
Localizing “Jump Up, Super Star” - minimaxir
https://nintendotreehouse.tumblr.com/post/167703261242/localizing-jump-up-super-star
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jakebasile
Interesting peek behind the veil, localization goes far beyond simple
translation but that's not immediately obvious to most, unless they're playing
a poorly localized game!

I don't have much else to to add except to say that Odyssey is a fantastic
game and you should buy it. I'm a PC gamer and have no nostalgia goggles for
any Nintendo property except Pokémon - I don't even like platformers! - but
that game is a joy to play. The section where the song in TFA played was
particularly stand out.

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Agentlien
I'm a big Nintendo fan. Other than that, I came to say almost exactly what you
did. Including the recommendation!

Localization in entertainment is often more about preserving the conveyed
feelings than translating the words themselves. During the recent development
of Need for Speed: Payback, I happened to sit next to two people working on
dialogue and localisation. I'm a software engineer working on the UI team, but
for a few months, these wonderful guys were seated in the UI room.

I learned a bunch from them, especially when they discussed how to translate
things like common sayings and cultural references.

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btown
Song translation is a really interesting "intelligence-complete" [constrained]
optimization problem. You have an objective function that needs to take into
account:

\- closeness of meaning to the source language for each line or group of lines

\- rhyme scheme in the target language (often completely absent in the source
language)

\- meteor/scansion in the target language (i.e. strong syllables on downbeats,
see:
[http://www.patpattison.com/perfectmatch/](http://www.patpattison.com/perfectmatch/)
\- and, as is often the case when the source language is a language like
Japanese where syllable stresses are ignored, the melody is not written to
make this easy)

\- if the target language is tonal or semi-tonal, the degree to which words
match the melody increasing/decreasing in pitch

\- overall natural feel of the lyrics as dialogue

So the song re-writing is an iterative process as indicated here: over time,
you explore the space of possible translations, evaluating against these
metrics, and recognizing that changing one line could have higher-order
effects, i.e. you need to change the rhyme scheme and therefore require a
reordering of two other previous lines, leaping out of a local optimum and
throwing out a lot of progress to make the overall song even better!

Skilled songwriters, of course, can instantly discard huge portions of the
space, and know intuitively where to begin. But even the best still need to
iterate. And I find translation a great exercise for songwriting, since it
lets me practice navigating this subspace of the much more complex general
problem: how do you write a song starting with a blank page?

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thristian
If you're interested in video-game localisation, you'll get a kick out of
Legends of Localization. It's a site run by professional translator and
amateur game-translator Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin, and it has a bunch of
articles examining the translation of particular well-known scenes¹ as well as
in-depth comparisons between different versions of a single game, like The
Legend of Zelda².

¹:
[http://legendsoflocalization.com/articles/recommended/](http://legendsoflocalization.com/articles/recommended/)
²: [http://legendsoflocalization.com/the-legend-of-
zelda/](http://legendsoflocalization.com/the-legend-of-zelda/)

~~~
dogruck
Interesting site.

I immediately thought of the All Your Base Are Belong To Us meme.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us)

~~~
thristian
There's an article about that, too!

[http://legendsoflocalization.com/lets-take-a-peek-at-zero-
wi...](http://legendsoflocalization.com/lets-take-a-peek-at-zero-wings-all-
your-base-translation/)

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wodenokoto
I didn't even know there was a Japanese version of the song. I set my game-
language to Japanese, but the song was in English.

I'd enjoyed a link to the Japanese version and lyrics as part of an otherwise
very interesting article.

