Legends of Localization

I have recently been reading three books by Clyde Mandelin. Clyde is better known online at Mato. He runs the excellent 'Legends of Localization' web site (https://legendsoflocalization.com).

The two books I suggest are…

• Legends of Localization Book 1: The Legend of Zelda

• Legends of Localization Book 2: EarthBound

[To clarify, when I say "Earthbound", I refer to the game that was released in Japan as Mother 2, with the translated release being called "Earthbound" in the US.]

If anyone wants to make the argument that a real-time translation would work, then I have an additional recommendation:

• press start to translate: This is what happens when you let a computer translate a video game?

You can find all of the above books at https://www.fangamer.com/collections/books/partner_legends-of-localization

I have technical concerns and non-technical concerns with the idea.

With Zelda 1 that would indeed work; there was not much text in the first place, and the typeface was blocky and easy to detect.

With Earthbound, things are much more complex. Ignoring text that is "baked in" to the graphics, the dialogue was much more interactive. The text was smaller, with thinner letter shapes, and when one of your characters was dead, the contrast between text and background was alot lower. You also have to deal with changes in coloration and highlighting, for example when you are selecting from a range of options.

Earthbound also had another trick: The dialogue system was…

I still remember Final Fantasy IV even though I first played it around 30 years ago. Those novels I had to read for school? I don't remember half of them, and the half I do remember are not novels I remember fondly.

Why? The game starts with a guy committing war crimes. He questions his king, is stripped of his post, and sent off on a suicide mission. Then, when he carries out his mission, it turns out he's committed yet another atrocity. That was fucking grim for a game that came out in 1991, and strong medicine for a sheltered kid who had grown up on TV that produced "pro-social" messaging like Dungeons & Dragons and The Get-Along Gang. Here was a game that gives you a taste of the kind of bad shit that can happen when you trust authority instead of your own conscience, and that was strong medicine.

So, yeah, I think games can be effective storytelling media. Just bear in mind that FFIV didn't have full-motion video, anime cutscenes, or voice acting. Hell, the original SNES release didn't even have an accurate translation; as a pre-ESRB title it was censored to suite Nintendo of America's content policies.

https://legendsoflocalization.com/final-fantasy-iv/

Opposite direction, but Super Mario RPG's localization team apparently didn't get half of the pop-culture and cross-game references of Mallow's "psychopath" ability and the net result is that English "psychopath" text is hilariously non-sensical.

For example, if you use "psychopath" on Magikoopa, the English translation is "That's... my child?" which makes zero sense. A better localization would have been "You're that baby from that one time!?" - a reference to Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island.

There's also a Donkey Kong-looking enemy named "Guerilla" whose psychopath text is "Don't confuse me with someone else!" In Japanese though, the enemy's name is more like "Dankey Kang" and his psychopath text is "This character has no relation to any persons, living or dead. Any resemblance is purely coincidental." (apparently this particular case was more due to memory constraints than the localization team "not getting it" though)

You can read more here: https://legendsoflocalization.com/the-pop-culture-obsessed-monsters-in-japanese-super-mario-rpg/

If you thought this was interesting, there's a lot more in this vein from the author (Clyde Mandelin aka Mato/Tomato) who is a professional translator as well as a ROM hacker (not to mention, his fame in internet Earthbound/Mother fandom). He has a great blog, Legends of Localization[1], where he talks about how games were localized into English, and streams interesting game hacks and unusual games from Japan on Twitch (usually with his wife, Poe)[2]. For instance, for the past few days they've been playing through an English translation of BS Zelda[3], a 16-bit version of The Legend of Zelda released on Nintendo's Satellaview service for the Super Famicom, which is long gone but the game has been put back together by enterprising programmers.

[1] http://legendsoflocalization.com/

[2] http://poematocx.com/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview_games_from_The_Legend_of_Zelda_series

> I was very taken aback when I first saw this comment, but these days I cherish it. It reminds me one of the first times my code had a big impact on a community.

This is a great perspective. When I was a highschooler I worked on a fan translation project that, 20 years later, someone called a "god awful piece of festering sewage that should never have existed to begin with" [1]. I'm quite proud to have done something in my youth that generated so much online rage for decades.

https://legendsoflocalization.com/which-final-fantasy-iv-translation-should-you-play/#comment-670424

The SNES Final Fantasy games famously had some translation adventures.

FF4 has "You spoony bard!".

FF6 had a lot of mature edges smoothed off in translation (as well as more typical translation nuances). Here's an article/interview with the original translator for FF6 (https://www.usgamer.net/articles/ted-woolsey-localization-translator-profile-nintendo-final-fantasy-6), and here's a piece (in fact a whole website about game localization...) going through different translations of FF6 (https://legendsoflocalization.com/final-fantasy-vi/)