donuts” thing will always be hilarious

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