Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Intro~

People are about to get mad at me since I still haven't made a post on here, so I guess I better get it over with. ^.^"

Even though it's my summer break I've been running all over the place, so I haven't been around much, but a few weeks ago I translated the dialogue text for the prologue.

Recently I looked at the text in-game in the FEE3 video, and saw a lot of my text had been heavily edited in some manner or another. In particular, the sentence, "There sure are a lot of hopefuls here" seemed to stick out at me...Or should I say 'seemed to stick out and stab me'... XD I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so whenever I'm translating I try to make the best sentences that will carry across the original meaning to the reader. So seeing what I felt were 'perfectly' translated sentences so mutilated/edited left me with mixed feelings. XD

But that's what translation is, especially when dealing with translation from two languages without a common root (for example the Latin languages, such as French, Spanish, and English). There is no correct answer, no 'perfect' translation. The messy truth of translation nearly drove me to insanity, which is why I taught myself Japanese in the first place; so that I could understand what everyone was trying to tell me 'perfectly'.

Despite whatever small grumblings I had (mostly being a matter of pride), it was kind of nice to see my work on display. I have no interest in living the rest of my life out as a translator, as its imperfection would drive me insane, but as a Nintendo fan I'm glad to lend a hand to this project.

To any of you out there waiting excitedly for this translation, I would hope that if you have a similar passion as I and many do in anime, games and the like, that you would over time try to learn Japanese so that you can learn the true meaning that the game creators intended. There's also a lot of great games out there that don't get translated.

To end this, I'll leave you all with a little trivia:
Did you know, that the 'Palace of Darkness' and 'Shadow Temple' from A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time respectively actually have the same name in Japanese? In the original Japanese text, they are both named 闇の神殿->Yami no Shinden.

There's always more to the story, lost in translation.

9 comments:

  1. Woah, hold on there. Does this mean that the patch won't include translated dialogue?

    ReplyDelete
  2. No, the final patch will. Where did you get THAT idea?

    @Snow I'll tell everyone to be pretty careful. I myself haven't made any edits because I don't understand Japanese so it's not my place IMO, but I know Arch takes some liberties sometimes translating things, and Vincent can too. XP

    ReplyDelete
  3. @Blazer
    Snow's translation was perfect as far as I can tell, but I still think we should edit it wherever possible. Not just because some text won't fit without editing (sometimes heavy editing!), but also because some text doesn't sound right for an English speaker or because there are better ways to express it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I guess you're right, I'm also learning japanese so that someday, I can understand the games in their "original language" and to read all the text in the way it should be, like what you said about the shadow temple and the palace of darkness, I didn't knew that but it's something interesting.
    And that happens in other games too, like in the Final Fantasy series, did you all know that in the original japanese games the espers are called "phantom beasts"?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Here's an interesting article you may want to read. http://www.carpefulgur.com/drakblog/?p=14 Of course, these guys aren't exactly the MOST professional outfit there is, so take their experiences with a grain of salt. But it sounds like Snow might be happier if he got more input on the final script to make sure the editors don't change TOO much meaning.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Yeah, I'd be happy to let Snow check out and make suggestions on our edits. We were kind of in a hurry with the Prologue I demo, so we didn't go through the whole procedure with the script (originally we weren't even planning on showcasing Prologue I due to the time constraints).

    ReplyDelete
  7. For the dialogue, can't you just use the text from the FE3 translation? That would reduce the amount of dialogue you would have to translate by a lot.

    ReplyDelete
  8. @Blazer/Aveyn
    I wasn't really trying to criticize anyone as much as I was trying to point out the difficulties/imperfection of translation. XD Editing the text (to make it fit, sound correct, etc.) is a necessary evil in order to make a polished translation that feels transparent to the reader.

    I'm well aware we were in a hurry to meet the deadline for FEE3. And sure, I'd love to get a final look over of the text in the future. ^.^

    ReplyDelete