Translation quality

[Sylkis]

Fernehalwe's reponse in regards to Midgardsomr and dragonspeak:

Greetings!

I hope you are all enjoying Before the Fall. Wait... Why are you here reading this post and not enjoying Before the Fall!?

Okay, you’re forgiven. Now on to the post!

Soon after the release of 2.5 there were some players who noticed differences in the length of dragon lines between the EN and JP versions, so I wanted to use this opportunity to talk a little about Eorzea’s dragons, their language, and how the ancient race has been characterized by the EN Localization team.

*Extremely minor spoilers ahead*

As I mentioned in the past, far back before even the original release of 1.0, I was tasked with creating an original language for the dragons of Dravania. The background information I received at that time was that the dragons had lived for several millennia and were highly intelligent, so I set about putting together set of rules that would fit naturally those criteria.

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!).

Secondly, as these dragons had lived together for so long and only spoke this language amongst one another, they would have the uncanny ability to anticipate what a speaker was going to say based not only on context, but on a kind of linguistic premonition. Think of it as how after fifty years of marriage, a wife can complete her husband’s sentences for him. The five-decade stockpile of conversations to draw upon has given her a sixth sense, if you will. Now multiply this sense by fifty or a hundred or even more, and you have the dragons. This ability to understand what is going to be said before it is even said, I believed, would affect their language in a way that saw single words taking on multiple meanings. For example, a word like ‘flesh’ could end up being used for ‘blood,’ ‘body,’ ‘corporeal,’ ‘concrete,’ or ‘intercourse’ (the border between nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc being blurred by ages of use). The dragons would know which word was intended based on context, position within a sentence, minute variations in inflection or vowel length, as well as the aforementioned knowledge of past conversations with the speaker.

So, it is safe to say that while a non-dragon may endeavor to study the dragon language, it would be nearly impossible in their short (compared to a dragon) lifespan to even begin to fully grasp the intricacies of it. And, because of this, the only way a non-dragon would be able to understand a dragon is if the dragon chose to speak in the non-dragon’s language, or the non-dragon was blessed with the power of the Echo.

When the Echo “translates” for someone, it is a joint effort between the listener’s mind and Hydaelyn’s gift. The gift is providing the knowledge, while the listener’s mind is using its previously compiled linguistic background to compile the data into something more familiar.

On the other hand, when a dragon speaks in a non-dragon language, it is the dragon himself who is doing the translation, and therefore it is only natural to assume that the resulting target language (in our case Eorzean/English) may somewhat resemble the structure of the dragon’s native tongue—short and concise, but chock-full of meaty ambiguous content.

The dragon’s knowledge of the target language also comes into play here. A being that has lived several ages in Eorzea will most likely have picked up its Eorzean long ago. Couple that with the fact that the being may not have had much in the way of communication with Eorzeans since then, making it difficult for him to pick up on more modern speech patterns. We felt that to reflect this (and the fact that they are simply very, very old beings), it would be better to give the dragons a slightly more archaic speech pattern, hence the ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s.

So finally we get to 2.5. In this patch are scenes in which a certain dragon speaks directly with the player. Here, the dragon has chosen to use the tongue of the player rather than his own language. When the EN Localization team received the relatively wordy Japanese lines for this scene, we felt that it would fit the character and his native language better if we localized it in a manner that seemed a natural fit with the dragon language I had created—that being something that was far more compact, but still contained the main core that was in the Japanese. And thus emerged the difference in the length of lines—EN being somewhat shorter than the JP. So fear not, for the content (while slightly jumbled up to accommodate the differences in grammatical flow between Japanese and English) is, for the most part, similar between versions, and Japanese users are not somehow privy to secrets lost to the winds of translation.

That’s all for today, as I have to get back to Gold Saucer translation. Thank you for making it this far, though. The post ended up being quite longer than I first intended. A dragon could’ve said as much in far less, I suppose... And for those of you crazy lore-fiends who found the post lacking, as we get closer to 3.0 (or maybe right after the launch of 3.0, depending on whether or not I’m given the green light by Yoshi-P), I hope to reveal more info on the dragon language, but until then...

[S][h]ess fta[h]r a[h]!

(Please look forward to it!)

[AskaRay]

Remember a localization is not a translation..

[StrejdaTom]

So as some people already stated, the English translation is good but in some encounters it was really unfaithful and poor. If there is a chance that French is more similar to Japanese text, I would stick with it, if you care about lore.

[Onikimaru]

snip

I love this game but the english localization sucks so bad. After seeing a post on reddit about midgardsormr, i realized how different the japanese dialogue actually is. It actually clarified a lot of questions i had about the 2.5 story. Also not a big fan of the ye-old english style they're going for...

[kyuven]

The linguistic penetrability of the English localization perturbs me. Using words that even native speakers barely understand seems like a poor choice when you realize the English translation is the one most likely to be played by those who don't speak Japanese, French, or German.
But this is just something SE has been doing for a while. DQ9, the FFT remaster/remake, and to an extent FFXII used this sort of translation a lot.
Which is rather jarring when, given the technological level of Eorzea (and Hydaelyn in general if the Garleans are anything to go by) the dialects and word choices used should be closer to the vocabulary used in the 1800s, not 200 years prior.
I mean, here we see characters using vocabulary the Founding Fathers of the U.S. never used!
That's not to say it ALL bothers me. Certain choices like "levin" replacing "lightning" and "anyroad" replacing "anyway" are perfectly fine, but much of the vocabulary and grammar is either so archaic or so bizarre that it took a long time for the voice actors to get used to it, leading to the stilted and rather undignified performances from 2.0's launch.
They seem to be toning it down a bit...but...

[Onikimaru]

snip

This is pretty much exactly how i feel. Thank you for putting this into a well thought out post(which i couldn't do). FF12 is an exception in my book, i think that game has an excellent balance of style and modern english speaking techniques. The voice actors they chose for that game also made things easier to understand as they were bloody brilliant IMO. My favorite among the bunch being "Cidolfus Demen Bunansa" voiced by john lee. One of the reasons i think they did a particularly good job is that most of the retro style english themes they were using were performed mostly by nobles, I.E ash, balthier and fran. Fran being an exception as isolation was the key to her races survival. She is also like 500 years old IIRC?, so it would make sense for her to talk that way, this is why i think XIV needs to have a good balance in the story of ARR.

Everybody has their own way of speaking yes. You have the hard workers at uldah, who speak like we do now, with some quirks here and there. But then you have the scions. Who ALL speak in riddles...when they should be the ones speaking in a more modern tongue. Lalafels speak this way because of their parents right?, so i think they're ok. Sure giving the scions a bit of a unique style is always good for story, and to get people entranced for those use to it. But it get's really annoying when the scions voice actors suck...example. When you are about to get into a massive fight, and minfillia or someone else says, "doth thee knowest no bounds?" "hath thee no sympathy for the weak?" stuff like that is..so blegh with bad voice acting.

Video of cid being awesome - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50tMUysAXm8 quality is a bit on the wild side, you will notice a slight dip in the voice. This is due to an old emulator issue.

[Renik]

OP

The localization is not bad, but the EN team has taken too many liberties, to the point they have altered personalities, changed lines and even added or excluded some, but Ferne is well defended by an horde of raging lore fans who have been blinded by gratefulness to their lore god, son nothing will be done about it.

[Shougun]

Interesting if true. I wonder why they decided to change Nael from male to female, at least the Deus version. Seems like a pointless change to make and it made a mess of the English version of Nael's dialogue in a certain cutscene.


When localization changes the meaning of the original script or leaves out details entirely, it's no longer a localization. It's a butchery. The point of localization is to modify translated scripts to match local culture and language. It's not to completely change the meaning of statements or events, or even leave things entirely out.

I felt like it was a tip of the hat to Jenova as Nael was to Sephiroth, to finish the picture that has association to metamorphosis (high aether, primal energies), tortious science of Allagans, and of a meteor (Jenova). Edit: And what Aldora said below~ ^^

Also, Localization may change a story if it feels it matches the area better - I get you don't like the change, but it is absolutely a thing that has been done before and within the job description. Point of localization isn't to keep a product 1:1 but to bring it over in a form best for the audience, I suspect they were keeping it as lore-y/"Ic" like as they normally do and as "RPG" english as they normally do. Whether you felt like that targeted you very well or not. . different story lol, but butchery?

Besides how high Koji is on the lore team, there is also terms of "localization" with western dragons who tend to be less agreeable than eastern ones. They'd behave differently when you bother a big ol mega powerful dragon who died fighting people and whose children die fighting people, and we expect to be treated to a cup of tea? No.. even if the large part of the crimes wasn't us in particular, though we've killed some already. Even if we scrap the norm of western dragons, I still expect the dragon to be a bit ornery - and not that impressed with us. I'd personally be annoyed at how polite and verbose the Japanese Sormr was if translated and not localized (especially after his opening action is to attack). Anyway , agree to disagree lol.

[Allyrion]

Some of the ability name differences are too much as well as larger plot conversations.

But What bothers me is that the scenes are actually different in Japanese vs English.

Look at the quest when you meet Haurchefant, it's called "When the Cold Sets In".
The expressions and gestures are different.
Haurchefant (and the PC, as well) is much more animated in the Japanese one.
The English version is watered down.

This seems far for localization.
I get that they put a lot of effort to re-adjust things for an english crowd, but they're changing the characters.
That's too much.
We're seeing different scenes at a certain point

[Spellbinder]

snip

I see people often make reference to this cutscene, which if I may add, is the only instance where the gestures were different. I also notice how it's always only a comparison between the Japanese and the English. Did you know that Japanese is the only language to get this special treatment for this cutscene?

Are you also aware that this characterization of the slightly crazed charismatic character talking about sweaty bodies and rippling muscles (almost as if he's coming on to you) is a character trope easily recognized by the JP audience, but not necessarily any others? I'm not trying to defend the English, French, and German localizations of the game per se, but there are reasons that these are sometimes portrayed differently to different audiences.