How the famous “comfy shorts” quote worked in Japanese Pokémon (2018)
legendsoflocalization.com
legendsoflocalization.com
I remember playing FFVII in Spanish as a kid, and I cried with laughter at times.
- people talked to Barret using female pronouns half the time.
- Barret constantly mentioned he was cold (in the English version he used “cool” as an expression and it was translated literally).
- NPCs talked about savepoints as if they were a person called Point Saving.
- characters were constantly celebrating things (party was translated as celebration rather than as “your group of people”).
- the mayor of a city was called the City’s largest. (Bad translation from “major” I guess).
LoL has only analyzed older games, but there's a long (Tim Rogers, so very long) video series about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCeN2KjRHZk&list=PLsiJPoHlPq...
This must not necessarily be bad, and can sometimes be a chance. E.g. the German translation of Donald duck pocket books has so much more depth and literary quality than the english originals that the translator herself has her own memorial and grammatic term in Germany¹.
Translations that make things worse are the rule, but it is not impossible to create translations that makes things better, especially if the text quality in the original is lacking involuntarily itself.
An other issues especially for older games was technical limitations: the devs might have squeezed the game content to fit within e.g. cart limits, and the translation would be bound to that regardless of the langage’s “density”.
A similar issue occurs with comics / mangas: speech bubbles might be tight fit for the original and require significantly altering font and size for translations to fit. Not to mention sfx.
Oh no, was the Spanish translation a "retranslation" from Japanese to English to Spanish?
> "Attack while it's tail's up!"
> "It's gonna counterattack with its laser."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us
https://legendsoflocalization.com/qa-smell-ya-later-pokemon/
The Zuiikin English series famously translated "hasta la vista, baby" as a simple "abayo": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ol4QQuIqS0
FF4 has "You spoony bard!".
FF6 had a lot of mature edges smoothed off in translation (as well as more typical translation nuances). Here's an article/interview with the original translator for FF6 (https://www.usgamer.net/articles/ted-woolsey-localization-tr...), and here's a piece (in fact a whole website about game localization...) going through different translations of FF6 (https://legendsoflocalization.com/final-fantasy-vi/)
TFA discusses it here: https://legendsoflocalization.com/lets-investigate-a-miserab...
This happened at the height of "photoshopping", almost like a showcase of the state of the art couched in a meme techno song. Wonder if there will ever be a deepfake equivalent?
I think this comes from なるこ in the original text, but my Japanese is minimal.
That sounds just sort of non-intuitive, but when reading a patent where the accepted US filing used the word "bird clapper" every time a type of logic gate was intended made reading it initially incomprehensible, then bizarre, and finally hilarious.
I've briefly looked at USPT and although I can find references to such phrases in patents, the one I'm looking for appears to have been thankfully fixed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_scare
https://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic/bam-boo
But clappers appear to be clappers, not a water feature:
たんパン
うごき やすくって いいぜ！
おまえも はけば？
short pants
They're comfortable, too.
Why don't you wear them?
Part of the problem is that Japanese does this thing where they label whole statements as “good” with いい. To me, he’s really just saying “it’s great how comfy shorts are!”.
If you translate it robotically, he says “speaking of moving easily, shorts are good!” But we don’t judge clothes like this in English, so it’s weird sounding
Rather, the っ here is just an affectation that makes the speech sound a bit childish. What's being said grammatically is just 「動きやすくていいぜ」.
In English we would just say "Shorts are easy to move around in!" and it wouldn't lose any of the semantic meaning, but I do think TFA's "nice and easy" might preserve some of the "feeling" of the Japanese without sounding unnatural like a word-for-word translation would be.
I'm not a native speaker though so I could still be completely wrong.
Professor Oak: "This is my grandson. He's been your rival since you were both babies. Erm... what was his name again?"
Player: types in a silly/rude name
Professor Oak: "Yes! I remember now! His name was (silly/rude name)!"
I also remember the rival saying "smell ya later". I wonder if this was in the Japanese version and if it was influenced by Milhouse from the Simpsons.
[0]: https://legendsoflocalization.com/qa-smell-ya-later-pokemon/
Square-Enix especially, their games almost all have better scripts in English in Japanese. Which makes sense since they have Western settings; if you're in a "pirate city" like Limsa in FFXIV there's no way to sound "piratey" in Japanese. So they just have no character voice.
Actually, this very game was a good example too. Gen 1 Japanese Pokemon names were really lazy - Zapdos and Jolteon are called "Thunder" and "Thunders".
Japan has a long native tradition of piracy. They're most of the reason China preferred to ship goods over inland canals instead of along the shore.
A historian could probably do a good job coming up with linguistic features in Japanese associated with their historical pirates, but I assume nobody would understand what was meant.
But that's more of a fact about modern Western pop culture (pirates are their own genre!) than about piracy as a historical phenomenon. It's not a Western thing, any more than highway robbery is a Western thing.
>there is no way to sound "piratey"
Do they need to sound piratey for me, the player, to know that they are pirates?
>Zapdos and Jolteon are called "Thunder" and "Thunders".
Is that any less lazy than English names like Seel the seal or Krabby the crab? It doesn't really bother me.
Sometimes, it'd just be really weird if you didn't change things. A lot of Japanese otome/romance tropes seem either rapey or childish in English, and only weebs would appreciate it while the average American woman would just wonder why the male characters are kabedonning or head patting you, so it wouldn't sell. Which is what the creators want it to do.
I also believe that localization corrupts the art piece more than controversial changes, the small things such as what the article is about counts too. It all adds up.
I am also not against the authors changing things for games that are releasing later. Iteration is a natural part of the process and it's possible that the extra time you have for making the international release of the game allows you to refine things that you did not like from the original version.
Was it to appear exotic in both markets? perhaps the respective terms were easier to trademark in each domain. maybe they were a small scrappy game company making it up as they went, there was no real motive behind the names. They just called the english translation what the japanese version was known by at that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_abbreviated_and_contr...
But no, Hideo Kojima and Tetsuya Nomura are just inane writers and there's a lot of pressure to make games unnecessarily long by padding cutscenes out.
The recent FFVII Remake I thought had great writing in both Japanese and English though, which is surprising since I didn't expect it out of that staff.
The original Pokémon does have a strong aesthetic of its own, coming from director Satoshi Tajiri’s fond memories of catching bugs in childhood.