Individual Entry
Thinking about disterbing subtitles
When dealing with Japanese games, there's a cetain expectation for lousy localization. It's a historical prejudice rooted in the days when games were low on text, lacked writers and translators, and were low on budget. Those days, quotes as Congratulation. The story is happy end. Thank you.
were the norm rather than the exception. The "All Your Base" meme is a perfect example of this.
Writing has drastically improved since then, but outside of the video game context -- compared to other media forms -- things are still relatively poor. For example, film has an expectation for quality. You anticipate good writing and, for foreign films, good translations. When that level of refinement is not met, it is very noticeable. When subtitled, it becomes very distracting. "Disterbing", even.
Bad film translations "interrfer" with the enjoyment of the film; this, for the most part, was never a problem with games. But as budgets grow and themes mature, those expectations are slowly changing. More foreign game companies are embracing localization as am essential piece of the puzzle. Even Capcom, notorious for bad translations, is getting in on the act.
The firm's leader acknowledged a lack of polish in previous international conversions of Capcom games, and promised a change in attitude. He said that in the future Capcom would put a lot of time, money and energy into making sure that games ported from Japan to the American and European markets would feature very high-quality localization production values.
It's a good step for the maturation of the industry, but... *sniff* I, for one, am going to miss that irreverent dialogue. A loser is me.
Related Gamasutra article: Lost In Translation--Japanese and American Gaming's Culture Clash
February 01, 2004. General.Comments (6)
"disterbing" is misspelled. It should be spelled "disturbing". I liked the article though. Perhaps after you fix the typo you will want to delete this comment.
-pete
I think you need to take a look at that first screenshot a little more closely, as the spelling was intentional.
Yeah, nostalgia has a lot to do with the appeal of the bad English. but part of that was tolerable because, for the most part, there wasn't that much dialogue or story to begin with. A modern, story driven game written entirely in Engrish would be completely intolerable. But a game with a few scattered, badly translated sentences here and there is "cute".
And yes, it was Versus.
February 2, 2004 12:00 AM. Posted by: nowak.This is true.
February 2, 2004 05:30 AM. Posted by: Walter."A modern, story driven game written entirely in Engrish would be completely intolerable."
Unless, of course, it was a parody game; the videogame analogue of a Mel Brooks spoof where everyone spoke Engrish, and self-consciously poked fun at RPG cliches in an over-the-top humorous way. Man, I'd love to play a game like that. Games take themselves way too damn seriously these days.
February 2, 2004 10:20 AM. Posted by: JP.
I'd still like to see the crap dialogue, but not at the cost of seeing so many potentially great games become so much detritus because they couldn't bother to hire a decent writer.
Also, I tend to think that crap dialogue is better under a haze of nostalgia. That's why "All Your Base" got so popular. When that stuff ceases to be the norm, it opens up the possibility of someone recalling it and concentrating the badness in a way that's more pleasurable than being subjected to it over and over.
Btw, is that Versus?
February 1, 2004 11:32 PM. Posted by: Walter.