Ask Localization Megathread

[Raydeus]

One example I like to give is what anime fans will recognize as the "tsundere" character. You know, the stereotypical "B-but it's not like I like you or anything!" This works for a Japanese audience. This works for an anime-enjoying Western audience. The problem is that it's a character trope that is incredibly vexing if you're not a Japanophile--and we don't create games for Japanophiles, we create games for a broad Western audience. We don't want you to have to have any prior understanding of Japan to enjoy yourself.

This is the reason why I've been very tempted over the years to just mod the Japanese text into my game. Unfortunately I've been very lazy learning Kanjis to do actually it. =/


And my Question(s) :

How satisfied are you with the changes NPC's personalities suffer when localizing their dialog?
Which characters do you think are the most affected (if any)?
And if there are, which characters would you personally like to go back and rewrite the dialog for because of this?

[Unelonborro]

How satisfied are you with the changes NPC's personalities suffer when localizing their dialog?
Which characters do you think are the most affected (if any)?
And if there are, which characters would you personally like to go back and rewrite the dialog for because of this?

I wouldn't use the word "suffer" when I talk about character personalities in the English localization. It's comparing apples to oranges. The other day I was watching an episode of a popular American spy spoof cartoon and thinking about what kinds of localization processes would be needed to successfully localize that show into Japanese, and the only conclusion I was able to draw was that the viewer would need to have a relatively deep pre-existing knowledge of America to make half the jokes work. The characters need to be American for the show to work, and if you don't have knowledge about American culture, it's simply not going to make sense.

I'll give you a recent example: in the "A Thirst for the Eons" quest (which you should go off and do if you haven't already--the planner had a field day with it) the character Palomel is characterized as a "fujoshi" -- a woman who is into comics and other art forms depicting male homosexual love. Western players don't have that trope in their collective consciousness, so if we kept her as blatant about it as she was in the Japanese, someone without a knowledge of Japanese culture would come across with entirely the wrong impression of what the planner was going for. The planner was going for "comical quirky archetype", but if we kept it in wholesale, it would come across as "crazed sexual deviant" in English. So we changed some aspects of her to maintain the "quirky" attitude the planner was going for in a way that your average English speaker could understand.

In terms of who I would rewrite if given a chance...I can't think of any off the top of my head. Obviously, there are things that I would go back and brush up or change if I had the chance or more time to do so, but most of that is from the earlier days of the game before I joined the project.