Liars, Damned Liars, and Localizers

One of the things that you often hear when you’re encouraged to learn a new language is expanding your horizons in terms of employment and media. I’ve been studying Japanese for several years now. While I can agree that it is true, it does come with one understated and rather ingratiating drawback: you begin to notice and thus are irritated by bad translations and grammar.

Suppose you are ignorant of or are just ignoring the political biases of the translators and localizers, often of video games and media. In that case, it is easy to chalk this up shoddy translation or just that the word or phrase has no easy equivalent, especially if you have had no exposure to raw untranslated materials. Unfortunately, many of these localizers or translators, particularly in industrialized western nations such as the United States of America or Canada, will sometimes insert their biases into these translations by completely changing the dialogue.

Please Note: while the examples listed below are from video games, there are many more examples across various industries. One of the most (in)famous is FUNimation’s American English Dubs of various popular anime such as Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid.

Caveat Lector: I have not played these games, so I cannot consider if the translation is simply a reflection of how the character speaks or holds himself/herself in the translated game.

Some Examples

Example 1: Balthus

While this sort of speech pattern and demeanour would make sense for a character that doesn’t have a very sharp sense of awareness for Balthus, that would not make very much sense.

Despite his hearty and careless personality, Balthus can be quite insightful, as he’s the only person who can not only keep up with Claude’s defensiveness over his past and his prodding, but he even turns it back on him, leaving Claude genuinely indignant and hypocritically getting upset at Balthus for trying to get a read into his past.

This is confusing as I don’t see any particular reason why they used the English translation when they could’ve directly translated it from the Japanese. I can’t think of any particular reason other than that perhaps they assumed the audience had no idea what sake was? I don’t know; let me know if you have a better reason, and I’ll edit this article.

Example 2: Alvin

Look, I really don’t think I need to explain why this one got changed. Considering just about anywhere you look, you’ll find this when you look up “lolicon.”

ロリコン : lolicon (slang) : sexual attraction to young girls : a person attracted to young girls

I think it’s incredibly amusing that they avoid using it in the one instance where it’s not going to be immediately taken to mean “pedophile.”

Example 3: Rita

Okay, so this one you’re going to have a very difficult time convincing me isn’t due to some gender politics slant. Oh no! A young woman of marriageable age is happy to get married? We can’t have that! Shut it down!

Example 4: Oh Grandma

Another one that you’ll have a tough time convincing me isn’t political. I shouldn’t even need to explain why.

Personal Experiences & Lexicon Gaps

I do many Japanese to English translation work for fan projects, so I can completely emphasize that sometimes there are no good or “easy” translations for the original “raw” text. However, as seen in the two examples, they haven’t even tried. They’ve completely changed it and added in something completely different. For some reason, Rita said that “Marriage is a woman’s greatest happiness” was deemed inappropriate, so the “translated” text was substituted instead. Japanese is not an easy language to translate into English; I’m not sure if you can find me a person who thinks otherwise. However, if you’re translating something, you have somewhat of an obligation to your readers (or viewers, players) to produce both a faithful and pleasant translation. It’s very annoying that this isn’t the case, at least very often anymore.