
The Near Impossible 20-Year Journey to Translate 'Fire Emblem: Thracia 776' - goohex
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mb8mvv/the-near-impossible-20-year-journey-to-translate-fire-emblem-thracia-776
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Xelbair
>For years, the community settled for a rushed localization that frequently
crashed and was full of memes. (You will not be surprised to learn this
version of the game was made by a high schooler).

Sadly that is not exclusive to high schoolers, plenty of well known
localization companies (for example NISA) do a horrible job(Ys8 is such a
clusterfuck) and insert plenty of memes(Danganronpa3), and worse - change the
script for no reason.

EDIT: I am not complaining about localization - but as a translator your role
is to convey the thought and style behind it. Not just one or other, but both.

It is hard. very hard - but doable.

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taneq
I don't understand why they didn't translate the dialog outside the game, as a
sort of post-process graphical filter which detects speech bubbles and other
text in the game and overlays the translated version. Apart from a few
diehards flashing custom ROMs to SNES cartridges, I'd expect almost everyone
playing it is doing so through an emulator, so this should be easy.

I can see an argument against it that this affects the "purity" of the game
compared with the translation being done in the ROM itself, but I can also see
a counter-argument that running the original unaltered ROM with what amounts
to subtitles is a "purer" approach.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm talking about a fan translation which is overlaid
on the game by pattern matching the image of the equivalent original text on-
screen, not an attempt at automatically detecting and machine translating all
dialogue.

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jldugger
I imagine that would be hard and slow. You'd have to typeset everything
yourself, to boot. And modify the emulator to handle it. Patching the rom
would be far more portable.

~~~
taneq
You still have to do all of that for a ROM patch, plus reverse engineer the
(apparently horrible) ROM code. At least the emulator's source is probably
available.

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Pfhreak
An aside, I absolutely adore Vice games (formerly Waypoint). They seem to cut
this really interesting line between game design, game critique, and social
commentary.

I imagine that a lot of folks here might not like their takes, as they tend to
bend towards a social justice framing of games as media. (E.g. a recent
podcast discussed, among other things, the differences between queer
representation in games manifested as 'I can form a queer relationship with my
character' vs 'there are queer people in this world.'. Another, not so long
ago, discussed games with a specifically decolonialist bent.)

Plenty of discussion about unions in the games industry, and how developers
handle bad working conditions as well.

So much games media these days seems to be about reporting on what press
releases the games companies ship, or try to strike an inoffensive tone. Or
even try to push the idea that games aren't/shouldn't be political (which is a
pretty silly idea, imo.) It's nice to have an outlet really trying to dig into
stories and present them with a deliberate lens and framing.

~~~
semitext
I definitely appreciate any journalism that centers the people behind the
things that make up our reality. This article is definitely a terrific example
of what I like about this approach to writing.

