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I've only played a a handful of text heavy fan-translated games and while I'm always grateful for the chance to experience media I couldn't otherwise at pretty

I've only played a a handful of text heavy fan-translated games and while I'm always grateful for the chance to experience media I couldn't otherwise at pretty much any level, I've never been very impressed with the results. Even without access to the original text you can often find sections of dialog are clearly just rewritten with whatever the translator thought was hilarious, 4kids-tier localization, and errors that could have been caught by letting even one person fluent in the language it was translated to/from read it over. It's hard to complain about something that takes a ton of work and is given freely, but I can't help but notice that fan-subs of TV/film seem to be of much better quality. It may be that text heavy games are so much more time consuming, and game translations often seem to be solo-projects (which is damn impressive, even though the end result seems to suffer for it). I haven't gotten into fan-subbed novels, but I wonder if they tend to have the same problems.

wodenokoto 3y ago
Like you said, it’s hard to complain about other peoples free effort, so let me complain about people’s praises: No the final fantasy III/VI fan translation is not better than the official. You don’t even need to look at the original Japanese to know that “imperial witch” is correct and “imperial bitch” is not what is being said.
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ogurechny 3y ago
Translators get their degrees for a reason. While they can't make everyone into a master, they can help with avoiding mistakes most amateurs do. Then, of course, there's a question of personal breadth. If a person imagines that lively characters talk like they are in a sitcom, there is little you can do about it. Consider that Vladimir Nabokov rarely, if ever, mentioned that one of the very first works published under his Russian pseudonym was a translation of “Alice in Wonderland”. It was a very thorough work in which each twist was given a match from more or less similar saying, poem, nursery rhyme, etc. Alice became Anya, and names got translated to something familiar to kids. The thing is, one might wonder where Lewis Carroll was in that. What is worse, because of the Revolution, almost all of the rhymes and jokes to which he alluded would be unused by next generations both inside and outside the country, and therefore forgotten.
imtringued 3y ago
https://www.romhacking.net/reviews/1718/#review https://www.romhacking.net/reviews/1718/#review (also look at the other reviews)

wodenokoto 3y ago

Like you said, it’s hard to complain about other peoples free effort, so let me complain about people’s praises: No the final fantasy III/VI fan translation is not better than the official. You don’t even need to look at the original Japanese to know that “imperial witch” is correct and “imperial bitch” is not what is being said.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ogurechny 3y ago

Translators get their degrees for a reason. While they can't make everyone into a master, they can help with avoiding mistakes most amateurs do. Then, of course, there's a question of personal breadth. If a person imagines that lively characters talk like they are in a sitcom, there is little you can do about it. Consider that Vladimir Nabokov rarely, if ever, mentioned that one of the very first works published under his Russian pseudonym was a translation of “Alice in Wonderland”. It was a very thorough work in which each twist was given a match from more or less similar saying, poem, nursery rhyme, etc. Alice became Anya, and names got translated to something familiar to kids. The thing is, one might wonder where Lewis Carroll was in that. What is worse, because of the Revolution, almost all of the rhymes and jokes to which he alluded would be unused by next generations both inside and outside the country, and therefore forgotten.

imtringued 3y ago

https://www.romhacking.net/reviews/1718/#review https://www.romhacking.net/reviews/1718/#review (also look at the other reviews)