LogFAQs > #979138648

mistymermaid posted...

The goal here is preserving the source material's information and emotional tone, to the extent practical. I realize the average person who doesn't know Japanese, is going to be unaware the dialogue was altered. But that doesn't give companies the right to treat their customers like idiots.

Correct, hence why I do not defend Fates (as well as the other obvious examples). However, it almost never actually seems to be that. As I mentioned before the complaints happened on Unicorn Overlord in which it very flagrantly wasn't true. For instance, here is one of the lines that constantly had people whining about it:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/d/db7a5df0.jpg

The center translation is the (somewhat rough) translation of the Japanese and the translation on the right is the official dialog. In this line you can easily see it: the official dialog is super off from the Japanese and doesn't carry the same meaning or tone so it's wrong... right? Well, as I pointed out before this is yet another case of people whining about something they know nothing about. The big problem comes from the original, very dry, writing and the very important "tone word": duty. In English the word duty will give an implication on the moral character of the individual. Someone "does their duty" when they are serious about something. However, as I mentioned in another post that misses how the interaction of the language is with the neo-Buddhist movement in that it explicitly fit into the mentality of it being your duty to support others and society, which has caused the term itself to be "normal" and not loaded in that same way. In addition it acts as a joke as the character in question is supposed to be taken as not all that seriously as the usage of duty is supposed to conflict with the fact that he is constantly bumbling around and not doing said duty. Thus the tone is actually supposed to have a "womp womp" noise next to it the whole time, as opposed to what you get when you just directly translate it. So when bringing it over they didn't just go "translator's note: *insert twenty paragraph Japanese history lesson*", they came up with a joke that fit the desired tone (sort of... the writing in the Japanese version apparently completely fell flat to that audience so it's more "bad/bland joke" versus "goofy joke").

All the same it didn't stop people getting pissy about how dare those WoKe localizers do what they did. So yeah bad translations/localizations exist, I've even played several games that would qualify last month, but the overwhelming amount of complaints have always seemingly come from the position of "having an agenda" far more than they actually have a legit complaint. While Sweet Baby definitely comes across as bad localizers (I would need to know wtf games they actually worked on besides the ones paraded around to show that they are bad before I feel comfortable passing judgement there) the number of bad ones absolutely gets dwarfed by the good ones.