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Crystalis 8-bit translation
2019-Jan-21, Monday 21:07
Not sure how much I'm going to be able to get into this in the review I'm writing, but this particularly struck me as I was playing.
One of the hardest things to translate from Japanese to English is the way that men and women have a different way of speaking. They use different words, they have different ways of structuring their sentences, and they tend to speak with different levels of formality. That means that when a woman talks like a man, or vice versa, it's meaningful. This is also why so many foreign men in Japan end up talking like women, because they start dating a Japanese woman and just mirror the way she talks.
In Crystalis, there's a scene where the main character is infiltrating a village of women using a magical disguise, and he returns a particular herb that the leader of the village is looking for. After he does, he says this:
It means, "It's merely a trifle in recompense for the kindness I've been shown in this village," but the last line is the MC speaking as a man, realizing he's disguised, and then correcting his language to feminine speech. This wasn't in the English at all, because even ignoring text box limitations, how could they? All he did was change the way he said "is." There's no way to reflect that in English, so they just cut it out.
But among the things they did leave in, I learned the answer to a question I've been pondering for a long time. In English, the strongest armor set in the game is called the "Psycho Armor" and "Psycho Shield." I was always curious how it got that name. The other armors are named stuff like "Hide," "Bronze," "Ceramic," mostly based on the material they're made of. But psycho? What does that refer to?
Well, uh, it turns out that in Japanese it's called the 最高シールド (saikō shīrudo, "The best shield").
That's actually really clever localization! "The best shield"? Obviously they can't go with that as a name, so instead they transliterated the name and left kids like me wondering. Is it the "psycho armor" because it's so crazy good? Is it some mysterious metal? What is going on? It drew me into the world and it's part of the reason I still remember Crystalis decades after I first played it, and it turns out it's just an attempt to avoid a name that sounds dumb in English.
Localization is hard, but sometimes it pays off.
One of the hardest things to translate from Japanese to English is the way that men and women have a different way of speaking. They use different words, they have different ways of structuring their sentences, and they tend to speak with different levels of formality. That means that when a woman talks like a man, or vice versa, it's meaningful. This is also why so many foreign men in Japan end up talking like women, because they start dating a Japanese woman and just mirror the way she talks.
In Crystalis, there's a scene where the main character is infiltrating a village of women using a magical disguise, and he returns a particular herb that the leader of the village is looking for. After he does, he says this:
It means, "It's merely a trifle in recompense for the kindness I've been shown in this village," but the last line is the MC speaking as a man, realizing he's disguised, and then correcting his language to feminine speech. This wasn't in the English at all, because even ignoring text box limitations, how could they? All he did was change the way he said "is." There's no way to reflect that in English, so they just cut it out.
But among the things they did leave in, I learned the answer to a question I've been pondering for a long time. In English, the strongest armor set in the game is called the "Psycho Armor" and "Psycho Shield." I was always curious how it got that name. The other armors are named stuff like "Hide," "Bronze," "Ceramic," mostly based on the material they're made of. But psycho? What does that refer to?
Well, uh, it turns out that in Japanese it's called the 最高シールド (saikō shīrudo, "The best shield").
That's actually really clever localization! "The best shield"? Obviously they can't go with that as a name, so instead they transliterated the name and left kids like me wondering. Is it the "psycho armor" because it's so crazy good? Is it some mysterious metal? What is going on? It drew me into the world and it's part of the reason I still remember Crystalis decades after I first played it, and it turns out it's just an attempt to avoid a name that sounds dumb in English.
Localization is hard, but sometimes it pays off.
