18th April 2005, 5:08 PM
Quote:Definitely, within the EU... the countries of Europe are pretty understanding with eachother. It's the countries who want to send people to Europe that they have problems with. The main issue right now is probably Muslims... lots of them want to immigrate to Europe and the Europeans don't really want them to come. They'll do it in a way that is probably less overtly xenophobic than Americans generally are (and sure, they might well watch movies from Africa with much more willingness than we will. They are more accepting of other cultures, after all.), that is true, but results are results... and it says that it's not an unqualified win for them.
Yes that's true, though I blame that more on the fact that people associate terrorism with Islam.
Quote:Not quite, I think... if you wanted it as close to American as possible you probably just wouldn't watch anime. So it's more diverse than 'as close as possible'. Dubbed anime is, usually, still anime... but yes, it is putting it into a form that is more acceptable to mainstream American culture.
Which is why I said conforming to. ;)
Quote:Actually, that's a good point: humor. Or, more appropriately, societal context (humor, allegory, cultural references, etc). When anime is translated, the humor is often some of the hardest part to translate... either you need explanation subtitles to explain the subtitles or you change the jokes to something someone in the target culture would understand... but changing the jokes doesn't work with subs, just dubs.
Anyway, my point. In the case of a game, would it make sense to make the game in nation Y, for nation Y, set in nation X, in the language of nation X... but with a script written for nation Y audiences? Seems like it could be a bit weird, if you think about it... and I could never expect a writing team in nation Y to be able to write something that fully understands and is set in nation X's culture. The best they could do is what they think nation X's culture is like... I guess that'd have to be good enough. If you've got good enough writers it should work (and Bioware does).
Well just do what I suggested, keep the original English script for subtitles. Simple.
Quote:I don't feel quite as strongly about it as you do... I mean, it is funny when a crew of a German submarine speaks with British accents. It's annoying. You've just got to get used to it and ignore it... which can be done, I'd say. You can get engrossed. But of course it'd be even better if it had been in German.
It's very distracting for me.
Quote:As I just said, I wouldn't go that far. You can have realism with false aspects if you just learn to accept the unrealistic aspects... it doesn't totally ruin it for me -- I loved ED despite the flaw of it being 99% in English, for instance. So I'd be a bit more qualified, while agreeing that it hurts the realism.
At least in ED that transition from the original language to English, like as if there were Trek-like translators at work. Heh. Not very realistic, but it also wasn't a huge RPG with tons of voicework.