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Translation is always difficult, but especially so when the translator does not know the overall context and intended use of the text. If one is translating a n

Translation is always difficult, but especially so when the translator does not know the overall context and intended use of the text. If one is translating a novel, most of the context necessary to understand, say, a line of dialogue is right on the page. According to a talk I heard about twenty years ago by a game translator working between Japanese and English, however, at that time all translators usually had to work with were isolated bits of text in Excel files. No wonder so many mistakes have crept into localized video games. In her talk, she stressed the importance of actually playing through the game while translating, but said that the finished game often wasn't available and that deadlines or low translation rates could make that unfeasible. I was a freelance translator myself at the time, mostly doing business-related texts, and her talk did not make me want to go into video game translation.

PhasmaFelis 7y ago
I recently played through a PC platformer called Rive. The voice actor was actually really good (and voiced both protagonist and the antagonist in completely different styles), but it was painfully obvious that (a) English wasn't the dialogue writer's first language, and (b) they'd given the the script to the voice actor as standalone strings, so his tone and emphasis didn't always make sense in context. Not quite the same thing, but another consequence of the person creating the final dialogue not having access to context, and there's really no excuse for that. Even if the dialogue is only available as a spreadsheet, the writer should have included context cues and stage directions.
baroffoos 7y ago
I recently had an experience getting software translated to Japanese. Just to test things while the translators were working I ran the all the yml files through google translate and then when we got the proper translations back I had a look at some of the things that changed that I would not expect to. One interesting one is we had translations for status indicators (Red, Amber, Green) The real translator had translated these to the Japanese versions of Red, Yellow and Green but google translated had picked the word for "fossilized resin" rather than the color. Since google translate is not using any context it has no way to know if I meant the color or the material.
- fenomas 7y ago
  FYI, google translate for Japanese is pretty unreliable for lone uncommon words. It seems to rely heavily on internet-trained ML, and does pretty well with phrases and sentences, but for single words I see it return nonsense fairly often. As an alternative, https://jisho.org/ https://jisho.org/ is super easy to use and hasn't let me down yet.
  - naniwaduni 7y ago
    In the other direction, I've seen gtl invert the meaning of sentences on subtle variations of the なければ pattern, which is probably a fairly small error in the problem space but, well, inverts the meaning of the sentence. A good reminder that parallel corpus machine learning does not see the world the same way you do.
  - amyjess 7y ago
    Personally, when I'm checking a translation, I like to use WWWJDIC's text glossing mode: https://www.edrdg.org/cgi-bin/wwwjdic/wwwjdic?9T https://www.edrdg.org/cgi-bin/wwwjdic/wwwjdic?9T The thing with my Japanese skills is that my grammar is excellent, but my vocabulary is limited, so a gloss of the kanji in a sentence is _massively_ useful to me (and kanji is a double-edged sword: I recognize far more words in hiragana (or when spoken) than in kanji, but kanji is pretty much necessary for a dictionary to have any decent idea of what the word is). I'll have to give Jisho a try though.
- hiccuphippo 7y ago
  Fun question: did the translators use green or blue for the green translation? Green (midori) is a newish word and semaphores, traditionally, use blue (aoi) when referring to the green light. This is something I assume translators would be able to catch that would be much more difficult for translation software.
rozab 7y ago
I wonder if the talk you heard was related to this[0]? It's a good read. They also were working with massive spreadsheets, but also with a huge franchise that required a lot of internal consistency. [0]: https://kotaku.com/the-curse-of-kiseki-how-one-of-japans-biggest-rpgs-bar-1740055631 https://kotaku.com/the-curse-of-kiseki-how-one-of-japans-big...
Legogris 7y ago
One great example of that was how in some later Sims game (2 or 3), one of the actions possible on a bonsai tree in the Swedish version is "Katrinplommon", translated from "prune" - unfortunately, prune as in a dried plum, not the pruning of plants.
- elygre 7y ago
  Ah, nice! I guess all languages have legions of these. In Norway, dell sold computers with “brannkabel”, or “burn cable” [1]. [1] IEEE 1394 — FireWire.
  - toyg 7y ago
    Considering the eventual hackability of Firewire, maybe the translation was prescient... you’re gonna get burnt by that cable!
    - ejolto 7y ago
      That makes no sense in context of Norwegian as "get burnt by" is an English idiom. Closest Norwegian equivalent to getting burnt I can think of is "å få lang nese" which translates into "to get a long nose", e.g. you get a long nose when someone tricks you. So in that case the cable should be called IEEE 1394 — LongNose. Translation is difficult..
  - jimnotgym 7y ago
    Would it be normal to not translate these into languages that share the Latin alphabet at least?
- rags2riches 7y ago
  In English most nouns can also be a verb, or vice versa, without the word changing at all. In some ways it is a feature, but it also leads to terrible outcomes like this. Words like "comment" and "reply" are often translated without context to the wrong class of word.
hatsubai 7y ago
I have experience in this. I translated exclusive Japanese-only content for a game for the PSP from Japanese into English (fan translation, not professional). At the time, I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. It was just myself and a python hacker who was extracting the script, and I was essentially handed the entire script within a Google Sheets document. Given how context-heavy Japanese is, it was nearly impossible to translate exactly what was going on as the Google Sheets only contained the additional content and not the full game script. Even if I did have the game script, there are still certain contextual things which are only realized when seeing what was happening to the characters on the screen. I ended up watching an entire "Let's Play" of the series in order to get the gist of the story, get the character names correct, and see how the original translators localized everything. I took cues from their localization and did the best take I could at the time in order to translate it while balancing heavy workloads at school. I'm both somewhat proud of the translation and somewhat disappointed in it. I feel as if I could do a much better job if I had more free time to update it, but localization is kinda like an art. Very few people will translate the same content the same way - even the same person might translate the same lines differently at different points in time. I do something completely different these days and don't get to utilize my Japanese nearly as much, but I'd definitely be up for another game translation again. While you may be bound by certain external forces (pre-localized content you need to mesh with, author's wishes, censorship, etc), there is still a lot of freedom and liberty in localizing. After all, it's your job to retell this story as best you can to your target audience, and it requires both knowing the source material's culture, as well as your own. In fact, it probably requires knowing your target culture even more so, and it's this type of creative challenge that really got me excited back in the day.

PhasmaFelis 7y ago

I recently played through a PC platformer called Rive. The voice actor was actually really good (and voiced both protagonist and the antagonist in completely different styles), but it was painfully obvious that (a) English wasn't the dialogue writer's first language, and (b) they'd given the the script to the voice actor as standalone strings, so his tone and emphasis didn't always make sense in context. Not quite the same thing, but another consequence of the person creating the final dialogue not having access to context, and there's really no excuse for that. Even if the dialogue is only available as a spreadsheet, the writer should have included context cues and stage directions.

baroffoos 7y ago

I recently had an experience getting software translated to Japanese. Just to test things while the translators were working I ran the all the yml files through google translate and then when we got the proper translations back I had a look at some of the things that changed that I would not expect to. One interesting one is we had translations for status indicators (Red, Amber, Green) The real translator had translated these to the Japanese versions of Red, Yellow and Green but google translated had picked the word for "fossilized resin" rather than the color. Since google translate is not using any context it has no way to know if I meant the color or the material.

fenomas 7y ago
FYI, google translate for Japanese is pretty unreliable for lone uncommon words. It seems to rely heavily on internet-trained ML, and does pretty well with phrases and sentences, but for single words I see it return nonsense fairly often. As an alternative, https://jisho.org/ https://jisho.org/ is super easy to use and hasn't let me down yet.
- naniwaduni 7y ago
  In the other direction, I've seen gtl invert the meaning of sentences on subtle variations of the なければ pattern, which is probably a fairly small error in the problem space but, well, inverts the meaning of the sentence. A good reminder that parallel corpus machine learning does not see the world the same way you do.
- amyjess 7y ago
  Personally, when I'm checking a translation, I like to use WWWJDIC's text glossing mode: https://www.edrdg.org/cgi-bin/wwwjdic/wwwjdic?9T https://www.edrdg.org/cgi-bin/wwwjdic/wwwjdic?9T The thing with my Japanese skills is that my grammar is excellent, but my vocabulary is limited, so a gloss of the kanji in a sentence is _massively_ useful to me (and kanji is a double-edged sword: I recognize far more words in hiragana (or when spoken) than in kanji, but kanji is pretty much necessary for a dictionary to have any decent idea of what the word is). I'll have to give Jisho a try though.
hiccuphippo 7y ago
Fun question: did the translators use green or blue for the green translation? Green (midori) is a newish word and semaphores, traditionally, use blue (aoi) when referring to the green light. This is something I assume translators would be able to catch that would be much more difficult for translation software.

rozab 7y ago

I wonder if the talk you heard was related to this[0]? It's a good read. They also were working with massive spreadsheets, but also with a huge franchise that required a lot of internal consistency. [0]: https://kotaku.com/the-curse-of-kiseki-how-one-of-japans-biggest-rpgs-bar-1740055631 https://kotaku.com/the-curse-of-kiseki-how-one-of-japans-big...

Legogris 7y ago

One great example of that was how in some later Sims game (2 or 3), one of the actions possible on a bonsai tree in the Swedish version is "Katrinplommon", translated from "prune" - unfortunately, prune as in a dried plum, not the pruning of plants.

elygre 7y ago
Ah, nice! I guess all languages have legions of these. In Norway, dell sold computers with “brannkabel”, or “burn cable” [1]. [1] IEEE 1394 — FireWire.
- toyg 7y ago
  Considering the eventual hackability of Firewire, maybe the translation was prescient... you’re gonna get burnt by that cable!
  - ejolto 7y ago
    That makes no sense in context of Norwegian as "get burnt by" is an English idiom. Closest Norwegian equivalent to getting burnt I can think of is "å få lang nese" which translates into "to get a long nose", e.g. you get a long nose when someone tricks you. So in that case the cable should be called IEEE 1394 — LongNose. Translation is difficult..
- jimnotgym 7y ago
  Would it be normal to not translate these into languages that share the Latin alphabet at least?
rags2riches 7y ago
In English most nouns can also be a verb, or vice versa, without the word changing at all. In some ways it is a feature, but it also leads to terrible outcomes like this. Words like "comment" and "reply" are often translated without context to the wrong class of word.

hatsubai 7y ago

I have experience in this. I translated exclusive Japanese-only content for a game for the PSP from Japanese into English (fan translation, not professional). At the time, I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. It was just myself and a python hacker who was extracting the script, and I was essentially handed the entire script within a Google Sheets document. Given how context-heavy Japanese is, it was nearly impossible to translate exactly what was going on as the Google Sheets only contained the additional content and not the full game script. Even if I did have the game script, there are still certain contextual things which are only realized when seeing what was happening to the characters on the screen. I ended up watching an entire "Let's Play" of the series in order to get the gist of the story, get the character names correct, and see how the original translators localized everything. I took cues from their localization and did the best take I could at the time in order to translate it while balancing heavy workloads at school. I'm both somewhat proud of the translation and somewhat disappointed in it. I feel as if I could do a much better job if I had more free time to update it, but localization is kinda like an art. Very few people will translate the same content the same way - even the same person might translate the same lines differently at different points in time. I do something completely different these days and don't get to utilize my Japanese nearly as much, but I'd definitely be up for another game translation again. While you may be bound by certain external forces (pre-localized content you need to mesh with, author's wishes, censorship, etc), there is still a lot of freedom and liberty in localizing. After all, it's your job to retell this story as best you can to your target audience, and it requires both knowing the source material's culture, as well as your own. In fact, it probably requires knowing your target culture even more so, and it's this type of creative challenge that really got me excited back in the day.