Advent Calendar 10: Invisible Insane

Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games.

As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon here by December 15th for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one!

I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence!

If you look back through the history of video games, right around the mid-80s, you see an odd geographical jump: The epicenter of the industry suddenly hurtles across the Pacific from California to Japan. I'll get to what tanked the American end of things in a few days, but the rise of the Japanese industry can be attributed to the explosive popularity of the Nintendo Entertainment System, née Famicom. From the NES' debut in 1985 to the release of the original Xbox in November 2001, Japan was where console games were born, and Japanese was the language they spoke.

Most Americans don't speak any Japanese, and they certainly don't read it. In order to take our money, Nintendo (and Sega, and far lesser players like NEC) had to convert their Japanese games into English. Not just "translate", but localize.

The process of localizing media is... imprecise. You can't just put out a word-for-word translation, if one even exists; then you get incidents like the infamous DO NOT WANT from the Chinese subtitles for Star Wars, a very literal rendering of what the three characters say. Video game-wise, we have the classic dialogue bubble from the original Final Fantasy, "I, Garland, will knock you all down!"

You also have to take a lot of cultural references and transplant them into a context that the target audience will understand. The original dialogue in Sailor Moon has characters calling the lead "odango-atama" -- odango are a kind of rice ball snack shaped like the knots at the tops of her pigtails, and nobody outside of Japan knows what they are, so the English track renders this "meatball-head". This can fail at either the origin or target ends. Technically, Final Fantasy II (US)'s "You spoony bard!" is correct. 'Spoony' as an insult means something like foolish and soppily infatuated, which the bard definitely is. It's just not used in modern English parlance, and so was hilariously unfamiliar to the modern English speakers trying to get through that particular train wreck.

Often when a concept has no ready equivalent in the target culture, the choice is between explaining it, or omitting it. Games and anime set in schools continually runs into the problem of when to try to translate the title sempai (one who is in a grade above you at school) into something like "upperclassman" and when to just ignore it and try to make the social dynamic of grade levels apparent in other ways. That one has actually filtered into the awareness of a lot of the target audience of games like visual novels, and so is often left in, untranslated -- but you wouldn't see it in a lot of run-and-gun shooters, where the player is assumed to have less weeaboo inclinations

This is all very tricky, and it was not helped by the way a lot of early Japanese games were translated entirely by Japanese people who had done a lot of English classes in school and never in their lives had a chance to test anything they learned on a real English speaker. Games like RPGs like to borrow terms and names from mythology foreign to both the Japanese translators and the North American audience. And then sometimes there are just flat-out mistakes and mistranslations, some of which are so egrigious they render the story incomprehensible. Have a look at a short list of some of the most inconvenient ones:

For a more in-depth look in what happens and why, you can always head to Legends of Localization, run by Clyde Mandelin, aka 'Mato. (He's also got a bunch of books out, all of which I kind of want.) You can, of course, try to head this off by learning Japanese and playing the originals, but only crazy people do that.

Me, I mean, Crazy people is me. I learned Japanese because inaccurate translations annoy me. My literacy is not great, but my vocabulary is well-tuned to murder, from all the Ace Attorney and Detective Conan games. The third most useful language for studying the history of games, as it turns out, is French. A surprising number of classic PC gaming companies are (or were) headquartered in either France or Quebec, including Infogrames and UbiSoft. That's not why I picked up French, but damned if it hasn't come in handy.