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It’s funny that this line is considered famous as a borderline mistranslation… it shows that English got it relatively easy. I remember playing FFVII in Spanis
by torben-friis 4y ago
It’s funny that this line is considered famous as a borderline mistranslation… it shows that English got it relatively easy.
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).
- anthk 4y agoNowadays you'll find patches to fix that.
- scubbo 4y ago> Cloud "Barrett, be careful!" > "Attack while it's tail's up!" > "It's gonna counterattack with its laser."
- jonny_eh 4y ago> Barret constantly mentioned he was cold (in the English version he used “cool” as an expression and it was translated literally). Oh no, was the Spanish translation a "retranslation" from Japanese to English to Spanish?
- rootsudo 4y agoProbably, but it's a very basic beginners mistake. If you used a dictionary and are on a time limit, I can see it happening.
- wodenokoto 4y agoThat’s very normal. Lots of Manga is translated from German for the smaller markets in Europe.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- astrange 4y agoFFVII's old English translation was also very bad; it was done in a week or two by a native Japanese speaker. 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=PLsiJPoHlPqEEA07AKMQ2Hm2oRLiGkR_uJ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCeN2KjRHZk&list=PLsiJPoHlPq...
- atoav 4y agoDepends on the kind of translation style. I guess the goal of a game translation like that is not primarily to do a faithful translation, but one that fits the target market. 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. --- ¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs
- bombcar 4y agoThe various translations of the Asterix comics have to undergo similar machinations, because they basically have to invent new puns to replace the ones in French.
- masklinn 4y agoThat issue famously occurs for Discworld translation, and very much separates the good translations from the bad ones.
- masklinn 4y ago> I guess the goal of a game translation like that is not primarily to do a faithful translation, but one that fits the target market. 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.