Board 8 > Fantastic Alexander O. Smith interview [Final Fantasy] [VS] [Linguistics]

(+) Yeah! (+)

Really great read. I'll include a few snippets.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-07-14-a-translators-tale-inside-the-building-of-final-fantasy-12s-ivalice

Final Fantasy 8 benefitted from a more serious approach to localisation - Smith joined a team of three translators, working on the Laguna Loire section of the game - as the team became more organised. "There was a lot going on at the time - it was the maturing of the company. It was just after the real heyday of a lot of those companies in the late 90s where they went a little wild and expanded quite a lot, and they were slowly pulling back in and picking up a little bit of the fat and not being quite so experimental. It was an interesting time - it's when the modern Square was forming."

"I would say the original is a little more direct - not that ours was looping in circles, but it's not inflected Japanese, it's very straightforward Japanese. It's a medieval European setting, and there weren't Japanese people in medieval Europe. It would be very odd to try and impose an accent on the Japanese in that kind of setting - if you gave them all southern Japanese accents or made them all talk like samurai it'd be very jarring for the Japanese player.

"It's very straightforward in Japanese, but when you look at writing in the medieval times, any writing in English that's part of that milieu, wordplay is really important, the leitmotifs where you're using language to create a mood. Those are things that we introduced, but the inspiration came entirely from the original Japanese. It created the world and we tried to do service to that world in the translation."

"He has a very good sense of characters - they have individual personalities and their intent is very clear. This is actually something that's somewhat rare in Japanese writing - it tends to favour the big moment, and the big scene, and they don't really care about how you got there. From a western perspective, lots of times Japanese dramatic writing will seem lacking in areas like motivation and the intent of the characters won't be entirely clear. They're putting the pieces together so they can get to the big scene.

"Matsuno is much more of the classic western style writer in the sense that all of his characters have very clear motives and objectives, so that when they're in a room together instead of everyone just participating in putting together the building blocks to get to the big moment, you have individual characters that want different things butting off each other, there's the back and forth that makes for great dialogue. And that structure is very important, and it really helps the translation. Even if ultimately the things they're saying drifts slightly when you put it into English, having that chemistry there to start with makes a huge difference."

That's partly why the wider world of Ivalice feels so rich. Take Migelo, the Bangaa shopkeeper in the starting town Rabanastre, as an example. A relatively small part was brought to vivid life by John DiMaggio - the voice of Bender in Futurama, and responsible for a number of minor parts in Final Fantasy 12 - in an extravagant performance.

"Just even now hearing the lines completely cracks me up. He brought so much character and flavour to what's a very minor role, and matching the insane lipflaps for a giant lizard man all the while. That really helped the overall quality."

I live in hope that I will get to work on a similarly great game," says Smith, who was involved in some extra translation in the recent Zodiac Age edition of Final Fantasy 12. "They don't make games like that anymore - I don't think they ever made games like that. It's definitely an outlier."

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A good read.

I was always impressed by FF12's presentation and voice work... I'd be more willing to praise the localisation as a whole if it hadn't given us cringe-worthy terms like tecknicks, but even so I won't deny it did some good things. Too bad about the actual game.
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Haven't played XII yet (just got it today) but hopefully the localization is better than X.
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FF12 has a real good translation, yeah. The article lost me on stuff like "it's one of the only games better experienced dubbed" though.
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Lost me there, too, granted.
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tag for later
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