Kotaku Article/Video on Translations

T@ctic

Pro Adventurer
AKA
Orah, Iju
Well the @108 dude did also admit in the 9th video
that the original Japanese script being comparatively more vague about Zack and Aerith’s romantic relationship doesn’t automatically equal evidence against it (i.e. a lack of evidence doesn’t not equal evidence proving the contrary), and makes clear in a big spinnig hashtag that he has a Cloud x Aerith bias/preference. Basically because the OG in the original Japanese painted Zack and Aerith’s romantic relationship more vaguely, he prefers to interpret it as having been unrequited, in spite of later entries explicitly clarifying otherwise (based on his tweets it sounds like he isn’t a huge fan of Crisis Core, or at least it’s fans).
oh okay, if he is in agreement with the fans' views on CC that makes a tad bit more sense. unfortunate CC still isn't getting the love it deserves :(

EDIT; Skimmed through the newest 10th video, it’s kinda amusing/charming how unabashedly Tim Rogers loves “#Clerith”.
he's gonna be shook when the remake comes out :awesome:
 

ForceStealer

Double Growth
Watched it yesterday, awesome, fascinating stuff once again. I really like where he surmises things about why the translator did certain things, and even praises him for stuff like going hog-wild with Cid's dialogue. Watching this thing always makes me want to interview VII's localizer, haha.

It is a shame we'll be finished with just disc 2, but I understand these take a crazy amount of time and he's already given us more than was originally planned.

Maybe we could get a bonus episode one day covering just the Lifestream sequence when Cloud's head gets sorted out, that's the disc 2 bit I would most like to see. :monster:
 

T@ctic

Pro Adventurer
AKA
Orah, Iju
I don't see why. If it's anything like the Compilation and the general trend towards the status quo, it'll err on the side of ambiguity.
it's pretty much guaranteed that it won't be vauge at all, even if we don't have any information on how the remake goes. it won't make much sense for CC to work that hard on zerith and VII not include it in someway. i mean come on, the last addition to the compilation still found a small way to include zerith, and even that was strong.

honestly, originally it wasn't vauge in the first place but that's imo.
 
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Random Nobody

local roach
I don't think, textually, it was all that vague either -- and then the Compilation clearly does slant a certain direction, even if it's never explicit. That's what I mean when I say "if it's anything like the Compilation": there's a repetition of themes and character arcs present, which -- by the writers' own admission -- exists because they don't know how to evolve the characters and their relationships without making them "unrecognisable" to the audience. Sephiroth keeps coming back for no good reason (and is now obsessed with Cloud for purposes beyond explanation). Tifa is not allowed to win a fight because she has to get her ass beat so they can do a call back to the well scene. The LTD can't be explicitly resolved because of the romance semi-mechanic in the first game.

CC is good and well, but is a prequel, and it technically doesn't have any bearing on the relevant events of the Original barring all the shitty retcons. And the Remake isn't even in the same continuity. I don't think they're just going to throw the developments in CC away except for maybe Genesis (WE CAN HOPE), but wrt to the LTD I'll be shocked if they don't play up every eyeblink that fans have been fighting over for the past 20 years whilst still leaving enough room for deniability.
 

Obsidian Fire

Ahk Morn!
AKA
The Engineer
The thing is... the Aerith/Zack pairing has nothing to do with the Aerith/Cloud/Tifa love triangle. Even if Aerith and Zack were an official couple (and CC treats them like this), Aerith would be free to pursue Cloud once she knows Zack is dead.

There's no reason the Remake can't have both in it.
 

Random Nobody

local roach
The thing is... the Aerith/Zack pairing has nothing to do with the Aerith/Cloud/Tifa love triangle. Even if Aerith and Zack were an official couple (and CC treats them like this), Aerith would be free to pursue Cloud once she knows Zack is dead.

There's no reason the Remake can't have both in it.
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ForceStealer

Double Growth
The thing is... the Aerith/Zack pairing has nothing to do with the Aerith/Cloud/Tifa love triangle. Even if Aerith and Zack were an official couple (and CC treats them like this), Aerith would be free to pursue Cloud once she knows Zack is dead.

There's no reason the Remake can't have both in it.

Exactly. I always thought that Aerith and Zack were a couple, but I still thought her feelings for Cloud (and vice versa) were genuine.

LTD warning level: 4
 

T@ctic

Pro Adventurer
AKA
Orah, Iju
well maybe if we were looking at a remaster or some slight differences i would probably agree more with you, but we have to remember it's almost a rehaul. they're even giving more insight on the previously empty avalanche members, so not seeing even a little bit more insight on any vagueness just doesn't seem likely.

also we have to consider what we have seen in the kotaku vids so far. zack's name was spoken probably less than a dozen times and was simply the character that changed cloud. so we can expect some more on that as well. also, CC was a prequel but remember i said in the sequel zerith was still included, twice.

but idk if this should be discussed anymore in this thread so i shouldn't go that further into it. for me, i will be surprised that for all that zerith pushing (and just generally more characterising zack) it won't be featured in the game or will be faint.

also, i wasn't implying since zerith was pushed in CC and slightly in ACC that aerith won't be interested in cloud or whatever. that will still be there of course. but the idea that S/E would include what they wrote in before isn't so far fetched.
 

T@ctic

Pro Adventurer
AKA
Orah, Iju
oh btw, tim replied to me on twitter and said he doesn't dislike CC, more of how it portrayed aerith and zack.
 

ForceStealer

Double Growth
As I've said several times, this series was phenomenal. Completely fascinating, thank you so much for all the work you put into that, Tim. I find all those little linguistic differences fascinating as well.

It's funny the lines that never struck me as odd at all, my brain just kind of made them make sense, I think. Much of the script is lodged deep in my brain, and if someone asked me what Cloud said immediately after almost killing Aeris, I would have absolutely put a "?!" on the end of it. As you explain, that wouldn't have been accurate to the Japanese either, but I don't think I ever noticed it was only a period there.
Similarly, Cid's "Damn! Again!" I never really thought that it meant Cloud was always saying "mosey, " but rather just that he just generally phrased things "like a wimp," and not in a way that got people fired up. Nor that Barret sounded insensitive to big-D Depression, but rather just using "depressed" in a more casual way. But that's not me defending the translation, as I say, it's just funny the way my brain has contextualized the strange lines over the years.

And that ending was very poignant, what an unexpected thing to come across in making this series, I'm sorry for your loss.
 

Cloud’s Strife

Lv. 1 Adventurer
AKA
Cloud’s Stripe
Hello everyone,

After seeing Tim’s incredible video series on FFVII, I found out about this equally incredible place! A question arose because of an observation I made seeing the footage this website provided for Tim’s video’s: the main characters have no mouth (and i must scream).

I bought the FFVII remake on PS4, but was immediately turned off by the silly stripe the main characters have for a mouth (as well as the filtered font). I’ve looked into the whole mouth thing for FFVII’s pc version(s), but I cannot pinpoint the exact mod disabling the main character’s mouths (only the npc’s). I played the original when it came out on psx, fell in love with those characters, and simply cannot get over those mouths. The remako background mod has me itching to finally replay the game, but I could only do so in a way the footage from lifestream.net displays it: no mouths and no filtered font. Could someone point me in the direction of how that is achieved?

I’ve looked through Qhimm, searched around online, but it seems like the simpler the mod, the harder it is to find. I hope I’m missing something obvious.

Beside that, in light of Tim’s translation analysis, how do y’all think the ‘beacause’ translation mod fares? Is it worth replaying the game with ‘beacause’ or do you prefer the original translation?

Hope this is the right thread -more or less- to ask...
Thanks in advance!
 

Lex

Administrator
Read this post in full along with the linked spreadsheet and then decide if you want to proceed with that fan retranslation.

I worked a little on it myself (providing a Scottish accent for Cait Sith) a long long time ago now. Personally I do not play with the mod, but I've done so once. I neither want to encourage or discourage people from using it, but the linked post contains an underhanded dig at people from this site who were called upon to participate in that particular project so my willingness to promote it is very limited even though I'm credited.
 

Fangu

Great Old One
Reading those posts gave me a brain tumour.

There's a segment in the first part of Tim's last two videos that is downright beautiful, it's where he talks about how literal (perfect) translations simply don't exist because the only way to fully understand a language is to live and breathe it. I was jumping in my seat through that part pointing at the screen going "this! this!!!" because as someone who speaks two languages, this is one of those things that is so hard to explain. Tim gives such a good insight to this. It's not about 'what it should have been' but more explaining why certain things don't work in the given context. (I'm not saying nothing is wrong with the original translation as clearly there are issues. But certain choices made are good even though they're not 'right'.)
 

Cloud’s Strife

Lv. 1 Adventurer
AKA
Cloud’s Stripe
Thanks for the many quick replies! I read that linked page on the translation mod and uh yeah, those are some bold (preposterous) statements imo. I live in a tiny European country with three official languages, where every 20km’s an indistinguishable kind of dialect from the other is spoken. Next to being surrounded by three large neighbouring countries with different languages I speak myself (and have read a book in each language, lol) language indeed is as much a lived in culture as a bunch of different kinds of sounds and signs. I’d take an extremely literal fan-translation over any relocalisation (not done by Tim :) of the game any time though. Amen to what Tim Rogers says mentioned in the post above about ‘living a language’; him highlighting Japanese slang, formal variations and his excellent framing of the original localisation work on FFVII overall. I will go through his videos again, and play FFVII little by little with more attention to the language instead of using the that mod.

ps: About the footage from this site used in his videos it dawned on me the night after making the post how come the characer models look exactly like th(e)ir (PSX) count(e)rpart, only in HD. I knew it was something obvious i must have missed ;) That said i found a mod for the Steam version eliminating all mouths on all original chibi character models (http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=18891.0;wap2) and I use that along the remako backgrounds, which do look stunning compared to the blurry ps4 version and even the pixelated original on my PVM (probably looks better on a regular crt tv). There’s some crushing, inaccuracies and missing animations here and there, but now the backgrounds look as sharp as the characters, making the hd version more consistent, and simply beautiful. The reunion mod didn’t contain a ‘no mouths’ option for the original chibi characters as far as i knew and all their visual tweaks look horrendous to me. Save states combined with fast loading i found myself a fine and accurate version of the game for a big screen on contemporary hardware.
Thanks to your footage i sure looked further than what i was sold :)
 
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