2nd October 2015, 5:39 PM
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.
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.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)