An Introduction to Dragonspeak

[Grayve]

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.

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

[Sadana]

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

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

[Shiki_Lockhart]

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

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.

[Mholito]

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.

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.

[Viridiana]

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

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.