The Story of Metal Gear Solid’s English Translation | Hacker News Reader

The Story of Metal Gear Solid’s English Translation

polygon.com

124 pointsdanso39 comments

I love Japanese entertainment. I'm not a native speaker of either, but I often use English subtitles with Japanese audio, because my English is better than my Japanese. As a result of having both languages in front of me at the same time, I often notice when translators take liberties and sometimes even rewrite entire personalities of characters, and it has always annoyed me a lot.

This article was great for helping me understand the motivations for localizing stories and characters (instead of simply translating them). I certainly don't blame the author (and other translators) for trying to provide the American audience with what they think is the best possible experience. But for anybody who isn't American, the localization might be entirely wasted - there's a good chance that they're just as familiar with Japanese culture and history as they are with American culture and history.

What's worse, in cases where the localization is wildly different from the original, the audience probably doesn't have any way of knowing it. It would be fair to tell the audience when the localization is inspired by or based on the original, instead of a direct translation of it. Otherwise, consumers can be misled to thinking they like or dislike a certain writer, while in reality their opinion is based entirely on a translator.

Slightly related: in Final Fantasy XIV, a character in the main story was COMPLETELY changed for the English version of the game. Playing in Japanese, I grew quite fond of the character, so when the character eventually died in the story, it had an actual impact for me. A friend of mine plays the same game exclusively in English, and when I discussed the death with him, he told me that this character was completely forgettable for him and he didn't even really remember the circumstances of the death. I'm fairly certain that the lack of impact for him was entirely because of the localization.

Very relevant: https://youtu.be/YvNxgHTWIlo

I am a monolingual English player, and I suspect you're referencing events that culminate in the player receiving a ruined shield. If so, I will say that while the character was nearly forgettable as of your very first encounters, they rapidly evolve when brought properly into the spotlight, and I was devastated by their death.

tl;dr I don't know what your friend is on, but I disgaree

It goes one step further. I've noticed that sometimes parts of the Swedish subtitles are poor translations of the English translation, rather than a direct translation of the original.

This is especially noticeable when you have an English idiom translated word by word to Swedish in a Chinese or Japanese movie.

The baffling Spanish translation of FFVII was quite (in)famous for that. So much so, that one of the most famous pieces of comedy gold from the internet of that time was a "let's play" series made using captioned screencaps, in which the author would sarcastically take any mistranslation literally.

This "alternate story" included:

- introducing a new character called "Pointsave" (the translation for some reason refered to saving spots as people by using proper names)

- a deep drama surrounding Tifa and Barret's experiences as transgender people (since the translation arbitrarily referred to them with male and female adjectives, switching mid-sentence)

- characters continuously getting drunk in fiestas (since the common references to "your party" were translated to mean "your party events" rather than "your group of people").

> characters continuously getting drunk in fiestas (since the common references to "your party" were translated to mean "your party events" rather than "your group of people").

I "fondly" remember getting to the first village outside, and being told "Tu fiesta te espera arriba" (Your fiesta/party is waiting for you upstairs). And there were the characters, all moody and sad, and I was thinking that it was a really shitty party. Until I mentally translated it back to English and understood.

I wonder if there's any source of information where I can get specific examples of this issue. It would be quite curious to see side by side comparisons on how stories differ, and see if there's any general trend.

It's not a "source of information" but a "specific example": the robotech RPG manuals (or at least some of them 90's editions, not the main one but the companions) had an appendix where they delved into the differencies between the US and Japanese translations. Looks like not just technical terms, but some plot lines diverted fairly from the original

Wouldn't that have to be the case as Robotech is a US combination of 2 unrelated Japanese cartoons?

https://legendsoflocalization.com/ is a blog all about this kind of thing.

The other day I tweeted with one of the localisers behind Half Minute Hero / 勇者30 , a silly RPG-esque game. They did this with one of the stages: it was a sepia level, harkening back to the NES (and slightly before) era. In Japanese, the bad guy spoke in spaced katakana, like the old Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Pokemon games. The reference was immediately understandable and cute.

You can easily do the same in English by using ALL CAPS, AND SILLY PHRASING WITH LOTS OF PUNCTUATION!!! In my opinion (native English, but not alive in the NES era), that would work great. But they didn't: they instead replaced all his dialog with various lines from the classic "all your base" meme/translation. It's a departure from the original - still works well, still funny, though in a different way.

Different translators think differently. I love seeing how that impacts things. (Also shoutouts to Square Enix's localisation team, they are usually INCREDIBLE. I have even more love for Crisis Core after playing it in Japanese.)

I have had very similar experiences to the author when doing a magazine translation job from Japanese to English. Very regularly the editor would take issue with me writing an English translation that sounded natural but didn't use a word with the exact same meaning and part of speech as the original.

Having worked in translation for a little while, bad and awkward translations really do stand out a mile. "How nostalgic!" is such a common way to translate "懐かしい” but I've never heard anyone say that in English.

The distance between the languages will always leave the translator with a sizable challenge. It's a real shame to hear the Kojima was not on board with this style of translation.

Yup, almost everything in I have ever worked with in Japanese to English translation has been shackled by the need to produce English translations optimized for English speaking Japanese readers.

> It's a real shame to hear the Kojima was not on board with this style of translation.

I have to agree - I found the dialog to be a high point in MGS1 and a low point for later installments, where Kojima's more florid moments sometimes came across as gibberish when directly translated.

But I guess the counterpoint would be, Kojima seems to have been consciously trying to form an auteur presence (he had that whole "a Hideo Kojima game by Hideo Kojima in association with Hideo Kojima" thing going on). So one can easily imagine him bristling at the idea of having someone else's fingerprints on the final product.

I did a fair amount of scanlation back in the day (very obscure manga). One of the things I liked about scanlation was being able write hacked up English on the assumption that the reader knew enough about Japanese culture/language to make the leap from awkward English to Japanese concept. But, if I was writing for a larger audience I think it would be incredibly difficult to write idiomatic English and still capture the Japanese sense of the sentence. I'm in awe when I see people who are successful. I'm convinced you have to be an incredibly good writer of English to be able to pull it off (which I am not ;-) ).

I admit do having a wave of nostalgia now :-) Few things brought me as much pleasure as scanlation...

    One of the things I liked about scanlation was being 
    able write hacked up English on the assumption that 
    the reader knew enough about Japanese culture/language 
    to make the leap from awkward English to Japanese concept.

First of all, thank you to you and the other scanslators of the world. You made a lot of things possible for your readers!

Translating manga must be so tough. At least in anime, if you're watching English subtitles, you can hear the characters speaking in Japanese which helps to retain some of the original meaning. I don't speak Japanese, but I can recognize at least certain things like honorifics that convey a lot of meaning... that adds a lot of meaning to the subtitles I'm reading.

But with manga, there's no such luxury... you did a really challenging job.

Highly recommend checking out this hour long interview with Jeremy Blaustein, the author of the linked article, who worked on the Silent Hill franchise among other things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DB5GFiTRig

He gives a lot of background on how the industry was at the time, not that much earlier than the MGS release. It boils down to basically being a wild west of sorts from what I remember.

Similarly, I can also recommend the rest of TheGrateDebate's YouTube channel. It's a group of Silent Hill fans talking about Silent Hill things with high production qualities. I don't even think you have to be much of a SH fan to enjoy their works.

On a side note, I was reading Jeremy's twitter feed a few weeks ago and I believe he was likely tapped to write this in response to an MGS story he shared: https://twitter.com/JeremyBlaustein/status/11431327794014699...

There are many parts of this game that are burned into my memory. It was such a deeply voice-acted game with so much emotional content. The gameplay was fun to repeat because there were different ways to approach each challenge. Reading up on the lexicon of the US military explains the use of the word “pineapples” to describe hand grenades when Snake is speaking over comm on the first level. This article gives context to many of the lines that have stuck with me.

There is a chapter of Metal Gear Solid 4 that takes place in a modern remake of the first level and one of the later levels of the original. There is even a playable version of the original that comes up in a dream sequence. The dedication that the crew has had for their work from the original and on is remarkable.

Great article. I don't agree with the choices made by the translator (I think any attempt to "satisfy the marketplace" will always corrupt a translation), but I admire the enormous effort spent researching for his translation.

Here is another article on translation posted a few days ago to HN that I think contrasts this one nicely:

Stephen Snyder, "The Murakami Effect" @ LitHub (https://lithub.com/the-murakami-effect/)

HN Discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20389112)

> any attempt to "satisfy the marketplace" will always corrupt a translation

I don't know how you're getting this from the article - everything he says about his efforts boils down to trying to change language that sounds flat and lifeless in translation into something that lives and breathes, and I think he's absolutely right to have made that attempt. (even if he misses the mark sometimes, like with the castlevania "what is a man?" bit...)

Living in JP I wind up seeing a lot of movies and TV with one language in the audio and the other in subtitles, and personally, "faithful" translations drive me bonkers with how flat and boring and explanatory they sound.

My pet theory is that it ultimately stems from the source languages being so linguistically different. I once read a book where the translator said in his notes (about Voltaire) "But mostly I've just tried to stay out of his way, for I find that he speaks very good English already", and I've often thought how hard it is to imagine a JP>EN translator feeling the same way.

I think a less accurate translation can sometimes result in a better product, but the translator needs to be very good to pull it off. The most notable example I can think of is Vagrant Story, which was widely praised for its localization.

Example from The GIA's review[0]:

"Lines as bland in the original Japanese as

"It is because you acknowledge things like freedom of belief. There can be only one God. This sort of incident occurs because you let heretics like them out of your control. That, and our parliament is impotent..."

become:

"All because of this religious freedom! Too much freedom, too many gods. Let those cultist cur-dogs run loose, and they will bite you. Gods! While our Parliament cowers...""

But if a bad writer tries this then you get Working Designs' localization style, where they "improved" the originals with unfunny 4th-wall-breaking jokes and references.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20010608201912/http://www.thegia...

Another controversial translation is the English localization of the "Ghost Stories" anime [1], which the authors were desperate to sell to Western audiences despite flopping in Japan. The show is full of hard-to-translate cultural references, so the translators quite drastically changed the tone of the show.

I would say Ghost Stories is a successful example of "satisfying the market" via something like an "official parody" of the original work, but it definitely doesn't remain faithful to the original. I'm glad it exists, and it has creative value, but it definitely fails as a "translation".

[1]: https://dubbing.fandom.com/wiki/Ghost_Stories (not sure

The result is genuinely hilarious. I'm sure I wouldn't have enjoyed a faithful translation nearly as much.

Hm, I get a different impression from the article. In both examples the author gave, I preferred the "improved" translation over the author's translation! And these were his hand-picked examples! Needless to say, I'm one of the people the author mentions who find more faithful translations "endearing" even when they have small mistakes.

I think I mainly take issue with "cultural translations" that intentionally alters a story (even slightly) in order to make the characters/plot/context more appealing to western audiences. When I consume translated media, I appreciate it when the translator makes an attempt to preserve the aspects which made the work appealing to the original audience.

I don't think the right question is whether translations are "faithful" or "cultural", I think it's whether they translate what was said, or what a native speaker would have said in a similar situation. To me, when JP dialog is translated precisely the results tend to sound overly neutral and explanatory - i.e. you get flat dialog that an English speaker wouldn't say. So the choice before the translator is either to sound unnatural or to editorialize.

But I think there's a second-order thing going on, where audiences who consume a lot of anime/JRPGs/etc are used to a certain kind of translation, and dialog that's too colorful or expressive winds up not sounding "proper" because one isn't used to anime characters talking that way. E.g. when an anime character makes a cultural reference that will be incomprehensible to non-Japanese audiences, I think a lot of anime fans will expect that to be translated "faithfully" (i.e. incomprehensibly), rather than be replaced with a reference they're familiar with (even if the replacement conveys the same meaning to them that the original conveyed to JP audiences).

Regarding your second point--I don't believe that e.g. Japanese cultural references can be replaced with something that has the "same meaning" to Western audiences. If I don't understand a reference, I try to look it up later. I see it see as an opportunity to learn more about the experiences of people who are different from me. It's frustrating to me when e.g. "onigiri" is translated as "hamburger" in an anime.

By cultural reference I meant things like a character quoting a JP movie or saying the catchphrase of a JP comedian - where if translated directly the line would be understandable, but not actually meaningful, to non-Japanese speakers.

Kojima seems to have two distinct sides. One is pure genius, the other is not so great. The former made Policenauts, Snatcher, Metal Gear 2, MGS, MGS3, Peace Walker. The latter fired Jeremy Blaustein, David Hayter, came up with vampires and flying whales for no good reason, wrote endless unnecessary cut-scenes for MGS4 that take themselves too seriously, came up with the script for MGS5.

I'm convinced that no one really knows what the hell happened at the end of MGS2. The story flew so far off the rails that I stopped playing the games in the series after that.

I was the same. Only nearly a decade later did I give MGS3 a go, and was not disappointed - it was more like MGS1 than MGS2 and is one of the best in the series.

MGS4 follows right in MGS2 footsteps and I would say better skipped. Peace Walker is surprisingly good, although parts of it towards the end get tedious. MGS5 goes back to weirdness, although a particular sniper's story line has some merit to it.

I actually think that Ghost Babel (the Japanese name) on the Game Boy Color is a really underrated game. It's worth checking out if you have avoided it because of it being a portable game. It has a fairly elaborate story, a delayed intro scene, and actually pretty decent graphics for the GBC.

Parts of it are deliberately nonsensical (you essentially just drugged an AI that has the ability to feed false information to your senses), but yeah, even the "real" parts are pretty wild. If you haven't seen it already, you might get a kick out of the "External Gazer" side story added to MGS2: Substance, which is widely regarded as self-parody of that aspect.

Yeah, I was referring to the "real" parts; I understand that the "I NEED SCISSORS 61!!!!" stuff is purposefully trippy, but the cutscene with the woman who can deflect bullets but not really then you're suddenly swordfighting with your father or something because of the internet(?) really confused me.

I'll check out External Gazer.

Kojima's a good example of how limitless creative freedom doesn't produce the best work. Tarantino is another. Even the best creative minds need a voice questioning whether a vampire licking a knife over and over again is a good addition to a spy thriller.

I love Jeremy, I've followed him for a while on Twitter. He comes across as self-confident and prideful of his work, which is great and perfect for a good translator (which he certainly is). Shame Kojima didn't agree at the time, I imagine he's a very proud person as well.

I left a comment the first time this was posted, but to reiterate, the MGS translations were excellent (and arguably better than later installments, though MGS3 was pretty high quality too).

Jeremy played a huge part in launching an incredibly successful series. I hope he doesn't feel too put out by Kojima's reaction.

I watched through most of the interesting MGS3 codec scenes in Japanese (after playing it in English years ago). It had an absurdly great script in both languages (perhaps better Japanese VAs). I'm a bit biased towards it though because it's one of the best games ever made IMO.

MGS was certainly memorable, moreso than MGS2 or MGS4 (lmao) for me.

Even though MGS was my favorite game I never really like MGS5. Any suspension of disbelief was ruined with awkward lines like, "You're a legend in the eyes of those who live on the battlefield."

The dialogue in MGS5 was absolutely horrible:

1. Because of the change of voice actors, I literally could not tell who was speaking at any given time. Everyone sounded the same.

2. None of it was believable, funny, interesting or relevant. Peace Walker had a very similar concept in terms of storytelling (through tapes) and gameplay (base management), but was infinitely better. I just really did not care about any of the tapes in MGS5. In PW the tapes were funny and interesting and you actually learned something.

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