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“Make It Biblical” – How Vagrant Story Changed Video Game Localization

56 points by drops 9y ago

craigds 9y ago
Initially I thought this was something to do with Hashicorp's Vagrant. It's really not. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrant_Story https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrant_Story
60654 9y ago
I was waiting for the part about how this game "changed video game localization" but it was not there. Just a clickbait title. Overall nice post, though. Translation is hard, and especially getting the feel of a particular place in time. It was neat to see their examples of turning plain Japanese into a quasi-Elizabethan English in order to match the vaguely medieval setting of the game. That's something that's really hard to do (because it's more than translation, now you're reinterpreting the original text)...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ggggtez 9y ago
  I agree it fell short. I thought the party about using more imagery in English than Japanese was interesting. I didn't know that was uncommon in that language.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    I know it's present in Zen poetry, but not sure beyond that. As a semi-related concept, I stumbled across an entry on Haragei [1] (non-verbal, implied meaning?) in Japanese culture yesterday. The myriad of ways that necessary communication is accomplished in different cultures is fascinating. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haragei https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haragei
  - unscaled 9y ago
    It seems like a wild exaggeration to me. Japanese definitely has it's share of imagery and wordplay. It's just that most video game scripts - especially from that era - tend to employ a language that is straightforward and functional at its best and uninspiring and dull at its worst. Japanese does have many forms of imagery though. For a prime example of cheeky imagery in wordplay like the one in the sodliers' dialogue you can probably look no further than Rakugo - which employs wordplay so much that it's notoriously hard to translate.
- AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
  This is why it's really an art. Games have tried using "medieval" dialogue before, but that usually entails something that sounds like 20th century dialogue with a couple substitutions of "thou" for "you" and an occasional "-th" ending on things. Alexander Smith's translation took some care in making it a thorough--I even spotted a few instances where he used an implied verb of motion. In earlier forms of English, verbs of motion like "to go" could be implied rather than explicitly stated (cf. Taming of the Shrew: "Come, Kate, we'll to bed."). It still exists in languages like German but has long since fallen out of favor in English .
  - wolfgke 9y ago
    > It still exists in languages like German Can you give an example where this happens in German? I am a native German speaker, but not aware of such an example.
    - jdmichal 9y ago
      I'm thinking it'd look something like, "kannst du Deutsch?", where the sprechen is implied. I'm not sure I've ever seen it with gehen or other motion verbs, though... And I'm not a native speaker so I can't rely on intuition to say whether something like, "werden wir ins Bett", sounds right without gehen.
      - wolfgke 9y ago
        > I'm thinking it'd look something like, "kannst du Deutsch?", where the sprechen is implied. What I can imagine what you might have had in mind when you wrote your post is something like "Willst du nach Hause?" or "Ich will nach Hause", where indeed that verb of movement is missing. In my opinion (but I am not a linguist or teacher of German) is that in German these verbs "können" (as in your example) or "wollen" are used somewaht differently in German than in English: If one asks "Willst du nach Hause?", one only asks whether the person would prefer to (with which method is undefined) to get home. If you ask "Willst du nach Hause gehen?", it asks the question with a concrete way to get to home ("gehen"). Similar things (though more subtile) hold for your "kannst du Deutsch?" example. Formulated this way it does not specify in which way the other person is capable of German (speaking, understanding, writing etc.). The answer will to this question will often give a hint in which way the answerer is capable of German (speaking, understanding, writing etc.). If you want to ask specifically whether the person is capable of German in a specific way, you add this to your question, such as "Kannst du Deutsch sprechen" (though it would be more idiomatic to formulate this as "Sprechen Sie (auch) Deutsch?"). > I can't rely on intuition to say whether something like, "werden wir ins Bett", sounds right without gehen. This is clearly not correct German. I think you perhaps meant "Wollen wir ins Bett?", which is nevertheless still rather colloquial (better use "Wollen wir ins Bett gehen?"),
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  I was nominally in charge of making Diablo 2 localizeable from the USA side but all I did was make all the text into resources loaded at run time that had some scrolling speed information embedded into so that scrolling text could match different spoken language speeds/text length for text that was more than one over head speech bubble in length. I handed off text data file to a parent company team in Ireland that translated it to all the European languages we supported. We could check the Spanish in house but had to trust them for every other language. I think we had contractors in the Far East do the Japanese/Chinese/Korean translations. The team in Ireland early on provided a function/sprintf format for possessive/of the/gender specific/other idioms that didn't translate well with just substitution so I merged that back into the source code/text data and didn't have to touch the source code after that for localization text resources and we released the game worldwide mostly simultaneously (I think we had a slight delay for Far East for some reason) in 2000. We just used Excel for most of the data driven parts of the game like Vagrant Story and the game could read a text csv file in debug mode and a binary excel file in production. I imagine most games that are something like this now.
  - amake 9y ago
    > I was nominally in charge of making Diablo 2 localizeable This is usually called internationalization (i18n).
GuiA 9y ago
Neat article. For people deeply interested in video game translation, particularly with some knowledge of Japanese, I highly recommend the “Legends of Localization” books, where the author goes into extreme details about how Zelda (first book) and Earthbound (second book) were translated. There’s also a website with similar information (but not as deep) for a whole plethora of games, and a third book (for Super Mario Bros.) is in the works. http://legendsoflocalization.com http://legendsoflocalization.com
shiftoutbox 9y ago
Facebook.
snvzz 9y ago
I wonder if I'm alone on this. For their examples, I do prefer the literal translation, and I can't stand the "localized" one. Why can't we have some respect for the original work? This is a bad trend in game translations, and sadly does extend further than that. I do hope it comes to pass.
- serf 9y ago
  I don't think you're alone in disliking translation 'liberties' , but I don't think most people really like literal translation either. A literal translation of many sentences from Japanese to English (and vice-versa) reorders words to the point of gibberish. Almost every idiom is broken without reinterpretation -- well except for the really good crude ones.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    Or as I saw misattributed to Keynes in a comment here: "It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong." -Carveth Read With humility for one's own skills and respect for the author, there are many times a literal translation would not accomplish the author's intent (in the target language).
  - x1798DE 9y ago
    I don't think anyone would argue for word-level translations without any grammar - that wouldn't even be possible, since there isn't a 1-1 mapping between words in different languages. But for a translation, I think most people want you to do the minimum possible to preserve the original meaning. So no switching "ramen" to "spaghetti" because you think people won't understand.
  - snvzz 9y ago
    > A literal translation of many sentences from Japanese to English (and vice-versa) reorders words to the point of gibberish. To be clear, by not taking liberties what I meant is preserving both meaning and intent. So called localization does often screw with one or the other.
- cholantesh 9y ago
jmduke 9y ago
I like Vagrant Story, and most of the games in its setting (Ivalice) are my favorite in the Final Fantasy series. For a more emblematic example of the script quirks these games employ, The Final Fantasy Tactics remake (War of the Lions) goes much more Shakespearean, for good and ill (you lose some of the most classic lines in the original, like Don't blame us. Blame yourself or God., but the entire thing is more cohesive and vivid) Here's a good side-by-side: https://dekaja.dreamwidth.org/1675.html https://dekaja.dreamwidth.org/1675.html
Feniks 9y ago
Not a fan of changing style. People would be pretty pissed if someone did that to a book wouldn't they? But at least they aimed for accuracy. Not too much American culture and memes. And actual respect for the product and creators! Unheard of in some contemporary videogame localization circles.
- AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
  > People would be pretty pissed if someone did that to a book wouldn't they? Alexander Smith was based in Japan and got Matsuno's blessing for the changes.
dragonfax 9y ago
Loved that game. Dark souls is the spiritual successor to me.

56 points by drops 9y ago

Initially I thought this was something to do with Hashicorp's Vagrant. It's really not. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrant_Story https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrant_Story

60654 9y ago

I was waiting for the part about how this game "changed video game localization" but it was not there. Just a clickbait title. Overall nice post, though. Translation is hard, and especially getting the feel of a particular place in time. It was neat to see their examples of turning plain Japanese into a quasi-Elizabethan English in order to match the vaguely medieval setting of the game. That's something that's really hard to do (because it's more than translation, now you're reinterpreting the original text)...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ggggtez 9y ago
I agree it fell short. I thought the party about using more imagery in English than Japanese was interesting. I didn't know that was uncommon in that language.
- ethbro 9y ago
  I know it's present in Zen poetry, but not sure beyond that. As a semi-related concept, I stumbled across an entry on Haragei [1] (non-verbal, implied meaning?) in Japanese culture yesterday. The myriad of ways that necessary communication is accomplished in different cultures is fascinating. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haragei https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haragei
- unscaled 9y ago
  It seems like a wild exaggeration to me. Japanese definitely has it's share of imagery and wordplay. It's just that most video game scripts - especially from that era - tend to employ a language that is straightforward and functional at its best and uninspiring and dull at its worst. Japanese does have many forms of imagery though. For a prime example of cheeky imagery in wordplay like the one in the sodliers' dialogue you can probably look no further than Rakugo - which employs wordplay so much that it's notoriously hard to translate.
AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
This is why it's really an art. Games have tried using "medieval" dialogue before, but that usually entails something that sounds like 20th century dialogue with a couple substitutions of "thou" for "you" and an occasional "-th" ending on things. Alexander Smith's translation took some care in making it a thorough--I even spotted a few instances where he used an implied verb of motion. In earlier forms of English, verbs of motion like "to go" could be implied rather than explicitly stated (cf. Taming of the Shrew: "Come, Kate, we'll to bed."). It still exists in languages like German but has long since fallen out of favor in English .
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > It still exists in languages like German Can you give an example where this happens in German? I am a native German speaker, but not aware of such an example.
  - jdmichal 9y ago
    I'm thinking it'd look something like, "kannst du Deutsch?", where the sprechen is implied. I'm not sure I've ever seen it with gehen or other motion verbs, though... And I'm not a native speaker so I can't rely on intuition to say whether something like, "werden wir ins Bett", sounds right without gehen.
    - wolfgke 9y ago
      > I'm thinking it'd look something like, "kannst du Deutsch?", where the sprechen is implied. What I can imagine what you might have had in mind when you wrote your post is something like "Willst du nach Hause?" or "Ich will nach Hause", where indeed that verb of movement is missing. In my opinion (but I am not a linguist or teacher of German) is that in German these verbs "können" (as in your example) or "wollen" are used somewaht differently in German than in English: If one asks "Willst du nach Hause?", one only asks whether the person would prefer to (with which method is undefined) to get home. If you ask "Willst du nach Hause gehen?", it asks the question with a concrete way to get to home ("gehen"). Similar things (though more subtile) hold for your "kannst du Deutsch?" example. Formulated this way it does not specify in which way the other person is capable of German (speaking, understanding, writing etc.). The answer will to this question will often give a hint in which way the answerer is capable of German (speaking, understanding, writing etc.). If you want to ask specifically whether the person is capable of German in a specific way, you add this to your question, such as "Kannst du Deutsch sprechen" (though it would be more idiomatic to formulate this as "Sprechen Sie (auch) Deutsch?"). > I can't rely on intuition to say whether something like, "werden wir ins Bett", sounds right without gehen. This is clearly not correct German. I think you perhaps meant "Wollen wir ins Bett?", which is nevertheless still rather colloquial (better use "Wollen wir ins Bett gehen?"),
stevenwoo 9y ago
I was nominally in charge of making Diablo 2 localizeable from the USA side but all I did was make all the text into resources loaded at run time that had some scrolling speed information embedded into so that scrolling text could match different spoken language speeds/text length for text that was more than one over head speech bubble in length. I handed off text data file to a parent company team in Ireland that translated it to all the European languages we supported. We could check the Spanish in house but had to trust them for every other language. I think we had contractors in the Far East do the Japanese/Chinese/Korean translations. The team in Ireland early on provided a function/sprintf format for possessive/of the/gender specific/other idioms that didn't translate well with just substitution so I merged that back into the source code/text data and didn't have to touch the source code after that for localization text resources and we released the game worldwide mostly simultaneously (I think we had a slight delay for Far East for some reason) in 2000. We just used Excel for most of the data driven parts of the game like Vagrant Story and the game could read a text csv file in debug mode and a binary excel file in production. I imagine most games that are something like this now.
- amake 9y ago
  > I was nominally in charge of making Diablo 2 localizeable This is usually called internationalization (i18n).

GuiA 9y ago

Neat article. For people deeply interested in video game translation, particularly with some knowledge of Japanese, I highly recommend the “Legends of Localization” books, where the author goes into extreme details about how Zelda (first book) and Earthbound (second book) were translated. There’s also a website with similar information (but not as deep) for a whole plethora of games, and a third book (for Super Mario Bros.) is in the works. http://legendsoflocalization.com http://legendsoflocalization.com

shiftoutbox 9y ago

Facebook.

snvzz 9y ago

I wonder if I'm alone on this. For their examples, I do prefer the literal translation, and I can't stand the "localized" one. Why can't we have some respect for the original work? This is a bad trend in game translations, and sadly does extend further than that. I do hope it comes to pass.

serf 9y ago
I don't think you're alone in disliking translation 'liberties' , but I don't think most people really like literal translation either. A literal translation of many sentences from Japanese to English (and vice-versa) reorders words to the point of gibberish. Almost every idiom is broken without reinterpretation -- well except for the really good crude ones.
- ethbro 9y ago
  Or as I saw misattributed to Keynes in a comment here: "It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong." -Carveth Read With humility for one's own skills and respect for the author, there are many times a literal translation would not accomplish the author's intent (in the target language).
- x1798DE 9y ago
  I don't think anyone would argue for word-level translations without any grammar - that wouldn't even be possible, since there isn't a 1-1 mapping between words in different languages. But for a translation, I think most people want you to do the minimum possible to preserve the original meaning. So no switching "ramen" to "spaghetti" because you think people won't understand.
- snvzz 9y ago
  > A literal translation of many sentences from Japanese to English (and vice-versa) reorders words to the point of gibberish. To be clear, by not taking liberties what I meant is preserving both meaning and intent. So called localization does often screw with one or the other.
cholantesh 9y ago

jmduke 9y ago

I like Vagrant Story, and most of the games in its setting (Ivalice) are my favorite in the Final Fantasy series. For a more emblematic example of the script quirks these games employ, The Final Fantasy Tactics remake (War of the Lions) goes much more Shakespearean, for good and ill (you lose some of the most classic lines in the original, like Don't blame us. Blame yourself or God., but the entire thing is more cohesive and vivid) Here's a good side-by-side: https://dekaja.dreamwidth.org/1675.html https://dekaja.dreamwidth.org/1675.html

Feniks 9y ago

Not a fan of changing style. People would be pretty pissed if someone did that to a book wouldn't they? But at least they aimed for accuracy. Not too much American culture and memes. And actual respect for the product and creators! Unheard of in some contemporary videogame localization circles.

AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
> People would be pretty pissed if someone did that to a book wouldn't they? Alexander Smith was based in Japan and got Matsuno's blessing for the changes.

dragonfax 9y ago

Loved that game. Dark souls is the spiritual successor to me.