An Introduction to Dragonspeak

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Originally Posted by Grayve

Oh? How so? Should we examine all four languages to get a better picture?

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I, for one, am all about this.
I actually wish we had transliterations of the JP dialog available to us. Yes, I realize that's a MASSIVE undertaking... hence, the 'wish'. :3

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Originally Posted by Fernehalwes

Firstly, I felt that the language would be fairly economical. Thousands of years of refining would render long words short, would eliminate most of the more complex consonants and compound vowels, and would see the complete disappearance of words with little meaning, or meanings that could be represented by similar terms (goodbye thesauruses!).

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So dragonspeak is the Dragon version of Facebook/Messenger speak (YOLO)?

Uh oh.

It's more like speaking solely in root words. Humans add to the root word to specify its meaning while Davanians would simply infer the exact meaning based on experience with the speaker.

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Originally Posted by Magis

So dragonspeak is the Dragon version of Facebook/Messenger speak (YOLO)?

Uh oh.

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Nah, it's like Newspeak from the 1984 novel

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Originally Posted by Grayve

Oh? How so? Should we examine all four languages to get a better picture?

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You only need to translate from original and that is Japanese. I have the audio in japanese and subs in english and I know a little japanese. What I was reading either didn't make sense or was WAY to short when he was talking over 1 or 2 minutes long... that's information lost and I hate when in any format game/anime/manga/serie/movie/etc happens. It is true you can't be too objective and word for word but you can't do 100% literal either because in that case meaning is lost. And that is what happened -_- not only in this speech but in all contents, we lose always some information and lore because of bad/bad choices/trying to make like that dragon way of speech translation.

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Originally Posted by Shiki_Lockhart

You only the to translate from original and that is Japanese. I have the audio in japanese and subs in english and I know a little japanese. What I was reading either didn't make sense or was WAY to short when he was talking over 1 or 2 minutes long... that's information lost and I hate when in any format game/anime/manga/serie/movie/etc happens. It is true you can't be too objective and word for word but you can't do 100% literal either because in that case meaning is lost. And that is what happened -_- not only in this speech but in all contents, we lose always some information and lore because of bad/bad choices/trying to make like that dragon way of speech translation.

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And what did he say that wasn't mentioned in the english localization?
I assume it is something like a scene from the movie "Lost in translation", where a japanese person is speaking for about a minute, while the translator translated it into a short sentence. The reason for the difference there was that the translator cut out a lot of completely needless rambling. In that example, nothing of any importance was actually lost in translation.

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Originally Posted by Shiki_Lockhart

What I was reading either didn't make sense or was WAY to short when he was talking over 1 or 2 minutes long... that's information lost

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Speaking from experience with Korean (which is grammatically identical to Japanese, I'm told), it's entirely possible to take a long, rambling sentence of paragraph length and shorten it to a short sentence or two without losing any information.

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Originally Posted by Karen_Cerfrumos

While I definitely appreciate the thought that went into characterizing the race of dragons, I can't help but feel that at the end of the day, there's a palpable discrepancy in how the Japanese writing team decided to represent the character of Midgardsormr and how he's written in English, to the point where impression of him as a character I got from looking up the Japanese dialogue is at a stark contrast with the impression English players on this very forum got from him.

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Ah yes. The Japanese should be translated and not localized camp. I disagree completely with this. It's why a good translator usually also needs to be a good writer.

It's also a pretty reductive way to look at the English localization team. Like they're just simple translation bots and not an actual part of the development team.

I'm one of those people who always want their games/anime to include the original Japanese VOs as well. Going just by the voice acting, FFXIV is no different - the way Japanese voice actors deliver their lines simply can't be matched. So for patch 2.5 I switched back to Japanese because... why wouldn't I switch to the original VOs in the first place?!

Well, after watching the new cutscenes I remembered why I had it set to English: The writing is just SO much better. I don't even speak Japanese and only understand a handful of words, I shouldn't be able to judge the quality of the Japanese writing. Yet even with my basic knowledge it feels like I could easily translate half of the Japanese dialogue because they keep using the same clichéd phrases over and over and over. It's like they have a holy codex with thousands of story stereotypes written down.

It may be just a cultural thing of course. Maybe they like repetition and familiarity and their understanding of good writing is completely opposite to mine. Either way I'm sure the Japanese team is doing a great job for their target audience, but the English version just seems much more sophisticated and interesting to me. In fact it's one of the main reasons why I'm still playing this game and the main reason why I'm posting. So once again thanks Ferne and of course everyone else in the English localization team! You're still doing an awesome job!

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Originally Posted by Gilthas

Ah yes. The Japanese should be translated and not localized camp. I disagree completely with this. It's why a good translator usually also needs to be a good writer.

It's also a pretty reductive way to look at the English localization team. Like they're just simple translation bots and not an actual part of the development team.

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Please stop putting words into my mouth. You're valiantly fighting what is obviously incorrect but also none of what I've said.
Localization is an extralinguistic process that involves adaptation for a different culture. Like, let's use an extreme example, a swastika in Japan would be taken as a buddhist symbol while in Western culture, you'd have to remove that from a game because people will absolutely take you the wrong way. This is localization. Replacing a jokeful reference to a Japanese comic with a jokeful reference to an English comic where appropriate is localization, done to retain the effect in a different cultural setting.
Localization however is not a carte blanche do just do whatever as every decision must serve some purpose or be questioned.
And "translation bots", that's rich. Translation, even something as trivial as 1:1 (which does not imply translating words by the way) is a very mind-tasking process. So again, please stop putting words into my mouth.
I'll admit, I'm not a big fan of fauxpeare writing and certain other alternations (like removal of callouts of Megaflare in Gilgamesh trial and Diamond Dust in Shiva trial, perhaps also considered inappropriate for high fantasy feel?).

See, fair enough, the translation is done in-house and close to people who come up with original lore. That's great. But the fact remains that the original writers did not consider this setting while writing Midgardsormr's dialogue.