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Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#2876: Sep 6th 2023 at 9:20:44 AM

I played that "accurate" fan translation and it makes Kefka just straight up bewildering. He's written in an extremely bland way, but the way he looks and the way he's animated really don't match his original writing. It's super obvious why Woolsey spiced up the writing a bit.

FFV had the opposite problem with the initial official translation. It's a pretty silly game, even in Japanese, but the PS 1 translation (beyond dumb things like the garbled enemy names) removed most of it.

ScubaWolf from South Carolina Since: Feb, 2020
#2877: Sep 6th 2023 at 9:41:08 AM

Luckily the GBA port fixed a lot of that for FFV, and the Pixel Remaster seems to use the FFV Advance translation.

"In a move surprising absolutely no one"
RedHunter543 Crimson Paladin Since: Jul, 2016 Relationship Status: Barbecuing
Crimson Paladin
#2878: Sep 6th 2023 at 10:02:43 AM

What is Kefka like in the OG anyway?

I'm sure he's supposed to still be crazy since I remember how the devs included the scene with him complaining about the sand in his boots to establish he has a few screws loose.

"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"
Watashiwa Since: Dec, 2009
#2879: Sep 6th 2023 at 10:38:52 AM

Think of how Kefka acts during part 2, when he's sitting on top of the tower being bored. In the original Japanese, part 1 Kefka's a lot closer to that all the way through. No Laughing Mad, more The Caligula who happens to wear clown makeup.

ObligatorySarcasm Since: Aug, 2016
#2880: Sep 6th 2023 at 10:48:05 AM

I believe Kefka was childish annoying in the original. English version had his sanity hanging by a thread to where he could somewhat function with others and be lucid, then he lost it at the Floating Continent.

-Witty line-
RedHunter543 Crimson Paladin Since: Jul, 2016 Relationship Status: Barbecuing
Crimson Paladin
#2882: Sep 6th 2023 at 11:26:17 AM

Maybe more of an extreme psychopathic manchild?

"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"
KuroBaraHime ☆♥☆ Since: Jan, 2011
☆♥☆
#2883: Sep 6th 2023 at 12:37:10 PM

Oh boy, FF translation talk.

Re:FFV - I want it to be known that the GBA onward translation for FFV isn't a super faithful translation. Yes, it reads better than the old, shitty PS1 translation, but it isn't necessarily more accurate. FFV is a more light-hearted game that has several funny moments, but it still takes itself seriously a lot of the time, and is trying to present the player with a fun adventure. The English script adds a lot of jokes and references that didn't originally exist to the point where it starts to give the game a more flippant and parody-like tone. If you like this then that's fine, but know that the English script is taking a lot of liberties to make it funnier, and the original devs in 1992 didn't intend for that.

Re:FFVI and Kefka - Kefka isn't not all a disliked villain in Japan, and I feel like a lot of things people say about his character being changed are based on that old fan translation patch of the game. I haven't played that fan translation, but it sounds to me like it was just a bad translation that was probably made by someone with weak skills that was too focused on getting the literal meaning of what was being said down without thinking the way it which it was said. Kefka is still a very animated person in the Japanese script, but a lot of that is tied to how he says things, which is hard to translate.

The big difference I can think of that the English script of VI does is make Kefka more "quippy". He more often does things like make jokes or insult characters in a snarky way. He doesn't really do that in Japanese, except for maybe like the waiter line (which is still a different joke). On the other hand in the Japanese script Kefka tends to obviously change his way of speaking a lot, such speaking eloquently and with the pronoun watashi, or roughly with the pronoun ore, or childishly with the pronoun boku-chin. And he says funny things at times, but rather than something intentional on his part it's more that he has cartoonish overreactions, like his sort-of catchphrase of reacting in shock to things with シンジラレナーイ!!!, which literally just means "I can't believe it!" but the way it's written makes it clear he's saying it in a weird and over-the-top way (and I think this wasn't consistently translated in the English script). He has similar weird ways of saying things anytime he's excited or angry. And he has a habit, which also wasn't consistently translated, of cutting off his laughs with つまらん! which literally means "Boring!", which means either he's rapidly shifting moods or he's not genuinely laughing about anything in the entire game.

So basically, in the Japanese version Kekfa doesn't come off as dumb like some people say he does, he seems to be intelligent underneath the way he acts, but he's way more obviously got something wrong with him and rapidly changes his emotional mood and mental lucidity even within the same conversation. English Kekfa comes off as more lucid and stable most of the time, and his funny lines are more snarky instead of clown-ish.

Edited by KuroBaraHime on Sep 6th 2023 at 3:37:22 PM

RedHunter543 Crimson Paladin Since: Jul, 2016 Relationship Status: Barbecuing
Crimson Paladin
#2884: Sep 6th 2023 at 12:38:50 PM

To add to that, I think how Kefka speaks in the JP version greatly influenced his Dissidia portrayal since there's a lot of physical comedy with him.

"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"
Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#2885: Sep 6th 2023 at 12:56:12 PM

I think though, that this is one of those things that's not nearly as big a deal as people make it out to be. Fully accurate translations can be great...but they also have a nasty habit of coming off as bland because a lot of signifiers of character in Japanese don't translate.

Like, if your game/anime/manga/book uses pronouns as a major source of characterization, that's just straight up going to be gone in English, because English doesn't function that way. You have to figure out some other angle.

The dub of Your Name has a nearly incomprehensible scene because of this, because a combination of space constraints (anything written needs to fit in the same amount of time as the Japanese lines) and the discussed concept just not being a thing in English (a character rapidly runs through a bunch of pronouns while paying attention to the responses of the other characters). The English version just has the character refer to themselves in awkward third person for that bit.

If the bit wasn't so rapid-fire, replacing it with something else would probably have worked better, but it's hard to come up with anything that would fit.

Edited by Zendervai on Sep 6th 2023 at 4:00:06 AM

lalalei2001 Since: Oct, 2009
#2886: Sep 6th 2023 at 12:56:47 PM

"You all sound like chapters from a self-help booklet!" lives in my head.

The Protomen enhanced my life.
RedHunter543 Crimson Paladin Since: Jul, 2016 Relationship Status: Barbecuing
Crimson Paladin
#2887: Sep 6th 2023 at 1:00:17 PM

So does Son of a Submariner.

"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"
Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#2888: Sep 6th 2023 at 1:04:31 PM

Oh, and sometimes, a direct translation just fails. Like, Wild Arms 2 has Liz and Ard, and the translation comes off as breaking completely around them, because the characters are just spouting off random non-sequiturs for no reason and Ashley gets in on it too.

They're actually copying old comedy routines and the translators just translated directly, with the result being that the jokes might be funny if you know the context of them, but because most English-speakers aren't familiar with (I believe) early 80s Japanese comedy duos, the jokes just don't make any sense.

A better translation would have probably swapped it out for a bunch of Abbott and Costello references or something like that. But because the overall translation isn't very good, this one bit being technically really accurate but in a way that totally fails to bring across the intent just gets mistaken for the translators giving less and less of a shit as the game goes on.

Edited by Zendervai on Sep 6th 2023 at 4:05:21 AM

RedHunter543 Crimson Paladin Since: Jul, 2016 Relationship Status: Barbecuing
Crimson Paladin
#2889: Sep 6th 2023 at 1:08:16 PM

Yeah, jokes are some of the most hardest things to localize from what I understand.

"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"
Draghinazzo (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: I get a feeling so complicated...
#2890: Sep 6th 2023 at 1:15:46 PM

Most people championing direct literal translations are either monolingual, have never worked in localization or had that much experience translating things from one language to another. It simply doesnt work that way and if you try the results are bad.

Even in languages that are fairly similar to each other like spanish and portuguese i regularly find things that arent so easy to translate literally.

To some extent you have to localize if you want to translate a script to flow well.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Sep 6th 2023 at 5:20:41 AM

RedHunter543 Crimson Paladin Since: Jul, 2016 Relationship Status: Barbecuing
Crimson Paladin
#2891: Sep 6th 2023 at 1:18:51 PM

I'm suddenly reminded of those fan translations of Fire Emblem Fates, the ones that kept the honorifics of siblings like Nii-san.

So you got shit like Big Sister Camilla or Big Brother Ryouma, and that sounds incredibly awkward to English speakers.

"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"
Draghinazzo (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: I get a feeling so complicated...
#2892: Sep 6th 2023 at 1:20:11 PM

Im fine with keeping japanese honorifics if the setting is japanese, but otherwise i dont see why you'd bother. It just feels awkward.

RedHunter543 Crimson Paladin Since: Jul, 2016 Relationship Status: Barbecuing
Crimson Paladin
#2893: Sep 6th 2023 at 1:23:26 PM

Well Hoshido IS Japanese inspired but even the European based Nohrian characters do it IIRC.

Plus the honorifics are in English. I can accept the honorifics better if they stay Japanese. Persona for example uses Japanese honorifics like kun.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Sep 6th 2023 at 4:24:35 PM

"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"
KuroBaraHime ☆♥☆ Since: Jan, 2011
☆♥☆
#2894: Sep 6th 2023 at 1:43:54 PM

On the PS1 FF games, a lot of people say that VIII and IX have better translations than VII, but I don't totally agree with that. The reason people say that is because VII's English script has a lot of awkwardly worded lines in it that sort of make it "read like a translation", but the actual information being conveyed to the player is generally pretty accurate to what was intended, although there's some mistranslated lines here and there due to the translator lacking context (always a big issue with game translation, and even other games that are considered to have good translations usually have one or two mistranslations because of this).

Outside of that and a lot of arbitrarily changed or mistranslated ability/item/monster names, the big issues that come to mind with VII have to do with ways of speaking that the translators didn't know how to convey. Early in the game, Red XIII speaks in a formal way with watashi as his pronoun. But later when you reach his home of Cosmo Canyon he reverts to his "natural" way of speaking, which turns out to be rougher and with the pronoun oira, which is like a rural version of ore. There's even a line where he corrects himself on his pronoun, which the English script left as is where it's not clear what he's correcting himself on. He later starts using oira all the time after Cosmo Canyon, showing how he's now more comfortable with the other characters. And in a similar vein, Cait Sith talks in a Kansai accent in the Japanese version, and there's a part where his handler Reeve gets himself mixed up on that. The English script doesn't do anything with this at all, though later FFVII media started dubbing Cait Sith in a Scottish accent (due to being named off a Scottish myth) to roughly translate it.

Anyway, I don't necessarily consider VIII and IX's translation better because while they do read better, they also have problems with mistranslations due to lack of context, and lots of arbitrarily changed or mistranslated names (How do you confuse Ahriman for Veteran? That's V PS1 tier), on top of just having weird rewrites in places. From what I've seen, VIII doesn't have as much of an issue with this as IX does, but there's randomly scenes where characters will just say completely different things than they did in Japanese. It can change how characters come across, like in IX at one point Zidane tells the other characters to go help people, in English Amarant complains about the idea of helping other people, while in Japanese he just calls out Zidane for acting erratic over Garnet but then goes off to help people with no further complaint. Not to mention how for IX's final boss they truncated a bunch of his speech and replaced it with a Star Wars reference.

There's also still the general issue not knowing how to convey non-standard ways of speech. Like in VIII, Selphie thinks in her head in a Kansai accent and speaks that way when she briefly meets her old friends at Trabia, which I don't recall the English script doing anything with. Or in IX, Freya speaks in an archaic fashion. She comes off as more casual in English, when she should probably sound something more like how Frog does in English Chrono Trigger (who himself speaks rougher in Japanese and him speaking like a formal knight is entirely made up my the translation).

Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#2895: Sep 6th 2023 at 2:54:48 PM

Well, the big reason people think FFVII had a not great translation is because it's riddled with typos. At the minimum, FFVIII and FFIX had proofreaders involved somewhere. FFVII inexplicably looks a lot more amateur than most of Square's SNES translations because you run into issues the older games didn't seem to have.

ScubaWolf from South Carolina Since: Feb, 2020
#2896: Sep 6th 2023 at 3:07:50 PM

Part of why I love FFV's GBA translation is simply BECAUSE it's like a parody. You can tell serious things are going on, but it feels like a Saturday morning cartoon with the jokes. But when the game wants to get serious, it will get VERY serious. There are no jokes or quips during a lot of moments in the game because they're pretty serious. But when it's a scene that is being played as comedic, it will be comedic. Note the obvious exceptions are Gilgamesh and the fight between ExDeath and Ghido.

Edited by ScubaWolf on Sep 6th 2023 at 6:08:16 AM

"In a move surprising absolutely no one"
OmegaRadiance Since: Jun, 2011
#2897: Sep 6th 2023 at 3:22:43 PM

I always like Dissidia Kefka for being a lot more over the top in line with how he’s presented in the English translation, while still being faithful to what he is beneath the makeup.

Cause it’s clear when they could go all in on making him over the top to match his appearance in 3D they went for it.

Every accusation by the GOP is ALWAYS a confession.
ComicX6 (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
#2898: Sep 6th 2023 at 4:01:48 PM

My favorite VII translation flub so far is labeling what is clearly the recurring Chimera enemy a "Harpy".

And while I'm sure that Cid isn't a very pleasant-sounding character in the Japanese script either, I'm willing to bet that he didn't have multiple text boxes that are 90% Symbol Swearing.

Edited by ComicX6 on Sep 6th 2023 at 7:04:06 AM

My Megaman and MegaTen RPG Liveblogs
Mizerous Pet Owner from Hell Since: Oct, 2013 Relationship Status: Brewing the love potion
Pet Owner
#2899: Sep 6th 2023 at 5:12:44 PM

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/why_would_someone_spend_five_years_retranslating_all_of_final_fantasy_7_143290246656.jpg Why are they sick?

Just Makima.
MorningStar1337 The Encounter that ended the Dogma from 🤔 Since: Nov, 2012
The Encounter that ended the Dogma
#2900: Sep 6th 2023 at 5:55:04 PM

[up][up] When Kingdom Hearts had the more faithful translation of the source material then the dub of the actual soruce materialtongue


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