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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28890 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Secondly, countries with less ‘wokeness’, like Japan, have even worse, more hackneyed and more cringe game writing than their western counterparts.

Which Japanese games have you played, which weren't filtered through non-Japanese translators? Because Japanese to English video game translation is notoriously plagued by rewrites, "punching up", and general disrespect for the original text.

I can't turn down an opportunity to introduce more people to Ghost Stories. Specifically the English Dub.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Stories_(Japanese_TV_series) https://dubbing.fandom.com/wiki/Ghost_Stories

Ghost Stories was picked up for dubbing by ADV Studios in 2005. According to voice actor Greg Ayres, they were told to "do whatever it took to sell the show." The only condition was that the basic story and names of major characters and ghosts had to remain intact, but everything else was fair game. To that end, director Steven Foster reworked the show into a pure Gag Dub by throwing out nearly all of the original script. When the voice actors were called in to record scenes, whoever got there first would set the tone and subject for the scene, which meant the other cast members had to follow in those footsteps. This approach produced a dub full of random characterization, fourth-wall-breaking jokes, political and cultural references.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=c8JRb3-W8uQ

It really is...something.

That is the greatest dub of all time!

Translation might well impact on prose and characterisation, but I've never heard of plot being altered. And it doesn't take much effort to find Japanese games with absolutely nonsensical plots

And it doesn't take much effort to find Japanese games with absolutely nonsensical plots

Sometimes that's part of the fun.

Several Yakuza games, the Zelda games, FF7, 8, 14, Prof Layton, Chrono Trigger on DS, most recent Persona games and many more in English; I don't speak Japanese.

I don’t really buy that it’s the translation making things much worse; if anything, translation to English by professional translators who also do books and TV scripts usually improves the writing quality of bad game writers (eg. my Polish friends have said the Witcher 2/3’s writing is more hackneyed and cliche in Polish than in English where there was some smart editing).

translation to English by professional translators who also do books and TV scripts usually improves the writing quality of bad game writers

except that they aren't translators, they are localizers, and they proudly declare themselves as such. Jelly Donuts is their work's infancy. You may be interested in the current Unicorn Overlord drama brewing on X.

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