Before I ramble at length about translation philosophies, I'll just quickly throw up a link to an old interview Hardcore Gaming 101 did with Agness Kaku, the woman behind the localizations for Metal Gear Solid 2, the Katamari Damacy series, and a whole host of other games. I think she does a better job of articulating what's often at stake when translating games like VC3 than I do and my general translation philosophies more or less line up completely with hers. Just so there's a little bit more background on where someone like me might be coming from when voicing concerns about this stuff.
@yyninja: It's entirely possible my experience with the source material is biasing my views on the translation to a degree. On some level, as a translator, I approach the original Japanese like I would a reader does of most any piece of fiction in general, bringing to bear my interpretations of characters and events, which in turn influences how I emotionally react to the material and, when I'm translating said material into English, reinterpreting it for another language. Coming from experience, you'll never get two translators to agree entirely about how to go about translating a given work since we all have different ideas about what needs to be emphasized, what can be safely dropped, and what needs a little imaginative massaging to make the underlying messages viable in the new language. In that sense, I feel that the translation is mostly successful in terms of technical consistency with the official Sega localizations since the basic terminology and whatnot is the same, but is perhaps lacking from my perspective in terms of respective Sega's stylistic approaches to dialog and whatnot. I'm sure some people will disagree with me on this, but when there's already some sort of precedence to work with in cases like this where you're dealing in untranslated sequels or supplementary material for works that have previously had translations and that precedence has been adequately well-received, I personally err on the side of caution and try to replicate that existing style, largely because it's what that foreign audience has come to expect. Maybe I'm still asking a lot of a free fan effort, but these are the sorts of questions that run through my mind personally as someone who's done this sort of work professionally before. Obviously there are compromises that have be made in part because of various technical limitations that are usually inherent to game translations specifically, but even knowing that, I feel like this patch could have really benefitted from some extra editing passes. I don't even necessarily mean from another translator like me; oftentimes when it's possible, it's good to just have a regular editor versed only in the target language go through the translated materials and punch stuff up. They're often the secret sauce behind the best localizations like what Nier and Hotel Dusk have gotten.
@video_game_king: I rarely dabble in translation patches since obviously I'm not their audience anymore, but I'd argue that there are definitely patches that avoid going the completely literal route and benefit hugely from it. Mother 3 is a case where a professional translator actually worked on that game for free and that game's patch was extremely well received in English in part because it's just well-written in its own respect. In cases where games are written by proper authors like Shigesato Itoi, that extra nuance and deftness in translating is necessary even more so than usual since going a purely literal route means that foreign players risk missing out on the sense of the depth that's present in the original Japanese. Preserving the heart and emotional substance in such translations is a lot more important than pure semantics. It's easy to find words with analogous meanings across languages if you brute force it with a dictionary, but it's another thing altogether to make a foreign audience react the same way as the native audience did to a given passage.
@tobbrobb: To be certain, I agree that more overtly literal translations and more overtly creative ones each have their place. If I'm working on academic or legal materials, I'm absolutely going to play my translations pretty straight and narrow and not really mess around with semantics and word choice. If there's a generally accepted translation for a given wording or phrase, I'll adhere to those standards unless I have a good reason to deviate and then I'll still make sure that change is noted accordingly. But speaking from experience, in the end, you never really have purely one type of translation. Human languages didn't all grow up side-by-side in the same ways; historical and cultural divergences over the course of hundreds and hundreds of years has resulted in different languages approaching the same sorts of situations from different philosophical perspectives, which influences the underlying meanings of even the most basic words to native speakers amongst the various languages. It's most obvious when you deal in something like Japanese and English like I do where it's readily apparent just how isolated the two cultures have historically been, but it's true even for languages that are related to them. It doesn't take much for languages to end up on different tangents that affect how their speakers look at the world around them and interact with it. So to some degree, the way I see it as a translator myself, translation is always a bit more of an art than a science because what's ultimately being transferred between languages isn't merely words, but a whole mindset, so to speak.
The end goal of translation, fundamentally, speaking is to evoke the original material's embedded thoughts and sentiments using analogous language that the new audience can find relatable. In that sense, being too literal (ie: formulaically translating specific words the same way time and again) is often problematic because it can neglect things like connotations, whether that's because something critical has been lost in translation or the wrong thing has been added in the new language altogether because of carelessness. It's true even for seemingly rigid documents like in those academic and legal cases I cited earlier; the right sort of rigidity needs to present across languages or misunderstandings can occur really fast. That's why despite the perceived blandness of that sort of translation work those people are among the best paid in the business because they need to be aware of those potential pitfalls and compose their translations accordingly. Similarly, overly liberal translations obviously risk losing sight of the intentions and sentiments present in the original material, as that wording and structure in the source naturally has to exist in the state that it does for some reason. That source needs to be consulted as a sort of foundation or else the translation risks veering so far away from the creative charms that defined the source material that it might as well be considered original work in its own right. It's tricky work and far be it for me to claim that I'm perfect as a translator, either. I'm just disappointed in the approach I've seen the team take with this game when I don't think it was particularly suitable given the medium and thematic ground it covers.
So yeah, I guess this is my way of saying that I ultimately agree with you. The best case scenario for translations is where you strike that balance and the new audience doesn't notice that there's an inherent balance towards one over the other. For me personally, since I mostly work in fiction, that means I pay close attention to the semantics and whatnot of the original material, but essentially reconstruct it so the same basic meanings and emotions can be conveyed anew in the most natural-sounding manner possible, all without dropping any critical connecting plot threads that specifically make that work what it is. You probably inferred it already, but that does mean that I'm normally more liberal-minded when it comes to my approaches to translation, although I make sure I don't get wanton about it. If I can read my new work and it preserves the same basic beats as the source material, all without the wording and structure immediately reminding me of how the Japanese reads, that's when I feel I've succeeded. Whether I actually manage to do that in the eyes of readers and players is another matter altogether, but it's at least what I strive for.
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