
“Make It Biblical” – How Vagrant Story Changed Video Game Localization - drops
http://www.usgamer.net/articles/vagrant-story-localization
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60654
I was waiting for the part about how this game "changed video game
localization" but it was not there. Just a clickbait title.

Overall nice post, though. Translation is hard, and especially getting the
feel of a particular place in time.

It was neat to see their examples of turning plain Japanese into a quasi-
Elizabethan English in order to match the vaguely medieval setting of the
game. That's something that's really hard to do (because it's more than
translation, now you're reinterpreting the original text)...

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ggggtez
I agree it fell short. I thought the party about using more imagery in English
than Japanese was interesting. I didn't know that was uncommon in that
language.

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unscaled
It seems like a wild exaggeration to me. Japanese definitely has it's share of
imagery and wordplay. It's just that most video game scripts - especially from
that era - tend to employ a language that is straightforward and functional at
its best and uninspiring and dull at its worst.

Japanese does have many forms of imagery though. For a prime example of cheeky
imagery in wordplay like the one in the sodliers' dialogue you can probably
look no further than Rakugo - which employs wordplay so much that it's
notoriously hard to translate.

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GuiA
Neat article.

For people deeply interested in video game translation, particularly with some
knowledge of Japanese, I highly recommend the “Legends of Localization” books,
where the author goes into extreme details about how Zelda (first book) and
Earthbound (second book) were translated. There’s also a website with similar
information (but not as deep) for a whole plethora of games, and a third book
(for Super Mario Bros.) is in the works.

[http://legendsoflocalization.com](http://legendsoflocalization.com)

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jmduke
I like Vagrant Story, and most of the games in its setting (Ivalice) are my
favorite in the Final Fantasy series.

For a more emblematic example of the script quirks these games employ, The
Final Fantasy Tactics remake (War of the Lions) goes much more Shakespearean,
for good and ill (you lose some of the most classic lines in the original,
like _Don 't blame us. Blame yourself or God._, but the entire thing is more
cohesive and vivid)

Here's a good side-by-side:
[https://dekaja.dreamwidth.org/1675.html](https://dekaja.dreamwidth.org/1675.html)

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snvzz
I wonder if I'm alone on this. For their examples, I do prefer the literal
translation, and I can't stand the "localized" one.

Why can't we have some respect for the original work?

This is a bad trend in game translations, and sadly does extend further than
that. I do hope it comes to pass.

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serf
I don't think you're alone in disliking translation 'liberties' , but I don't
think most people really like literal translation either.

A literal translation of many sentences from Japanese to English (and vice-
versa) reorders words to the point of gibberish.

Almost every idiom is broken without reinterpretation -- well except for the
really good crude ones.

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x1798DE
I don't think anyone would argue for word-level translations without any
grammar - that wouldn't even be possible, since there isn't a 1-1 mapping
between words in different languages. But for a translation, I think most
people want you to do the minimum possible to preserve the original meaning.
So no switching "ramen" to "spaghetti" because you think people won't
understand.

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dragonfax
Loved that game. Dark souls is the spiritual successor to me.

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Feniks
Not a fan of changing style.

People would be pretty pissed if someone did that to a book wouldn't they?

But at least they aimed for accuracy. Not too much American culture and memes.
And actual respect for the product and creators! Unheard of in some
contemporary videogame localization circles.

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AdmiralAsshat
> People would be pretty pissed if someone did that to a book wouldn't they?

Alexander Smith was based in Japan and got Matsuno's blessing for the changes.

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craigds
Initially I thought this was something to do with Hashicorp's Vagrant. It's
really not.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrant_Story](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrant_Story)

