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Bruce Sterling, my literary idol, once said that there's a quality in a translation, any translation, that you just can't get in the original. At the very least, the statement sounded cool enough for the cyberpunk sf movement to adopt it as dogma. (And if you think cyberpunk equates with dumb guys with guns and cranial jacks, you need to read the good stuff more.) I personally tend to think there's a large chunk of truth in the statement, especially as it applies to Japanese RPGs, but as to what you think... well, let's find out, shall we?

Onward.

I'll grant you that fan translations can sometimes be quite good, often better than what the official translation was... but I don't think it's really fair to compare them to the official translation either. A lot of people have been knocking on Woolsey and dismissing the issues of time and resources that were available to him. It's "obvious" that the text memory should have been expanded for English, and that compression should have been used for the text. Problem is, those kind of options simply weren't available to him as the lowly translator at the time.

To a fan translator, the work is a labor of love and they can spend as much time and effort as they care to to get it right. But at the time, FFIV was just another video game, produced at a time where games were far more low profile. Like any programmer in the real world, Woolsey did the best he could in the time available, same as with FFVI and Chrono Trigger. OF COURSE those conditions aren't going to produce a "perfect" translation, and it's a bit petty to look at things otherwise. The good news is that we're now in the modern era, and Square's translations are quite excellent overall... and that statement will last maybe two letters before someone challenges it.

Ok, I gave the opinion airtime. And now that I've done so, I can rightfully say that this is complete nonsense. Absolutely a translator should be going for meaning as well as the actual words in the original version, but it's foolish to say that there isn't a scale of good or bad as to how well something's been translated, or that things must be exactly as in the original for something to be "correct".

Who cares if Rock Man got renamed Mega Man? Yes, it's more interesting to have access to the music-related in-jokes in the game (Roll, Forte, Bass, etc.) and it did eventually lead to absurdities like "Megaman Volnutt", but just renaming something isn't that big a deal. I've never even heard that about Super Mario Bros., and I'm not entirely sure if I buy it, but if it is true that I'm most thankful to Nintendo for giving us a relatively much more interesting name. In short, harping on the fact that some details are changed from one version to the next is just pointless.

I'll buy into this one... except there's nothing left for me to say about it. Moving on.

Again, sounds about right. Xenogears I'm not so sure about, because even though the game was largely grammatically correct, the translation didn't do nearly as much towards explaining the story or giving greater emotional heft to the characters as it should have... but on the other hand, if seen as an evolutionary stage between FFVII and Vagrant Story, it's quite acceptable.

Amen, brother. Nothing makes me wince quite as much as a lack of verbal shortcuts where real speech would be littered with 'em. It's absolutely amazing to me that translators can't take five seconds to say to themselves, "nah, he'd say something like 'I'll be back later' rather than 'I will return here when possible.'" Of course, I'm stepping on my own comments about time available above, but still, it's a definite bucket of cold water when something like that happens. Again, here's being thankful that it doesn't happen so much anymore.

"Secret and highly sexual"? I've read through one or two of the fan translations for FFIV out there and never seen anything even remotely like what you're talking about - some more kissing than what I remember from the US version, but not much more than that. As for Chrono Cross, I haven't heard from anybody on staff that's played both that the Japanese translation is infinitely superior. There's certainly some info they've got that makes understating the game a bit easier, such as the ending movies to the Chrono Trigger PSX version, but nothing you can't get yourself with a little research effort. If there's any problems with the game, I suspect that they really were caused by simple miscomprehension on the player's part - I know that I got things that were perfectly straightforward wrong, even though they were stated quite plainly in the game, simply because there was so much plot to keep track of.

Sounds about right to me. One fact that a lot of people seem obsessed with is that in the US version, Rosa is nearly crushed by a giant boulder, whereas in the Japanese version she's nearly cleaved in two by a giant falling blade. Other than being able to see that the blade is there in all the previous scenes (as opposed to mistaking it as just part of the scenery and being surprised when it actually started falling, which I kinda preferred) who gives a flying leap? I like FF2 as much as anyone, but seriously, it's just not that deep, that small changes could make a big difference in the game. Even not being able to resurrect Palom and Porom is forgivable, as far as I'm concerned.

Wow, a DQ ref and an FF ref at the same time! Not an easy thing to do, especially considering that it's actually on topic. Excellent work sir, I salute you!

Ok, just for the record I've got to step in once more and defend FFT's translation. Yes, the bar jobs and tutorial have some bad screwups, and yes, there are one or two goofs in the main part of the game itself. (Older brother, and all that.) But the core story is still there, it's just that it's a horrendously confusing labyrinth of politics and family. None of the fan translations I've seen out there have been much different from what we've got, and I was able to follow the part of the game I actually cared about well enough, so I really don't see what all the fuss is about.

Getting back to the intro, this letter is really what I was talking about - the idea that there's something intrinsically superior about game text written in Japanese. I think there's a definite mythos that's grown up around Japanese RPGs, anime, etc., so that a lot of us tend to think that since it's from the mother church, in a sense, it must be superior. And I can't really argue with that, because it's a subjective thing and if you think Japanese stuff is just inherently cool, more power to you. But the more I've played, the more I've started to think that it has nothing to do with the translation as much as it has to do with the core game and story therein, and that in a lot of cases, good translation or no, there's simply not that much there to begin with. And that being the case, no amount of polish will make a game take off. Of course, that's just my opinion, but I can't bring myself to look at a game like the US release of Grandia and think that it's all the translator's fault. There may be more to it than that.

Closing Comments:

I'm really drowsy for some reason... maybe some Zelda will wake me up. Send AK some good email, and I'll talk to you Monday.

-Chris Jones, can live with the occasional "good feeling"