old games a pretty well known for weird translations and localisations and things have improved with time so you probably don't see the level of major errors you would in the past, but have you ever seen little mistakes that have slipped through in modern games (say from the hd ps3/xbox 360 era to present)?
i was checking the options on 'remothered: tormented fathers' which had defaulted to japanese, but i decided to switch it to english after seeing this screen
where it says the text language is japanese, it uses 'japanese [person/people]' (日本人) instead of the correct word for the japanese language (日本語). the rest of the menus are generally fine but i figured i'd be better off in english just in case something like that happens at an important moment. (クローズ for 'close' at the bottom is also a weird choice since something like 戻る or 閉じる sounds more natural)
i don't have an image for it, but i also remember playing 'lords of the fallen' in spanish and for chest armour it used the word 'cofre' which is a treasure chest rather than the part of the body.
this is the text language selection screen for the ps5 remaster of judge eyes/judgement. i only just started dabbling in korean so it's a struggle to understand what's going on let alone pick up on errors. but i think i have found one here. it's a repeat of a previous one, where what should be referring to a language instead uses the word for people from that country. and there's a few here:
영어 - english language, one of the few correct ones)
독일 사람 - german person
스페인의 - this looks like 'of spain' (so like 'spanish food') rather than language
프랑스 국민 - i think this is the french people as a group, like 'the people/nation of france?
이탈리아 사람 - italian person
일본어 - japanese language
중국어 번체 - traditional chinese
중국어 간체 - simplified chinese (i don't really know if these are right but it is at least saying the chinese language)
한국어 - korean language
in japanese it would be clear it's talking about the language rather than people, it looks like it used another language as a base for further translations? probably using english as what's called a pivot language, where you translate to another language that more common then base other translations on that where it would be harder to find as many translators who work in the original and target languages. i assume it's english because a) it's more common as a pivot language given how ubiquitous it is, and b) not being able to make the distinction between say 'spanish' as a language, a nationality, or an origin/description.
i think with older translations, they would just give a translator a spreadsheet with all the text in and they would have to just work from that without context. i would have thought that they would have changed things now, but i'm not sure how you would confused language and people on a text language screen if you weren't working without context
anyway, not a good start for the game! this is the first screen that pops up!
i'm going back to remothered, but the english version now
i don't know if this game was localised to english or originally made in english. the credits look very italian, so i guess either it was made in english by people with english as their second language or in italian first but i didn't see that. (i had the japanese edition which only included english, japanese, and traditional or simplified chinese)
apart from a few spelling issues ('insulin' and 'insuline' both used on the same page, 'painfull' rather than 'painful'), it occasionally had some odd phrasing. stuff like 'make light of' where it probably meant 'bring to light' as in reveal something rather than demean or belittle it. one like was something like 'no matter how you call it' instead of a more natural 'what you call it'. the use of the phrase 'aggressed someone' instead of assaulted or attacked. it makes me wonder if things like that sound natural in italian.
thumbs up to the second remothered game, broken porcelain, for using the correct word for 'japanese' in its language settings as opposed to saying 'people' like the first game
thumbs down for kingdom: new lands, for listing this option for korean language settings where everything on screen is korean as 'english' (영어). you had one job
got 'agent a', a little point-and-click style adventure game, since it was 100 yen and the artwork looks cute. you can go around interacting with object, moving stuff or knocking them down and a little bit of dialogue appears.
in one room in chapter 1, you can interact with a chair and knock it over. when you do, the english texts says:
"take that chair!"
not grammatically correct, it should be "take that, chair!" (you can't actually take the chair, and you're not talking to another character or anything) as a kind of jokey comment about pushing over the chair. but it's a fairly common mistake to miss a comma, and it should be fairly obvious to a native speaker what is meant by this.
but because of this little error, the japanese translation went with...
あの椅子を取れ！
literally a command "take (in your hands/pick up) that chair [over there]!" i played it in japanese first and when i saw that line i instantly thought something like this had happened. please remember your commas in the video games you're selling for actual money, if for no other reason than the poor translators.
on a shelf in the same room you can interact with a book shelf:
eng:
Nothing interesting, and here I was thinking Ruby had good taste
jpn:
面白そうな本はなし。そして私がここで考えたことは、ルビーはいい趣味してるってことだ。[No interesting looking books. And what I thought here was that Ruby has good taste.]
this one, i didn't really get at first. why would ruby (the antagonist you're chasing) have good taste because there's no interesting books on a shelf? but checking the english, they had taken the english line 'here i was thinking...' literally as 'i was in this spot, and thought that...' rather than a statement expressing the opposite. in this case it didn't click for me what the original text might have been, i was just reading it as a japanese sentence.
the weird thing here is that the japanese line mentions books where the english one doesn't, which suggests that it wasn't translated completely devoid of context like i suspected with other games in previous posts. whether that involved working with the game itself or that the script used to translate had comments/notes like 'interaction: book shelf', i don't know.
if i can be arsed to look over cat quest again, i think it'd be a trove of these overly literally translations. that was a game i played in japanese with no knowledge of the english version that had so many lines where i was sure i could guess what the english text was but that sounded weird in japanese.
i'm not going to call this 'bad' localisation, it's just something i keep thinking about because i don't get it and i don't have anywhere else to put my ramblings
i started playing genshin impact because it's free/i am too cheap to buy breath of the wild and i read it was similar. despite it's japanese-sounding name it was developed by a chinese studio. but i wouldn't understand it in chinese to play it so i'm playing it in japanese so i can claim all these hours were actually educational.
(i am going to be saying 'chinese' for the language throughout this post because i don't know if it would be mandarin or cantonese so sorry for my ignorance here)
my main question is what basis do they use to decide when to use a japanese reading for a word, and when they use a chinese one in the japanese localisation. it's not really a thing in most of the regions it takes place in, inazuma is fictional japan so everything is going to be japanese there and the other two are analogous to europe and the middle east. it mainly happens in liyue, the second area based on china. the game text often doesn't show the readings (if at all) so when characters pronounced 璃月 as リーユェ (riiywe) i was thrown off a bit. that 'ユェ/ywe' sound isn't one used in japanese words so i wasn't expecting to hear it and it took me a while to get used to it. i would have guessed 璃 would be リ/ri, but never 'ywe' for 月 (which i would have thought 'rigetsu? ritsuki?')
seeing that i thought you would get a bunch of chinese readings for names in that part of the game, but it's a mixed bag. in english they seem to use a lot of the chinese readings, but in japanese it's seemingly random to me. the nation's name uses the chinese reading so i guess the place names will? but no, most of the other place names seem to be japanese except 'liyue harbour' which uses the chinese reading for the name (and the japanese one for the 'harbour' portion).
maybe characters? the first liyue character i saw in game was xiangling, 香菱 pronounced シャンリン/shanrin. then i managed to get another liyue character, keqing. her name, 刻晴, gets the japanese reading こくせい/kokusei.
later on you can go meet xiangling's dad, whose name gets the japanese reading. i don't get it
chinese readings:
xiangling - 香菱 - シャンリン/shanrin
yaoyao - (doesn't use the chinese character 瑶瑶 in japanese) - ヨォーヨ/yooyo
hu tao - 胡桃 - フータオ/fuutao
yelan - 夜蘭 - イェラン/yeran
most of the time it uses a japanese reading (some of which are pretty close since the readings derived from chinese), although ones like 'yukuaki' or 'nana' are just straight up japanese. but every now and then they will hit you with a chinese one. but why. i haven't figured out if there is any reasoning behind what gets what reading. one character doesn't even use the chinese characters for their name and just katakana, which is another seeming random choice that appears in npc names. some will have chinese character names (that get japanese readings) and some get katakana. at seemingly random??
the 'liyue qixing' group 璃月七星 (リーユェしちせい) is 'riiywe shichisei' so chinese name + japanese reading. so except the name which is always chinese, but are we going for japanese for the rest? but the members of the group have a title based on a star (the name being 'seven stars'). when the names are spoken, it's with the chinese reading.
those are i think the chinese names for those stars but they have japanese readings (tenken and gyokukou). idk man. what gives.
i have passed most of the story taking place in liyue but this will continue to live on somewhere in my mind and googling it gets a bunch of results asking why they use 'genshin' (the japanese reading of the title) everywhere instead of its chinese one (i think 'yuanshen'?).
i have seen search results talking about the localisation being off so i might go look into those and see what that's all about
Really interesting, thanks so much for always taking the time to translate on this forum! Even though I’m more of a lurker here I always enjoy reading all the work everyone does on this site/forum.
Differences in localisation especially where the meaning changes are really fascinating - as I assume for big AAA games they really make sure to double check their translations. It’s incredible the debate that mistranslation/localisation choice can cause (a la FFVII)
Speaking of modern games with translation/localisation difference, in Zelda BOTW, there was one major translation difference in the English localisation which kinda confuses the whole ending.
I’ve linked an article to it here.
Just before the end battle in the English version of the game, Zelda says:
"He [Ganon] has given up on reincarnation and assumed his pure, enraged form."
In Japanese she says:
"This form was born from his obsessive refusal to give up on revival…"
Completely different meanings. Seems like a glaring oversight from the localisation team given that the whole premise of all Zelda’s is this cycle of reincarnation.
In the end, in English Zelda says:
"Although Ganon is gone for now, there is still so much more for us to do."
It also really undoes itself with TOTK. Although still playing through TOTK..
