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+--- Thread: The truth about the FFIV translation (/showthread.php?tid=6905)
The truth about the FFIV translation - Dark Jaguar - 2nd October 2015
As many here are aware, when Final Fantasy IV got ported to Playstation, they completely retranslated it. This was largely due to fan demands based on the popularity of the fan retranslation project for the game. The claim was the original translation was horrible and the fan translation was far more accurate.
This professional translator (and yes, it is very hard to decipher which translators and thus translations are worth trusting without actually learning the language in question yourself) basically calls out that fan translation as sloppy and amateurish to the point of being LESS accurate than the original SNES translation. While it's true that the fan translation worked off the original version and thus wasn't censored nor had content dummied out, they took so much liberty with their own version that everything else is essentially completely rewritten. As an example, as it turns out no, the original script was NOT filled with swearing. It seems that a big mistake beginner translators make when it comes to translating Japanese rude language is to replace the rude word with the rudest possible English equivalent, when in reality a lot of those rude words, based on grammatical context, are pretty mild, more equivalent to something like "You cur!" than "You bitch!". In many places, they basically just made up whole sentences entirely based on their opinion of what was said. A big example is the "William Shatner" joke wedged into the fan translation, which basically never happened. I read their FAQ on it and they even defended it by claiming the original referenced a famous Japanese actor so that translation "kept the spirit". However, this translator has shown that was made up entirely, so they basically lied. It seems that the fan translators weren't so much interested in an accurate translation so much as a complete script rewrite to fit better with what they thought it should be. That's fine in and of itself, but it's really crummy that they went on to claim they were making a perfectly accurate translation.
Unfortunately, this fan translation so affected the fan base that their demands resulted in Square Enix more or less deciding that instead of giving the fans a highly accurate translation, they'd make the translation a bit more accurate but plug in some extra swearing and other rewrites to make it more in line with what fans were expecting based on that fan translation. The later GBA and PSP translations are, rather than retranslations, just the Playstation script run past an editor a few more times.
The majority of this comparison deals with the original Japanese compared to the first English translation on the SNES, with a few comments on other translations sprinkled throughout. It's very revealing. The SNES version did get some things wrong and censored a few other things, but it actually was a lot more accurate than most people believe. One thing I've learned from this person's articles on these things is just how difficult it is to translate a lot of very language-specific ideas while still making the result read well. A perfectly accurate translation would be filled to the brim with asterisks and parenthesis going over all manner of Japanese-specific minutia, and a few things (like poetry and song lyrics) still wouldn't work right (which is why to this day full song translations in games are basically entirely different). As a result, I've learned to appreciate certain changes that manage to translate the SPIRIT of the original when they can't capture the literal meaning of the original (such as changing the squid statue to a pencil statue in Earthbound).
It's worth a read, if you're interested.
The truth about the FFIV translation - Weltall - 4th October 2015
Do we know if any future translations were based, in any way, upon this one? I have Final Fantasy Chronicles, but it was mostly because I did not, at the time, have a copy of Chrono Trigger, so I didn't play much of this version of IV. I have, however, played the ports on GBA, DS and PSP, and none of them had anything like what you described.
The truth about the FFIV translation - Dark Jaguar - 4th October 2015
They didn't steal the script, no, but it seems that they didn't try to go for a perfectly accurate translation either, in favor of appealing to fan's desire for an "edgier" translation (which fans at the time thought was an accurate translation). The Chronicles translation is basically the script they reused and reused for both GBA and PSP translations, though the DS translation was more of an original creation since that had been heavily expanded and rewritten in Japan as well.
The truth about the FFIV translation - A Black Falcon - 4th October 2015
The FFIV fan translation was one of those early ones, right? Yeah, in the early days of fan translations they took some big liberties with the scripts of some games. I think most more modern fan translations are much more faithful to the source material... though they often do change things, in order to fit the amount of space they have for text, or to fit the language better, or just because they want to make changes. But those very ... altered ... fan translations are not the rule.