Ask Localization Megathread

[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.

[Unelonborro]

Is there a huge story bible for the game?

Without getting into too much of our internal workings, I can say that we do have an extensive list of resources to draw on!

What happens if a quest is added involving a NPC that maybe hasn't been in use in 5 or 6 years? Do you have to go back to the original quests involving the NPC to get a feel for how they speak?

Oh, most definitely. Every time we have a Trust NPC with an accompanying event, I go back and look over all the quests they were involved in. In terms of the amount of time it takes to translate something, an individual alter ego takes me about three to four times as long as something more recent like the Tarutaru Sauce quests or the Seekers of Adoulin missions. These NPCs are beloved by the playerbase, so we have to do them justice!

The one exception was Ingrid, because she was released nearly simultaneously with her breakout mission and thus was already ingrained into my consciousness.

[Unelonborro]

Are you the localization lead on FFXIV as well? If not, do you help out at all? If you help out, is there anything different between localization of the two games?

My involvement with XIV is virtually nonexistent, and I have never done any translation for them. However, XIV has many references to XI, so every so often I'll get a request for a specific snippet of an older mission or the like. But this is also somewhat rare, because half the XIV localization team worked on XI at some point!

Why do some pieces of gear flow over with one word or number on the second page? Buremte gloves for example have +13% by itself on the second page of the text

I'd love to squash these as they pop up, so let me know if you see any and I'll whack-a-mole them out of existence!

[Unelonborro]

I have a more recent localization question, why delve and not menace inspector? I personally like the way the latter rolls off the tongue, so if there's a story behind the change on that one I'd like to hear it.

I don't want to get too much into this one, because it involves people other than localization and the devs, but "Menace Inspector" is pretty long for a content name.

The one comment I can make without incurring someone's ire is that "Menace Inspector" was originally supposed to refer to the Anomaly Expert, not the content as a whole.

Also, when you use a delve shard to get plasm, the message has said menace plasm instead of mywea since the event was introduced.

This...should not be the case. Let me see if I can find and fix it for September.

[Unelonborro]

Those are indeed classics that I remember well lol. Out of curiosity, with western game developers really booming over the past decade+, has there been any such cases that happened with shoddy localization into the Japanese market? Do you find that western games are localized well, or did they go through a period of infancy as well?

This is getting into the realm of personal opinion, but I think that the video game industry as a whole does a much better job of translating games INTO English than we do of translating games FROM English. Translations From EN to European languages tend to be higher quality than those to distant languages like Japanese and Korean, but there are many, many examples where mistranslations occur even with languages that are "closer" to English. I don't feel it's appropriate to call out any specific examples, but if you're interested in the topic, a quick google search will provide you with a plethora of mistakes and missed opportunities.

Speaking from a more general perspective, English is a relatively risk-free language to translate into. You can just go with American spellings and language conventions and people will understand it quite easily, even if they come from non-American English speaking backgrounds, due to the permeation of American culture into the global mindset. Spanish, French, and Portuguese are very risky languages, because the discrepancies between the European and North/South American dialects are high enough that players feel a huge of disconnect if they play a version intended for another region.

Sometimes I will play a Western game with a Japanese language pack just for fun, and the translations are really all over the map. Some are very professionally done, with excellent nuanced localizations; some have outright mistranslations that impede the player's ability to progress; and others are borderline incomprehensible. We've still got a ways to go.

Your bit about actually targeting a western audience with the localization, rather than just a translation, is really interesting. I've never really thought much on it before, but it makes a lot of sense the way you laid it out. Looking back, I've certainly read/played my fair share of media that hadn't had such care given to it. Looking at some recent quests as examples, Saved by the Bell, To Catch a Predator, I'm on a Boat, Don't Ever Leaf Me, Hide and Go Peak, and many others, make sense through English and our culture, they're phrases that we know from life, shows, music, etc. Out of curiosity, do quests like these take on relevant names that may invoke similar "I know what that's from!" feelings for the Japanese community? Any examples to share that we might know?

A lot of this comes down to player expectations and translator/writer preference. Even in the Japanese, some of our planners prefer light, playful names, while others like something more serious, so it's not a set rule. The Tarutaru Sauce questline for example: The planner always uses a play on words by replacing one of the kanji in the quest line with the kanji for "to laugh." The planner for the Svenja questline plays it straight. Because the Japanese is relatively freeform, we make things light hearted in the English whenever we feel we can fit in something good that fits the story.

Is there any chance that someday you may be able to give a bit of a description to some auto translate terms that are ambiguous, or that are misused often? I'd be interesting to know what they actually say/mean in Japanese. "Please use a weak weapon to attack" seems straight forward enough, but I've had a few Japanese players use that in party (not during something like Void Watch) and I was left confused at what they were getting at. Some terms of our's that may not be well known is "Excuse me..." "Are you alone?" "Can you hear me?" and many others. They seem straight forward enough, but whether due to the language barrier being too much of a bother to communicate through, or our knowledge of what the terms come out to be on the Japanese side, it's difficult to get a clear answer from Japanese players.

Ohhhhh I can give you a very good one. I was talking with the planner in charge of the auto-translate dictionary the other day about this very topic. He remembers one instance in particular where he was just chatting with his linkshell, sitting in Jeuno and someone in /shout was looking to buy some item or other:

"{Please} {Reward} 300k"

The problem is that the player selected "Reward" from the Job Abilities category, not the Trade category, so it popped up in Japanese with the beastmaster ability, which in Japanese is "Itawaru"--a verb rather than a noun. "Itawaru" means "to treat someone nicely," so the guy was basically sitting in /shout going "Please treat me nicely 300k."

Long story short: make sure you took before you translate!

[Karbuncle]

lol... please treat me nicely...

the real reward has a : in it too :O

[Nyerieri]

My involvement with XIV is virtually nonexistent, and I have never done any translation for them. However, XIV has many references to XI, so every so often I'll get a request for a specific snippet of an older mission or the like. But this is also somewhat rare, because half the XIV localization team worked on XI at some point!



I'd love to squash these as they pop up, so let me know if you see any and I'll whack-a-mole them out of existence!

You can whack-a-mole it for the September version update Since it is still there!

[Nyerieri]

When the text description for items was moved to 2 boxes (now sometimes 3) It was said that the main text description for items can hold 7 lines I believe. Why do some items not follow that rule? I've seen some items where the main text for the item only has 6 lines before moving to the second page.

[ZoMBie343]

I just wanted to say you guys do an amazing job.

Thank you for making some really funny quest names and dialogue that reminds us of real world events (I remember some quest names had a really good ring to them!)

[Zubis]

Without getting into too much of our internal workings, I can say that we do have an extensive list of resources to draw on!

These NPCs are beloved by the playerbase, so we have to do them justice!

And you did, it's fun going back and seeing the new dialogue for NPCs I haven't spoken to in 8 years :3 Thanks for the reply and thanks for all your team's work on the game.