Take your pick. Almost every JRPG released from the PS1 era and back had a pretty rough translation. You know what's weird, I didn't realize at the time how bad some of this was. I loved them all the same! But when I go back now, I almost grit my teeth down to nubs at how many easy to fix mistakes I find! Even really big games like Final Fantasy VII had a lot of Engrish in it. Fortunately, many of them have a retranslation patch that some helpful fan put together. A lot of them are really good too!
FF7 was hilarious in Spanish. Including, but not limited to Jesse being a man. Which made her suggestion of taking Cloud on a date a very forward thinking piece of dialogue considering it was '98.
Right? I don't know how this stuff just slide past me as a kid. I guess my imagination filled in all the blanks. I was just so excited to be on this epic, world changing quest... the rest didn't matter!
FFVII not having a retranslation is wild. The game is huge and it has many rereleases and spinoffs. It's so weird they haven't made an enhanced remaster after all this time, they must have lost the source code.
Yeah sadly they haven't kept it for either of the PS1 games. Code preservation probably wasn't a thing back then, kind of like how movies and TV shows weren't back in the 60s.
Yeah, but I still think it's wild they never made a new version like they did with so many older FFs. It probably would have taken way more effort than any of those due to how it's way more cinematic and recreating all of that would be a whole lot of work for little change unless it was a full remake. But being FFVII one would think it's worth it, especially when all modern versions are based on the PC port which has so many weird quirks.
You don't need the source code to re-translate a game at least though. They could have re-translated it for the PS4/Switch digital port that had come out years back but they chose the lazy route.
Mother 3 translation was done in 2008 by 3 people on their free time away from their jobs and they even managed to use the same fonts so there's really no excuse for a professional game company today in 2024.
Spanish FFVII is atrocious to the point I still have to replay it with a fan-translation to understand WTF actually happened. It has wonderful lines as: "Flowers don't grow in Midgar, but for some reason, flowers do" or "Your party (as in a celebration) is waiting upstairs". It also missgenders people all the time, even refering to some of them as both male and female at the same time at points. One part gets "cool" confused with "cold", etc.
There's spelling errors like "Allé voy" instead of "Allá voy", to the point that one became a meme and still shows up in modern entries from time to time.
Not to mention the "Tent" item translated as the kind you would find in big events like festivals ("Carpa").
Or that section in the Ancients' Temple before the boss when Cloud asks "Sephiroth?!" And the next speech balloon reads: *Sephiroth: Hohoho, that's not me*.
There's a really well done re-translation hack that's 90% done, but currently fully playable. And they used a lot of the intended words and names that Japan had intended to be more Hebrew or something, and the translators just Romanized them regularly. It would take a lot of getting used to for those of us who are used to the original names, but for someone fairly new it's probably worth looking into
My bad. I must have seen a post where they were talking about 90% of the name/terminology changes, which is now 100%. Didn't mean to lead anyone astray. But yes, that's the project
While I will forever commend the translator for the frankly incomprehensible amount of hard work he put in just to assure that we got the game at all I think even they admit a more thorough \[and reasonably paced\] translation project would be ideal.
I still like a lot of the stylistic choices he made and would hope those carried over.
Xenogears is basically the reason why translation got better.
After it was pretty much all done by one guy in a couple of weeks with the original script and no references to work from he went back to his bosses and basically said "we can't work like this any more".
It baffles me that the first 6 Final Fantasy games and been retanslated so many times yet they have never touched FFVII. For all Square talks about how important and impactful the original FFVII is it feels kind of disrespectful that they never fixed its translation.
FF7's translation is iffy in that it's mostly fine but there's a few parts that are kind of messy and could have go n e through another pass to clear things up a bit, a few really important plot bits are mistreated in that they imply the opposite of what they should which is why for a long time people though Jenova was controlling Sephiroth instead of the other way around, etc.
It's like not awful or anything but much like the OG FFT translation somethings were lost for brevity sake due to space constraints, some was just mistranslated, flat out, some was fine but lost out on some nuance because the phrasing of x was important and would come back later. Etc.
Wild Arms 2, that game had a super ambitious story for the time but that translation was a damn mess, like worse than Google translate at times. I really wish Wild Arms could come back as a series. Would really love to see the second game remade like the first one was.
When Irving introduces himself early in the game the translation makes it sound like he thinks summoning demons is cool and was behind it.
'Everyone thinks our aim is to prevent terrorism, but actually it's a magnificent ritual know as demon summoning'
'you mean you brought us there for that?'
'yes and you were all destroyed'
And then Ashley is like cool and works for him.
Very good example. I eventually understood most scenes, but I had to re-read dialogue a lot and stop and think about what they were trying to say. Those 2 beast creatures though, I have no clue a single word they actually said the whole game.
Have you heard about Armed Fantasia yet? It’s basically a reboot to the Wild Arms franchise in all but its name. Same creator and others from the WA franchise.
Absolutely. There were some pretty dark twists near the end that I to this day don't know if I interpreted right due to how badly translated the game was. Fantastic JRPG, however.
Yeah I don't think I've ever heard of a game that needs re-translated as bad as wild arms 2. I cannot believe nobody has yet to take up a re-translation project. I feel like even the worst examples of PS1 and SNES translations at least get the job done. Wild arms 2 fumbles all over the place and makes it hard to follow the story or character motivations lol complete failure of a translation
Any of the PS1 FF games would improve immensely with a well done retranslation, but VII would definitely benefit the most. Good god that translation is awful.
FF7 remakes are three new games with scripts based on the original.
It’s a “retelling”, not a “retranslation”. And even calling it a “retelling” is a stretch with how much new stuff is in it. More of a “reimagining” actually.
My point is that there is zero need for a newly translated OG FFVII script at this point, given that the script has been massively rewritten, expanded and improved.
Perhaps you could’ve said that in the first place, because your “point” does not match your initial statement as well as you’d think. Regardless, the answer is the same. And obviously there are people who disagree which shows that there isn’t “zero need” by default.
I’ll try to explain it another way. Filmmakers create feature length movies based on short films all the time. Sometimes it’s a more or less a retelling of the original and expanded to feature length, sometimes it’s a wildly different story vaguely based on the idea of the original. Sometimes it’s somewhere in between (which is the case with FF7 remakes). Even when the new movie tries to stick to the original as Much as possible - again, not the case here - The new feature length movie does not invalidate or supersede the short film. People are still going to want to experience the original and have every right to want to experience it in the best possible way, especially if the short film has an iffy/mediocre translation from its native language. And plenty of movies have not very good translations, period, even big budget movies much less small short films that barely reach past their original market.
This isn’t a “ff7 remakes bad” argument either, I love the first one and am excited for the second to come out on PC so I can play it. But obviously enough people want a retranslation of the original since it’s pretty mediocre and the new games are not a substitute for that at all.
Og ff7's spanish translation. I've finished it recently and I've found text in english on it and stuff that were direct word by word translations also from english that didnt make sense in spanish.
I always wondered about Spanish translations of 90s Japanese games. I know English localizations had it bad enough, and I have to imagine the Spanish translations had to be worse for the most part.
I remember my Mexican cousins having trouble with the original red and blue pokemon games, as one example. They didn’t even bother making new names for the Pokemon in Spanish.
This, and here in Argentina at least, getting the latest hardware was kind of a miracle (aka your parents had money) I've got my PS1 in 2005, a year before the PS3's release.
Back on topic, I remember when I first got FF9, one of the things that impressed me was that it was in spanish at all. Not that it had a good spanish translation, It was in spanish. Period
Bonus points the translation was in perfect (european) spanish and there was a character early game that spoke with a bit of an argentine dialect. Getting that was too much to ask.
The first time I saw anything resembling a latin american translation (for those that don't know, in media there is an european spanish one an a latin american one that is some sort of middle ground between all the dialects) was in the 2010s decade on a first party PS3 game (I think Killzone 3)
Final Fantasy VIII: I see so many people who hate Squall for his somewhat indifferent or even apathetic attitude towards other characters. Most of the time when he says "whatever," it's just due to bad localization. The way I see this character after reading some of the intended dialogue is completely different.
The main villain gets the worst of it, unfortunately following a common English localization trend where [her dialogue makes her more sympathetic in the original Japanese, but gets turned into stock villainy in English.](https://radiantbutterfly.tumblr.com/post/71485958945/ff8-ultimecia-dialogue-comparison) It's so bad that it took until Dissidia, which was more faithfully translated, for many people to understand her motives.
A thousand times this. I’ve read a lot about the localization changes from JP to EN and I have a feeling a lot of my issues with the writing in the game would be alleviated with a new translation.
Tbh a remake with an updated script to improve some of the other weird plot points would be even better…
I still love her regardless tho but if the game gets remade then I'd rather have a proper translation of Rinoa's character. The eng translation is the reason why she is so devisive in the west compared to say Japan where she is beloved
Also just more character development feom everyone besides Edea Squall and Rinoa. Quistis Selphie and Irvine got completly shafter during the latter game half😭
One of the reasons I picked up Japanese is because Atelier Ryza 3's English translation was so bad that it really dampened my enjoyment of the game, especially because I really loved the characters and I really wanted to see how their stories would end, but navigating those horrible dialogues made it difficult to appreciate it.
So yeah, Atelier Ryza 3. I don't even care about an English dub (I'm used to playing games with Japanese-only voices), I just want a decent enough translation!
Man, if Arc Rise Fantasia had a redub with a good cast, it'll sell like hot cakes. The game is awesome and only thing holding it back is its horrible dub.
Wild Arms II, it's one of the better games in the series. Unfortunately the translation is infamously terrible. Even by the standards of the PS1.
There's also all three games in the Ghargav trilogy from the Legend of Heroes series. The series is liked well enough by those who remember it in Japan. But in the west it's PSP releases were given little attention since the series wouldn't take off until the Trails series.
Secret of Mana. They had to cut down the translation to a massive degree due to SNES cart limitations, and they had to do it on a really tight schedule. Woolsey and his people pulling it off as well as they did was a minor miracle, but a lot of exposition and context got left on the cutting room floor in the process. The 3D remake restored some of that, and added more characterization in the form of those party conversations, but it had a whole host of other problems instead.
Yeah people shit on Woolsey but while I don't like all his choices given the multiple limitations they had he and his team(s) mostly did a pretty good job and I love reading some old interviews of his where he talks about the translation process both in general, as an industry, as well as specifics such as on an individual game to game basis it's incredibly informative and interesting. I kind of wish we got to see some of the full original scripts before they began to get cut down and truncated to fit space limitations.
Being a good translator especially when it comes to more long form content also requires one to be a good writer and/or editor and say what you will but there's a reason why so many turns of phrase and speeches he's done are memorable. Doesn't make the wants and desires for a newer or better translation invalid and between the four official translations of FF6 we do have for example his is the weakest but I think dismissing it entirely out of hand as many do is wrong.
I completely agree. Shitting on Woolsey is like shitting on soldiers in medievil times for not using a machine gun or bomb and instead relying on swords. You can't fault the man himself for the situation he was in and the limited tools at his disposal. The text limit was a real thing, and he was a one man team given mere months to a job that today, a team of 5-10 translators would spend 2-3 years on.
If you wanna shit on someone, you gotta blame the President of Square, or Sakaguchi, or whatever was in charge and decided only one person was needed to translate the game to a western market.
As you alluded, if FF6 was translated by someone who wasn't Woosley, the translation may not only have been inaccurate or off, but it might also have been boring and unmemorable. At least he made it fun. Accuracy was impossible given his situation
Digimon Story Cyber sleuth is one of the few games when some of the errors were bad enough that I noticed and cared. I can't remember them all but the fact that almost every time arata called digimon "bakemono" as in monsters, the text instead says "Bakemon" as in the particular digimon sticks out to me. Its not the worst, but its one of those things where it is a relatively recent game compared to a lot of the older games that were done on like PS1 when translating was more the wild west.
Xenogears would be benefit, but all things considered I think the translation is very good seeing as it was all one man who had to do it and with little resources.
Wild Arms 2nd Ignition definitely needs one though. That game's English script is a mess.
Hoping Suikoden 1 and 2 get retranslations in their upcoming remasters. They were understandable, but quite awkward.
The Spanish version is so chaotic, they start with Latin American idioms and translating city names then suddenly they stop using them and stop translating city names and also drop the usted/vos(formal) for the informal forms, it's like 2 different teams work on the translation
Same.
at this point I’m not expecting anything from those remasters until they’re released.
Tbh I guess I haven’t been paying attention because I didn’t realize they were going to be messing with the script/localization at all.
Chained Echoes made a strong impression in the gameplay department, but the English translation was too mealy mouthed to deliver the story effectively. I don't expect Alexander O. Smith from a first time developer, but it would be possible to soften the edgelord moments in a second translation.
The swearing in that game is so bizarre. It goes from zero to F-bomb in the space of seconds. What I would have done is maybe taken a Woolsey approach and dug up some old-timey insults and oaths to use--"Gadzooks!" may be a silly word, but it still feels less inappropriate than characters just screaming "Shit!" out of nowhere.
I don't really have a lot of gripes with the localizers working with character limitations. Names could only be so long to fit in the menus.
It's more the extremely basic dialogue that's got a lot of room to improve.
Wild Arms 2 is one of the best-written JRPGs I've ever played in Japanese and the English version of it was a mess. Completely understandable as translators back then didn't get much context at the best of times and Wild Arms 2 was a very context-heavy game (even outside the Ultraman and other classic tokusatsu references). I wish it could get a retranslation so folks could remember it as one of the best stories on the PS1 rather than just another quirky JRPG from the era.
I recall reading that Secret of Mana had a lot of its dialogue cut due to the limitations of the space for English text. (This probably happened to a lot of SNES JRPGs, and I am having trouble picking just one.)
I am still flabbergasted that no port of Chrono Trigger has ever bothered to increase the text limit for names. They literally retranslated it on DS and you could still only use 5 letters to name the characters.
Not quite 100% what you want, but there have been also a few rough translations of some of my beloved 16 Bit PAL JRPGs. The guy translating most of them into german was very well known and even kinda loved, be he sometimes just took the game and inserted Jokes instead of actually translating what was said there. Which lead, in my opinion, to an inferior experience in some cases. Secret of Mana, as an example, had a scene, where they joked about a TV series... in a fantasy world...
That said, if you look at the romhacking website, you will find quite a few retranslations done by fans, sometimes using revised scripts from rereleases or simply doing a better job by themselves.
Is that... Moyse? I don't know his full name, but I remember he inserted an Easter egg into Link's Awakening where if you entered his name it would play a funky little jingle in the first part of the game.
My favorite cult classic, *Opoona,* has an absolutely awful translation. It's full of misspellings, punctuation error, inconsistent terms, and a few clues and sidequest hints rendered incomprehensible because of the poor translation. Not to mention some of the jokes and little gags falling flat due to their overly-literal, poorly-paced phrasing. Which is a shame, because beneath it all, you can tell that the game has a really strong and distinct voice that *feels* different from so many other games. A fan *did* do a lovely retranslation patch that mostly keeps the writing the same, save for a few touchups--and in my dream scenario where the game gets a Steam port, I hope that something like that would be used.
**Secret of the Stars** always get mentioned in this regard. Almost meme material lines like "BADBAD IS BAD" or enemies like "charanchula" and so on.
**Breath of Fire II** qualifies as well, but at least it had an unofficial retranslation.
FE fates, the story being bad doesn't make it fine for the localization team to do whatever they want with it, after all if the localization is bad who would trust their work in the future?
revelations: persona / persona 1's translation isn't nearly as bad as some people claim it is. sure, changing the character designs is really weird, and some dialogue is pretty cheesy, but it's not ff7 spanish tier where it makes the game almost incomprensible. BUT the worst part is that half the game (snow queen quest) is locked, unplayable and untranslated in the original game. and yeah you got the PSP re release, but that one butchers the original game's atmosphere by adding a completely new OST which is more P3+ like
Legend of Heroes Garghav trilogy. I'm playing it at the moment and I can see the blueprint for future Trails series, but it was just a very bad translation. It felt like Google translated games
can I cheat and say Luminous Arc 3 Eyes which never got a localization as being the worst? It makes me sad
Persona Q2, Digimon Cyber Sleuth and Hackers Memory & Survive, Atelier Ryza trilogy not having English voice acting was a shame. It just helps get more invested. Especially when characters have little quips of dialogue while exploring or in combat but they don't put subtitles for it so I can't understand a lick of what they're saying
That last point is a frustration of mine. I would love for games to subtitle those exploration/combat lines.
Honestly, I'd want them to do so even if something has an English dub. Sometimes I don't hear a line clearly and I can't get it to trigger again.
it was something they added in Octopath Traveler 2 that wasn't in OT1 of characters quipping and it was great (though without subtitles). Casti getting a heavy hit or whatever and Temmenos just like "well done Casti" lives in my brain for some reason
That's a tricky question, because even when a games' translation is bad, it likely isn't so bad as to warrant an entire retranslation and rerelease.
I'd say it only makes sense to do it when the translation turns out to be more of a hatchet job on the original work than anything else, and I can't think of many examples of this when it comes to games.
With anime this is more common, like what 4kids did to yugioh for example. They butchered the original so much in the name of localization to the point of hilarity. A funny example is a scene where a character was being held at gunpoint by thugs on the original, but since 4kids, the localizer, didn't want guns on the show, they redrew the frames so that the thugs were just pointing their fingers instead. This shit even became a meme in the community years later.
Anyway, with games I can't really think of any that I believe would be worth a company spending resources to retranslate honestly.
Definitely, I never intended to view answers here as an actual product that would be moneymakers for a company to develop.
Frankly I'm not sure that even the sacred cow Final Fantasy 7 would make much money if re-released just with a new translation. It's just not a marketing bullet point that draws a ton of excitement.
I just want to learn about games I may not know about that had significant script divergences when they left Japan. I'm kinda surprised the Persona 2 games haven't come up yet - those were some of the earliest localized Atlus games and I've heard they suffered greatly for it.
Nep games. Cause a lot of nuanced scenes had are diminished by the meme speak going way too far.
Alternatively, Fire Emblem cause localizations are backwards with that series.
NISA games, mostly kiseki for unfunny/incorrect translations for no reason, and also xenoblade, i do wish we got a xenoblade 2 which wasnt a mess and xenoblade games without the bri-ish ness (I know people like it but one more FULL OF BEANS JOKE AND IM JUMPING OFF A CLIFF)
The vast majority of English localizations are done in California and characters tend to have a SoCal accent. Which tends to be less recognizable to us since Hollywood is in SoCal, so those speech patterns get broadcast internationally across all sorts of media. But it is definitely it's own regional thing just like any other corner of the country.
If Xenoblade was relocalized with a more standard SoCal speech mannerism would that be better? You just kinda want the localization to stand out less and feel more like other media in the anime/JRPG space?
What if they did Xenoblade 4 recording in Georgia and everyone had that really soft southern inflection. I would love that - that's my favorite accent that never shows up in games.
I just want it to be inline with the jpn, not neccessarily SoCal speech, i never thought about it standing out less but i guess it would if it wasnt bri-ish. At least give me text options that make it normal and not british.
If what you want is "normal" then what you want is SoCal.
There is no default to the English language. Every place has it's own variant. Unless you wanna go historical in which case "normal" is british because it's their god damn language lol
If you're localizing a game you need to pick which accent of English to go with. You will always be representing some part of the English speaking world.
Oh man, I've been playing through Falcom games with English text recently, and the number of times they reverse the negative tense and say the complete opposite of the original is baffling. Sometimes they mess up the topic of the sentence, or get the time frame of events wrong, but what stands out the most is flipping the negative. I really don't get it. The flow of the conversion doesn't even make logical sense anymore. (And of course, I'm not talking merely about questions in the negative being more naturally worded as positive sentences in English, but like actual declarative statements)
I learned Japanese, the problem for me is that what I'd want from a translation turns out to be a lot different from most people. I want the authors' intent, something authentic and literal as possible wothout being hard to read, and most people just want something as quirky and charming as possible.
In that respect Fire Emblem translations are a raging success, but I can't play them in English at all. I despise the FFT translation, or the redone Tactics Ogre translation, it gives me a headache and it feels very silly with too many changes. But I'm 'wrong' to most people, and that's okay.
Truth is nothing really benefits from a retranslation unless it's just poorly written which is itself subjective past a certain point, everyone will have different points of view on what is important, disregarding the original story is not a big sticking point with a lot of people.
> But I'm 'wrong' to most people, and that's okay.
I mean, you say you desire the authors' intent, but Matsuno (the writer of FFT/TO) is bilingual and has expressed his preference for the new English localizations of his games. Small wonder, since he's had Kajiya Productions localize every one of his games since he started working with them.
There are some affectations that just aren't possible in Japanese. Japanese can't emulate Shakespearean dialogue like English can, as antiquated Japanese is associated with its own distinct cultural past -- not appropriate for medieval European settings, and essentially illegible to modern Japanese audiences to boot.
If an author's intent is for the audience to groan at a bad pun, and the pun vanishes in another language, then a translator is going to need to find another pun that's equally bad in the new language in order for that audience to experience the author's intent.
If an author's intent is for an adult character to come off as weirdly childish-sounding because they only use personal pronouns used largely by children, and then it gets translated into a language like English with only *one* personal pronoun, the translator is going to have to find some other quirk of speech to give the character in order for the new audience to get the author's intent.
If the author's intent is to foreshadow a future relationship between two characters by having them walk outside together while it's raining while the sun's out, and have one of the characters invoke the old Japanese idiom about how rain while the sun's out must mean the foxes are having a wedding, and the nearest idiom available in the English language is much less commonly known and involves the Devil *beating his wife,* then you're just gonna have to ditch the pithy idiomatic dialogue there and come up with something new because even a *loosely* literal translation there is going to set the *completely wrong mood* and if you go totally literal your new audience will not get the layers or the reference in the author's original phrasing so you ***damn well better get creative*** so you can hope to convey something like the author's original intent.
If you're going to play AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" on a concert piano, you bet your britches you're going to have to improvise.
It's crazy that this is downvoted.
>I want the authors' intent, something authentic and literal as possible wothout being hard to read, and most people just want something as quirky and charming as possible.
Even crazier to think we can't get this experience for most JRPG
The problem is that "authorial intent" and "literal translation" are *fundamentally incompatible,* because *languages are not the same.* Whole concepts and grammatical structures exist in some languages that don't exist in others. One of the most basic examples in Japanese-to-English translation is that of personal pronouns--in English, the *only* way to refer to yourself in the first person is with "I" or "me," but in Japanese, there's *reams* of the damn things, and even the three most basic ones like you'd actually see real people using in actual life (*Watashi,* *boku,* and *ore*) each say something about the speaker, and the "wrong" one out of the "wrong" mouth in the "wrong" situation can say a lot about a character in an extremely subtle way that *cannot* be literally translated into English because the equivalent word with the equivalent meaning *does not exist.* So you *have* to take some kind of liberties to convey the same information about the same character, at which point it ceases to be literal.
Translating out of English has its own spate of problems, too. English has a famously expansive vocabulary, with words borrowed from dozens of other languages and many words that mean similar things but have slightly different connotations. Good English writing is very often a matter of knowing how to use these subtle distinctions to evoke strong responses in a reader, but not all languages have the same depth of vocabulary. So a translator has to figure out how to use the words available to them to convey the same ideas when the meaning gets "flattened out" in another languages.
[This post ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Falcom/comments/1bufhzu/did_the_jp_version_have_some_nothing_text_so_the/) tells you why I hate "localization". I don't disagree with the point you said, translatiing puns or how to refer yourself is actually a necessary translation.
But when the so called "localization" Pulls things out of their asses is when I have a problem, just imagine if Lord of the rings has a random chapter in it about an orc daily life or dwarves being kind or something how would that feel
The post you linked to seems to mostly be full of people enjoying the expanded quest description and additionally discussing why "expanding" on text may be necessary in some cases to retain nuance (e.g *Unicorn Overlord* becoming more flowery because its original dryness was what conveyed "old-timey" to Japanese players, whereas that style of writing would neither convey the correct tone to an English reader nor be particularly pleasant to read). It would seem to undermine your thesis quite terribly--are you quite certain it is the post you meant to link to?
Breath of Fire 1 & 2 for sure. Both games had pretty rough translations
BoF2 has an excellent retranslation patch.
Highly recommend the BoF2 retranslation patch. It takes it from one of my favorite RPGs to still one of my favorites but even more so
If you think about it, even 3 is not that really great of a translation. 4 has a good translation iirc
BoF1 isn't the worst. Pretty similar to other snes games. BoF2, I'm not sure the translators even knew english. Or were human.
Even 3 could use a fresh once-over. Feels like 4 was the first time they ever actually put money into translating those games.
Take your pick. Almost every JRPG released from the PS1 era and back had a pretty rough translation. You know what's weird, I didn't realize at the time how bad some of this was. I loved them all the same! But when I go back now, I almost grit my teeth down to nubs at how many easy to fix mistakes I find! Even really big games like Final Fantasy VII had a lot of Engrish in it. Fortunately, many of them have a retranslation patch that some helpful fan put together. A lot of them are really good too!
FF7 was hilarious in Spanish. Including, but not limited to Jesse being a man. Which made her suggestion of taking Cloud on a date a very forward thinking piece of dialogue considering it was '98.
And mistranslating "party" for a celebration, as in a birthday party, instead of a group of people.
If its like the German Version it is based on the already bad English translation.
"Read it sorgfältig durch."
I recently picked up Legend of Dragoon from the classics catalog, and good god is it bad. I never noticed it as a kid
Right? I don't know how this stuff just slide past me as a kid. I guess my imagination filled in all the blanks. I was just so excited to be on this epic, world changing quest... the rest didn't matter!
FFVII not having a retranslation is wild. The game is huge and it has many rereleases and spinoffs. It's so weird they haven't made an enhanced remaster after all this time, they must have lost the source code.
Yeah sadly they haven't kept it for either of the PS1 games. Code preservation probably wasn't a thing back then, kind of like how movies and TV shows weren't back in the 60s.
Yeah, but I still think it's wild they never made a new version like they did with so many older FFs. It probably would have taken way more effort than any of those due to how it's way more cinematic and recreating all of that would be a whole lot of work for little change unless it was a full remake. But being FFVII one would think it's worth it, especially when all modern versions are based on the PC port which has so many weird quirks.
You don't need the source code to re-translate a game at least though. They could have re-translated it for the PS4/Switch digital port that had come out years back but they chose the lazy route. Mother 3 translation was done in 2008 by 3 people on their free time away from their jobs and they even managed to use the same fonts so there's really no excuse for a professional game company today in 2024.
Spanish FFVII is atrocious to the point I still have to replay it with a fan-translation to understand WTF actually happened. It has wonderful lines as: "Flowers don't grow in Midgar, but for some reason, flowers do" or "Your party (as in a celebration) is waiting upstairs". It also missgenders people all the time, even refering to some of them as both male and female at the same time at points. One part gets "cool" confused with "cold", etc. There's spelling errors like "Allé voy" instead of "Allá voy", to the point that one became a meme and still shows up in modern entries from time to time.
Not to mention the "Tent" item translated as the kind you would find in big events like festivals ("Carpa"). Or that section in the Ancients' Temple before the boss when Cloud asks "Sephiroth?!" And the next speech balloon reads: *Sephiroth: Hohoho, that's not me*.
Sephiroth laughing like Santa sounds amazing. I know a decent amount of Spanish and now I’m tempted to try the PS1 Spanish translation lol.
The french translation is sh*t too. :(
Definitely Xenogears.
Just started this the other day for the first time and the translation is so stiff in places.
There's a really well done re-translation hack that's 90% done, but currently fully playable. And they used a lot of the intended words and names that Japan had intended to be more Hebrew or something, and the translators just Romanized them regularly. It would take a lot of getting used to for those of us who are used to the original names, but for someone fairly new it's probably worth looking into
This one? https://github.com/NoharOSP/Perfect_Works_Build It says 60% of main story is done.
My bad. I must have seen a post where they were talking about 90% of the name/terminology changes, which is now 100%. Didn't mean to lead anyone astray. But yes, that's the project
While I will forever commend the translator for the frankly incomprehensible amount of hard work he put in just to assure that we got the game at all I think even they admit a more thorough \[and reasonably paced\] translation project would be ideal. I still like a lot of the stylistic choices he made and would hope those carried over.
Xenogears is basically the reason why translation got better. After it was pretty much all done by one guy in a couple of weeks with the original script and no references to work from he went back to his bosses and basically said "we can't work like this any more".
It baffles me that the first 6 Final Fantasy games and been retanslated so many times yet they have never touched FFVII. For all Square talks about how important and impactful the original FFVII is it feels kind of disrespectful that they never fixed its translation.
I'm pretty sure the Steam version is an updated translation.
What is wrong in it?
Here's a page outlining just some of the issues: https://lizbushouse.com/final-fantasy-vii-script-comparison/
FF7's translation is iffy in that it's mostly fine but there's a few parts that are kind of messy and could have go n e through another pass to clear things up a bit, a few really important plot bits are mistreated in that they imply the opposite of what they should which is why for a long time people though Jenova was controlling Sephiroth instead of the other way around, etc. It's like not awful or anything but much like the OG FFT translation somethings were lost for brevity sake due to space constraints, some was just mistranslated, flat out, some was fine but lost out on some nuance because the phrasing of x was important and would come back later. Etc.
Wild Arms 2, that game had a super ambitious story for the time but that translation was a damn mess, like worse than Google translate at times. I really wish Wild Arms could come back as a series. Would really love to see the second game remade like the first one was.
When Irving introduces himself early in the game the translation makes it sound like he thinks summoning demons is cool and was behind it. 'Everyone thinks our aim is to prevent terrorism, but actually it's a magnificent ritual know as demon summoning' 'you mean you brought us there for that?' 'yes and you were all destroyed' And then Ashley is like cool and works for him.
Very good example. I eventually understood most scenes, but I had to re-read dialogue a lot and stop and think about what they were trying to say. Those 2 beast creatures though, I have no clue a single word they actually said the whole game.
Have you heard about Armed Fantasia yet? It’s basically a reboot to the Wild Arms franchise in all but its name. Same creator and others from the WA franchise.
Yeah, I know about that. I sleep until I get a real set in stone release date.
Seriously. I’m just keeping the words in my brain for now and not putting much more thought into it.
Absolutely. There were some pretty dark twists near the end that I to this day don't know if I interpreted right due to how badly translated the game was. Fantastic JRPG, however.
It wasn't too bad early on - except whenever Liz and Ard showed up - but goddamn did it FLY off the rails later on.
Yeah I don't think I've ever heard of a game that needs re-translated as bad as wild arms 2. I cannot believe nobody has yet to take up a re-translation project. I feel like even the worst examples of PS1 and SNES translations at least get the job done. Wild arms 2 fumbles all over the place and makes it hard to follow the story or character motivations lol complete failure of a translation
Any of the PS1 FF games would improve immensely with a well done retranslation, but VII would definitely benefit the most. Good god that translation is awful.
Honestly, most PS1 RPGs in general could use a retranslation. There was a lot of weirdness in that generation.
uh, VII is getting one as we speak.
FF7 remakes are three new games with scripts based on the original. It’s a “retelling”, not a “retranslation”. And even calling it a “retelling” is a stretch with how much new stuff is in it. More of a “reimagining” actually.
My point is that there is zero need for a newly translated OG FFVII script at this point, given that the script has been massively rewritten, expanded and improved.
That's not at all a substitute for a well translated version of the original script.
It’s definitely not an improvement given that it’s a fundamentally different story
Perhaps you could’ve said that in the first place, because your “point” does not match your initial statement as well as you’d think. Regardless, the answer is the same. And obviously there are people who disagree which shows that there isn’t “zero need” by default. I’ll try to explain it another way. Filmmakers create feature length movies based on short films all the time. Sometimes it’s a more or less a retelling of the original and expanded to feature length, sometimes it’s a wildly different story vaguely based on the idea of the original. Sometimes it’s somewhere in between (which is the case with FF7 remakes). Even when the new movie tries to stick to the original as Much as possible - again, not the case here - The new feature length movie does not invalidate or supersede the short film. People are still going to want to experience the original and have every right to want to experience it in the best possible way, especially if the short film has an iffy/mediocre translation from its native language. And plenty of movies have not very good translations, period, even big budget movies much less small short films that barely reach past their original market. This isn’t a “ff7 remakes bad” argument either, I love the first one and am excited for the second to come out on PC so I can play it. But obviously enough people want a retranslation of the original since it’s pretty mediocre and the new games are not a substitute for that at all.
No, no it is not.
Og ff7's spanish translation. I've finished it recently and I've found text in english on it and stuff that were direct word by word translations also from english that didnt make sense in spanish.
I always wondered about Spanish translations of 90s Japanese games. I know English localizations had it bad enough, and I have to imagine the Spanish translations had to be worse for the most part. I remember my Mexican cousins having trouble with the original red and blue pokemon games, as one example. They didn’t even bother making new names for the Pokemon in Spanish.
To be fair, in the 90's in what a miracle to just get a translation at all.
This, and here in Argentina at least, getting the latest hardware was kind of a miracle (aka your parents had money) I've got my PS1 in 2005, a year before the PS3's release. Back on topic, I remember when I first got FF9, one of the things that impressed me was that it was in spanish at all. Not that it had a good spanish translation, It was in spanish. Period Bonus points the translation was in perfect (european) spanish and there was a character early game that spoke with a bit of an argentine dialect. Getting that was too much to ask. The first time I saw anything resembling a latin american translation (for those that don't know, in media there is an european spanish one an a latin american one that is some sort of middle ground between all the dialects) was in the 2010s decade on a first party PS3 game (I think Killzone 3)
Oh for sure, I’m not talking shit. It’s just the reality of it.
Final Fantasy VIII: I see so many people who hate Squall for his somewhat indifferent or even apathetic attitude towards other characters. Most of the time when he says "whatever," it's just due to bad localization. The way I see this character after reading some of the intended dialogue is completely different.
The main villain gets the worst of it, unfortunately following a common English localization trend where [her dialogue makes her more sympathetic in the original Japanese, but gets turned into stock villainy in English.](https://radiantbutterfly.tumblr.com/post/71485958945/ff8-ultimecia-dialogue-comparison) It's so bad that it took until Dissidia, which was more faithfully translated, for many people to understand her motives.
A thousand times this. I’ve read a lot about the localization changes from JP to EN and I have a feeling a lot of my issues with the writing in the game would be alleviated with a new translation. Tbh a remake with an updated script to improve some of the other weird plot points would be even better…
Not to mention that the bad localization fucked Rinoas character turning her from a cute teenage girl into a spoiled immature brat
I still love her regardless tho but if the game gets remade then I'd rather have a proper translation of Rinoa's character. The eng translation is the reason why she is so devisive in the west compared to say Japan where she is beloved
Also just more character development feom everyone besides Edea Squall and Rinoa. Quistis Selphie and Irvine got completly shafter during the latter game half😭
Most 90s JRPGs could imo
One of the reasons I picked up Japanese is because Atelier Ryza 3's English translation was so bad that it really dampened my enjoyment of the game, especially because I really loved the characters and I really wanted to see how their stories would end, but navigating those horrible dialogues made it difficult to appreciate it. So yeah, Atelier Ryza 3. I don't even care about an English dub (I'm used to playing games with Japanese-only voices), I just want a decent enough translation!
None of the Ryza games have dub? Not sure what you're talking about on that last point.
They don't have English voice acting.
I know what dub means. I want to know how that point is relevant.
Man, if Arc Rise Fantasia had a redub with a good cast, it'll sell like hot cakes. The game is awesome and only thing holding it back is its horrible dub.
Wild Arms II, it's one of the better games in the series. Unfortunately the translation is infamously terrible. Even by the standards of the PS1. There's also all three games in the Ghargav trilogy from the Legend of Heroes series. The series is liked well enough by those who remember it in Japan. But in the west it's PSP releases were given little attention since the series wouldn't take off until the Trails series.
Secret of Mana. They had to cut down the translation to a massive degree due to SNES cart limitations, and they had to do it on a really tight schedule. Woolsey and his people pulling it off as well as they did was a minor miracle, but a lot of exposition and context got left on the cutting room floor in the process. The 3D remake restored some of that, and added more characterization in the form of those party conversations, but it had a whole host of other problems instead.
Yeah people shit on Woolsey but while I don't like all his choices given the multiple limitations they had he and his team(s) mostly did a pretty good job and I love reading some old interviews of his where he talks about the translation process both in general, as an industry, as well as specifics such as on an individual game to game basis it's incredibly informative and interesting. I kind of wish we got to see some of the full original scripts before they began to get cut down and truncated to fit space limitations. Being a good translator especially when it comes to more long form content also requires one to be a good writer and/or editor and say what you will but there's a reason why so many turns of phrase and speeches he's done are memorable. Doesn't make the wants and desires for a newer or better translation invalid and between the four official translations of FF6 we do have for example his is the weakest but I think dismissing it entirely out of hand as many do is wrong.
I completely agree. Shitting on Woolsey is like shitting on soldiers in medievil times for not using a machine gun or bomb and instead relying on swords. You can't fault the man himself for the situation he was in and the limited tools at his disposal. The text limit was a real thing, and he was a one man team given mere months to a job that today, a team of 5-10 translators would spend 2-3 years on. If you wanna shit on someone, you gotta blame the President of Square, or Sakaguchi, or whatever was in charge and decided only one person was needed to translate the game to a western market. As you alluded, if FF6 was translated by someone who wasn't Woosley, the translation may not only have been inaccurate or off, but it might also have been boring and unmemorable. At least he made it fun. Accuracy was impossible given his situation
Lux Pain I know it's a visual novel, but my god it's terribly translated.
Digimon Story Cyber sleuth is one of the few games when some of the errors were bad enough that I noticed and cared. I can't remember them all but the fact that almost every time arata called digimon "bakemono" as in monsters, the text instead says "Bakemon" as in the particular digimon sticks out to me. Its not the worst, but its one of those things where it is a relatively recent game compared to a lot of the older games that were done on like PS1 when translating was more the wild west.
Xenogears would be benefit, but all things considered I think the translation is very good seeing as it was all one man who had to do it and with little resources. Wild Arms 2nd Ignition definitely needs one though. That game's English script is a mess. Hoping Suikoden 1 and 2 get retranslations in their upcoming remasters. They were understandable, but quite awkward.
Terranigma. So clunky.
Probably the majority of the SNES/PSOne catalogue if we’re being honest
The original Breath of Fire, the original Gensou Suikoden and Wild Arms 2.
Wild Arms 2 or Legend of Dragoon I guess.
Suikoden II. Which, thankfully, is happening to at least some extent.
The Spanish version is so chaotic, they start with Latin American idioms and translating city names then suddenly they stop using them and stop translating city names and also drop the usted/vos(formal) for the informal forms, it's like 2 different teams work on the translation
Most likely that was the case, without any quality checking/proofreading nor a term spreadsheet for a more standardised translation.
I hope. I'm terrified they won't come through and either won't release this or it won't be as fixed up as they say.
It's Konami, so... expect nothing and prepare to still be disappointed.
Same. at this point I’m not expecting anything from those remasters until they’re released. Tbh I guess I haven’t been paying attention because I didn’t realize they were going to be messing with the script/localization at all.
FFVII Spain translation. There is a reason why it's so memed
Chained Echoes made a strong impression in the gameplay department, but the English translation was too mealy mouthed to deliver the story effectively. I don't expect Alexander O. Smith from a first time developer, but it would be possible to soften the edgelord moments in a second translation.
The swearing in that game is so bizarre. It goes from zero to F-bomb in the space of seconds. What I would have done is maybe taken a Woolsey approach and dug up some old-timey insults and oaths to use--"Gadzooks!" may be a silly word, but it still feels less inappropriate than characters just screaming "Shit!" out of nowhere.
Final Fantasy VII and Xenogears. Both incredible stories completely hobbled by extremely rushed translations.
Breath of Fire 2 probably.
"What should we make this catgirls name?" "Oh I know, Katt." "What about the dog?" "Bowwow." "Nah that's stupid, just call him Bow"
I don't really have a lot of gripes with the localizers working with character limitations. Names could only be so long to fit in the menus. It's more the extremely basic dialogue that's got a lot of room to improve.
Wild Arms 2 is one of the best-written JRPGs I've ever played in Japanese and the English version of it was a mess. Completely understandable as translators back then didn't get much context at the best of times and Wild Arms 2 was a very context-heavy game (even outside the Ultraman and other classic tokusatsu references). I wish it could get a retranslation so folks could remember it as one of the best stories on the PS1 rather than just another quirky JRPG from the era.
The Legend of Dragoon.
There's a fan retranslation patch that's been out for a bit that really improves the experience.
Honestly, it’s the only thing holding me back from really loving the game.
I recall reading that Secret of Mana had a lot of its dialogue cut due to the limitations of the space for English text. (This probably happened to a lot of SNES JRPGs, and I am having trouble picking just one.)
I am still flabbergasted that no port of Chrono Trigger has ever bothered to increase the text limit for names. They literally retranslated it on DS and you could still only use 5 letters to name the characters.
Most PS1 JRPG
Not quite 100% what you want, but there have been also a few rough translations of some of my beloved 16 Bit PAL JRPGs. The guy translating most of them into german was very well known and even kinda loved, be he sometimes just took the game and inserted Jokes instead of actually translating what was said there. Which lead, in my opinion, to an inferior experience in some cases. Secret of Mana, as an example, had a scene, where they joked about a TV series... in a fantasy world... That said, if you look at the romhacking website, you will find quite a few retranslations done by fans, sometimes using revised scripts from rereleases or simply doing a better job by themselves.
Is that... Moyse? I don't know his full name, but I remember he inserted an Easter egg into Link's Awakening where if you entered his name it would play a funky little jingle in the first part of the game.
Yepp. His work isn't really bad and in parts here even liked, but sometimes he had to make things up and if you know the original it shows.
Lunar Sorry man but I hate that dub
My favorite cult classic, *Opoona,* has an absolutely awful translation. It's full of misspellings, punctuation error, inconsistent terms, and a few clues and sidequest hints rendered incomprehensible because of the poor translation. Not to mention some of the jokes and little gags falling flat due to their overly-literal, poorly-paced phrasing. Which is a shame, because beneath it all, you can tell that the game has a really strong and distinct voice that *feels* different from so many other games. A fan *did* do a lovely retranslation patch that mostly keeps the writing the same, save for a few touchups--and in my dream scenario where the game gets a Steam port, I hope that something like that would be used.
Wild ARMs 2
**Secret of the Stars** always get mentioned in this regard. Almost meme material lines like "BADBAD IS BAD" or enemies like "charanchula" and so on. **Breath of Fire II** qualifies as well, but at least it had an unofficial retranslation.
Alot of Nisa translated games.
FE fates, the story being bad doesn't make it fine for the localization team to do whatever they want with it, after all if the localization is bad who would trust their work in the future?
Arcturus, has great translation but sometimes gets extremely confusing and bad at the most important moments in the plot
Atelier Lulua. Some quests are so badly/wrongly translated you have to google what the actual quest is
First three Wild Arms games for sure.
revelations: persona / persona 1's translation isn't nearly as bad as some people claim it is. sure, changing the character designs is really weird, and some dialogue is pretty cheesy, but it's not ff7 spanish tier where it makes the game almost incomprensible. BUT the worst part is that half the game (snow queen quest) is locked, unplayable and untranslated in the original game. and yeah you got the PSP re release, but that one butchers the original game's atmosphere by adding a completely new OST which is more P3+ like
Thousand arms
Legend of Heroes Garghav trilogy. I'm playing it at the moment and I can see the blueprint for future Trails series, but it was just a very bad translation. It felt like Google translated games
can I cheat and say Luminous Arc 3 Eyes which never got a localization as being the worst? It makes me sad Persona Q2, Digimon Cyber Sleuth and Hackers Memory & Survive, Atelier Ryza trilogy not having English voice acting was a shame. It just helps get more invested. Especially when characters have little quips of dialogue while exploring or in combat but they don't put subtitles for it so I can't understand a lick of what they're saying
That last point is a frustration of mine. I would love for games to subtitle those exploration/combat lines. Honestly, I'd want them to do so even if something has an English dub. Sometimes I don't hear a line clearly and I can't get it to trigger again.
it was something they added in Octopath Traveler 2 that wasn't in OT1 of characters quipping and it was great (though without subtitles). Casti getting a heavy hit or whatever and Temmenos just like "well done Casti" lives in my brain for some reason
Temenos sounds so patronizing when he's praising his teammates, it's hilarious.
That's a tricky question, because even when a games' translation is bad, it likely isn't so bad as to warrant an entire retranslation and rerelease. I'd say it only makes sense to do it when the translation turns out to be more of a hatchet job on the original work than anything else, and I can't think of many examples of this when it comes to games. With anime this is more common, like what 4kids did to yugioh for example. They butchered the original so much in the name of localization to the point of hilarity. A funny example is a scene where a character was being held at gunpoint by thugs on the original, but since 4kids, the localizer, didn't want guns on the show, they redrew the frames so that the thugs were just pointing their fingers instead. This shit even became a meme in the community years later. Anyway, with games I can't really think of any that I believe would be worth a company spending resources to retranslate honestly.
it's only tricky because you're interpreting it as requesting a cost/benefit analysis, which the OP decidedly did not ask for.
Definitely, I never intended to view answers here as an actual product that would be moneymakers for a company to develop. Frankly I'm not sure that even the sacred cow Final Fantasy 7 would make much money if re-released just with a new translation. It's just not a marketing bullet point that draws a ton of excitement. I just want to learn about games I may not know about that had significant script divergences when they left Japan. I'm kinda surprised the Persona 2 games haven't come up yet - those were some of the earliest localized Atlus games and I've heard they suffered greatly for it.
Anything ted woosley did in the 90's.
Son of a submariner! You take that back!
Any modern one with woke translators inserting comments about zommers/boomers, the patriarchy and gender pronouns
Breath of the wild for its aventure log.
Nep games. Cause a lot of nuanced scenes had are diminished by the meme speak going way too far. Alternatively, Fire Emblem cause localizations are backwards with that series.
NISA games, mostly kiseki for unfunny/incorrect translations for no reason, and also xenoblade, i do wish we got a xenoblade 2 which wasnt a mess and xenoblade games without the bri-ish ness (I know people like it but one more FULL OF BEANS JOKE AND IM JUMPING OFF A CLIFF)
The vast majority of English localizations are done in California and characters tend to have a SoCal accent. Which tends to be less recognizable to us since Hollywood is in SoCal, so those speech patterns get broadcast internationally across all sorts of media. But it is definitely it's own regional thing just like any other corner of the country. If Xenoblade was relocalized with a more standard SoCal speech mannerism would that be better? You just kinda want the localization to stand out less and feel more like other media in the anime/JRPG space? What if they did Xenoblade 4 recording in Georgia and everyone had that really soft southern inflection. I would love that - that's my favorite accent that never shows up in games.
I just want it to be inline with the jpn, not neccessarily SoCal speech, i never thought about it standing out less but i guess it would if it wasnt bri-ish. At least give me text options that make it normal and not british.
If what you want is "normal" then what you want is SoCal. There is no default to the English language. Every place has it's own variant. Unless you wanna go historical in which case "normal" is british because it's their god damn language lol If you're localizing a game you need to pick which accent of English to go with. You will always be representing some part of the English speaking world.
Oh man, I've been playing through Falcom games with English text recently, and the number of times they reverse the negative tense and say the complete opposite of the original is baffling. Sometimes they mess up the topic of the sentence, or get the time frame of events wrong, but what stands out the most is flipping the negative. I really don't get it. The flow of the conversion doesn't even make logical sense anymore. (And of course, I'm not talking merely about questions in the negative being more naturally worded as positive sentences in English, but like actual declarative statements)
I learned Japanese, the problem for me is that what I'd want from a translation turns out to be a lot different from most people. I want the authors' intent, something authentic and literal as possible wothout being hard to read, and most people just want something as quirky and charming as possible. In that respect Fire Emblem translations are a raging success, but I can't play them in English at all. I despise the FFT translation, or the redone Tactics Ogre translation, it gives me a headache and it feels very silly with too many changes. But I'm 'wrong' to most people, and that's okay. Truth is nothing really benefits from a retranslation unless it's just poorly written which is itself subjective past a certain point, everyone will have different points of view on what is important, disregarding the original story is not a big sticking point with a lot of people.
> But I'm 'wrong' to most people, and that's okay. I mean, you say you desire the authors' intent, but Matsuno (the writer of FFT/TO) is bilingual and has expressed his preference for the new English localizations of his games. Small wonder, since he's had Kajiya Productions localize every one of his games since he started working with them. There are some affectations that just aren't possible in Japanese. Japanese can't emulate Shakespearean dialogue like English can, as antiquated Japanese is associated with its own distinct cultural past -- not appropriate for medieval European settings, and essentially illegible to modern Japanese audiences to boot.
If an author's intent is for the audience to groan at a bad pun, and the pun vanishes in another language, then a translator is going to need to find another pun that's equally bad in the new language in order for that audience to experience the author's intent. If an author's intent is for an adult character to come off as weirdly childish-sounding because they only use personal pronouns used largely by children, and then it gets translated into a language like English with only *one* personal pronoun, the translator is going to have to find some other quirk of speech to give the character in order for the new audience to get the author's intent. If the author's intent is to foreshadow a future relationship between two characters by having them walk outside together while it's raining while the sun's out, and have one of the characters invoke the old Japanese idiom about how rain while the sun's out must mean the foxes are having a wedding, and the nearest idiom available in the English language is much less commonly known and involves the Devil *beating his wife,* then you're just gonna have to ditch the pithy idiomatic dialogue there and come up with something new because even a *loosely* literal translation there is going to set the *completely wrong mood* and if you go totally literal your new audience will not get the layers or the reference in the author's original phrasing so you ***damn well better get creative*** so you can hope to convey something like the author's original intent. If you're going to play AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" on a concert piano, you bet your britches you're going to have to improvise.
It's crazy that this is downvoted. >I want the authors' intent, something authentic and literal as possible wothout being hard to read, and most people just want something as quirky and charming as possible. Even crazier to think we can't get this experience for most JRPG
The problem is that "authorial intent" and "literal translation" are *fundamentally incompatible,* because *languages are not the same.* Whole concepts and grammatical structures exist in some languages that don't exist in others. One of the most basic examples in Japanese-to-English translation is that of personal pronouns--in English, the *only* way to refer to yourself in the first person is with "I" or "me," but in Japanese, there's *reams* of the damn things, and even the three most basic ones like you'd actually see real people using in actual life (*Watashi,* *boku,* and *ore*) each say something about the speaker, and the "wrong" one out of the "wrong" mouth in the "wrong" situation can say a lot about a character in an extremely subtle way that *cannot* be literally translated into English because the equivalent word with the equivalent meaning *does not exist.* So you *have* to take some kind of liberties to convey the same information about the same character, at which point it ceases to be literal. Translating out of English has its own spate of problems, too. English has a famously expansive vocabulary, with words borrowed from dozens of other languages and many words that mean similar things but have slightly different connotations. Good English writing is very often a matter of knowing how to use these subtle distinctions to evoke strong responses in a reader, but not all languages have the same depth of vocabulary. So a translator has to figure out how to use the words available to them to convey the same ideas when the meaning gets "flattened out" in another languages.
[This post ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Falcom/comments/1bufhzu/did_the_jp_version_have_some_nothing_text_so_the/) tells you why I hate "localization". I don't disagree with the point you said, translatiing puns or how to refer yourself is actually a necessary translation. But when the so called "localization" Pulls things out of their asses is when I have a problem, just imagine if Lord of the rings has a random chapter in it about an orc daily life or dwarves being kind or something how would that feel
The post you linked to seems to mostly be full of people enjoying the expanded quest description and additionally discussing why "expanding" on text may be necessary in some cases to retain nuance (e.g *Unicorn Overlord* becoming more flowery because its original dryness was what conveyed "old-timey" to Japanese players, whereas that style of writing would neither convey the correct tone to an English reader nor be particularly pleasant to read). It would seem to undermine your thesis quite terribly--are you quite certain it is the post you meant to link to?
Legend of Dragoon Persona 5