Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

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A full localization is always preferable, but since it does entail quite a bit of work, I can think of at least two scenarios where this would be useful:

1) I played a good amount of untranslated Japanese ROMs for the NES/SNES/GBA, back in the day. Some of them had pretty simplistic gameplay ("Press A to swing your sword. Swing your sword until everything on-screen is dead.") or gameplay that was self-explanatory once it started. Those games didn't really need full translations to get enjoyment out of the game. Except, I recall a handful where I could never even get to the gameplay part because I was stuck in some pre-game menu hell where a non-native speaker would not be able to figure out how to get the game going, short of clicking every menu option and every sub-menu option. This happened alot with sports games, IIRC.

2) A more recent example that comes to mind would be Rhythm Tengoku (a.k.a. Rhythm Heaven) for the GBA. 95% of the game's gameplay is "Press a button in time with the rhythm", making it trivial for non-Japanese speakers to play. But one particular stage had an on-screen text prompt which told the player which button they should press at the right time, making it a random guessing game for the non-Japanese speakers. A quick translation for what is an incredibly tiny component of the full game would make a full localization unnecessary and still allow international players to complete the game.

>A full localization is always preferable

You'll quickly find this not to be the case for everyone if you hang around fans of Japanese games or cartoons, or really any non-casual fans of foreign media. A lot of those people prefer the translation to be as direct as possible and for the translators to do little to no localization for various reasons. The reasons are varied but include things like preserving the artist's original intent, preserving cultural nuance, fear of censorship, changes to the story lines to match local cultural sensitivities, inclusion of local cultural references that get outdated fast and many more. Some of these reasons are more valid that others, but in general localization is seen as damaging to the original work in favor of getting more sales.

Taken to the extreme this results in people doing things like learning Japanese to enjoy the originals or learning Russian to read Dostoevsky.

There is a trick to having just the right amount of localization to make the work attractive to a new audience without alienating the existing fans, and it's by no means trivial.

For the kind of people who emulate games or play fan translations, a complete localization would not be a selling point and a more direct (even if flawed) translations could be preferable, particularly because overtime these people get used to interpreting the original intent as they become familiar with the culture surrounding the games, even if they don't speak the language.

Such people exist, yes, but you're never going to convince me that those people's opinions are valid. :)

I can completely understand not wanting to completely change someone's name or setting (e.g. pretending your clearly-based-in-Japan game is actually New York and protagonist Toshi is now named "Stan"), but the degree to which some of them attempt to preserve the Japanese is mind-boggling. To use a contrived example, let's say an RPG character has a special attack called 北斗の拳 (anime name, not an attack name, I know, just bear with me). Most people would prefer that the name be translated to "Fist of the North Star" so that its meaning is obvious. Nonetheless, there is a contingent of fans and purist translators that insist it is better simply left rendered as "Hokuto no Ken", where the pronunciation is left intact, and yet the meaning is completely obscured to the non-native speaker.

In which case, my question is, "If you believe your target audience knows enough Japanese to understand what the hell that attack is called, why do they need your translation?"

In essence, you are agreeing with me. "Fist of the North Star" is more a direct translation than a localization and most people, even fans, don't really care about that. When people say localization they mean something close to your first example, changing names, introducing local memes, etc. More to the point, people who dislike localizations tend to have objections to changing the games' content (particularly when it's controversial) like changing blood to green or people to robots, removing Nazi or Communist symbols, or in the case of Japanese games like some recent Fire Emblems or other, more risque titles, removing or changing "questionable" content.

I don't really have a horse in this race either way, but I do have friends who are quite invested and I can see their point when they prefer fan translations to first party localizations in some cases.

The thing with old video games, the things retroarch is translating, a lot of localizations were terrible to the point of being incomprehensible(castlevania 2) comes to mind, came with some heavy censorship(especially) with Nintendo and in some cases actually changed a bunch of the gameplay. For example, ninja gaiden 3, where the north American version cut out passwords and continues when it was localized.

Interesting example there. There’s actually a fan translated version of the Rhythm Tengoku that was finished a few years ago. I won’t link the ROM here but it should be fair easy to search.

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