what does a literal translation of japanese to english look like

Persona 5's translation is a black mark on a vivid game

Why exercise fans of JRPG giants assume Japanese writers can't write?

Editor'south note: A few weeks ago a startling, brilliant and insightful site popped upward on the cyberspace, its sole purpose to highlight the problems with Persona v'southward translation. It's a beautiful thing - near equally stylish as the game itself - and its creator Connor Krammer raises some fascinating points. We've invited him to go into particular hither, and I implore y'all to check out Connor's site also.

Persona five is the latest prey to bad translation in the JRPG genre, and it likely won't exist the last. Yet oddly, many JRPG fans don't seem to care that the stories they love then much are frequently warped and degraded by stiff, sometimes entirely inaccurate writing by Japanese-to-English translation staff.

Perhaps the problem is the tacit agreement that a story can just be truly appreciated in its original form, and that any other linguistic communication can but tell an inherently inferior tale. Translation, the reasoning goes, is a killer of nuance and particular. Yet most hold that if it'south an evil, it'due south a necessary one.

Thus, a mental compromise: if language B can't do justice to a piece of work written in language A, then the adjacent best option must be somewhere in between, theoretically in language B but equally close to the original linguistic communication every bit possible. Sometimes the writing might seem stilted and foreign, but then again, it is strange media, after all!

Welcome to Literal Translation Hell, where practiced stories go to dice. And most populous among the damned is a detail brood of story hailing from Japan: the JRPG.

But let'due south step dorsum a fleck, considering word of translation in English inevitably encounters a stumbling block: most people born and raised to the English tongue take never needed to think about translation. If that describes you, don't worry, because perhaps unexpectedly, you only need to know one linguistic communication to understand the basics of translation.

What is translation?

Though people generally think of language when the topic of translation comes up, at its middle translation is only taking an idea and retelling it so that it can exist understood past a new audience. Words and linguistic communication aren't required, though language translation is so prominent information technology'south frequently what get-go jumps to heed.

In fact, translation is so common that people don't realise how skillful they are at judging it. Take you e'er watched a film adaptation and hated it? If so, you already know what bad translation looks like.

Translated text can be judged by the same standards as a movie adaptation - which is itself but a translation of words to film. Does the translation faithfully depict the ideas and style of the original? Do the characters feel authentic and authentic? Or have, perhaps, bad acting and atrocious direction left the story a terrible, stilted mess?

The idea of translation as a word-by-word procedure is bonny and simple, but think once more about films. The best screenwriters know that their job is to convey an writer's ideas and style to the audience in a unlike medium, not to mechanically copy the author's every word. Pretending that picture works the same way equally text is a recipe for a bad adaptation, and actually does a worse job of being faithful to the original writer. After all, the near literal adaptation of a novel would just be a recording of pages turning, and that would brand for a terrible film.

So what happens when a translator treats their work like a bad movie accommodation? Well...

Welcome (back) to literal translation hell

...you go Persona 5, or any of the dozens of translated Japanese games out at that place with strong, stilted writing in English. (And to caput one issue off at the pass: I'm not advocating for censorship. That's an entirely different problem, and non i that affects Persona v.)

Persona five's full general brilliance and widespread acclaim soften the bear on of its translation just does non remedy it. Nor exercise they somehow modify the fact that the English release is inferior to the Japanese as a consequence of its translation.

While not every line in Persona 5 is a dud (and there are indeed some shining moments), the issues are extensive and run deep. Errors range from grade-school grammatical flubs and character voice catastrophes to complete mistranslations that fundamentally alter the meaning of the text.

A common view is that the script'due south sheer size should excuse whatever errors information technology contains - a sentiment frequently followed by comparisons to novels infamous for their length, such every bit War and Peace. Still novels of titanic scale are published in English all the fourth dimension without a fraction of the bug present in Persona 5. Many of them, War and Peace included, are themselves translations.

The double standard is blunt and, frankly, saddening. To have blatant errors in a video game script is to admit that video games and their players don't deserve the level of quality that is commonplace in other mediums. And that acceptance is all the more poisonous when the fabric is translated, considering it marks an access that non only exercise players not deserve quality, but not-native speakers least of all.

Persona five's translation contains an impressive array of errors that can't be reproduced in total, just here are five pick samples:

• 'Suguru Kamoshida was a scum.'
• 'Are you skipping out on the volleyball rally? I guess I expect information technology from you, transfer.'
• 'You're done for, along with this abominous globe!'
• 'Just to say "heavy rain," every bit many things fall as in that location are countries in the world.'
• 'It means they're holding nothing dorsum and are serious to kill us!'

And the higher up errors are actually preferable in their raw, unmistakable quality. The more insidious errors alter pregnant on a fundamental level and in means that readers in English shouldn't be expected to detect. Accept an early on scene in the game, in which a detective seemingly predicts another person's phone call as if psychic. In Japanese, he was actually referring to a previous call.

Additionally, equally so many JRPGs do, Persona 5 suffers from stock translation. These are translations of phrases that look like proper English language, only which are used overly frequently and in inappropriate contexts. The Japanese 'shikata ga nai' is often translated to 'it tin't exist helped', for example, which isn't intrinsically problematic. Even so bad translation results in the repetition of that rendering over and over and over, regardless of who the speaker is and what their speaking voice is like.

A common refrain amidst defenders of literal translation is that to change the exact, word-by-word phrasing is to change some ineffable, distinctly Japanese attribute of the source text. That argument profoundly overestimates how deliberate the use of the phrase really is and assigns too much importance to verbal wording at the cost of the more of import value: how the original writers intended the character to come beyond.

Put yourself in the shoes of an author and ask yourself: if yous had to convey a detail grapheme, which line would you lot choose to all-time express their personality?

A punkish character:

1. 'It tin't be helped.'
2. 'This thing'due south out of our hands, yo.'

A formal character:

1. 'It tin can't be helped.'
2. 'This state of affairs simply cannot be altered.'

A shy character:

1. 'Information technology tin can't be helped.'
2. 'I guess... i-if it's similar that, we can't assist it.'

A philosophical French character:

1. 'Information technology can't be helped.'
2. 'C'est la vie.'

If a translator chooses the offset pick in all four cases, suddenly they've destroyed the unique voice of those characters and made them all sound the same. To claim that a translator should always pick the first option because it 'best represents' the original creators is to merits that the original creators had footling taste or skill in their craft.

Information technology'southward unclear exactly why Persona 5's translation is then poor. Managerial issues are nearly certainly at play, every bit indicated past the big translation staff, which includes six translators and eight editors. This was 'the virtually number of translators and editors on a team' at Atlus, says Yu Namba, the Persona 5 localisation project pb.

And though it's tempting to point fingers at translators and editors for being subpar, it'southward unfair to do so without knowing the conditions they were working under. Even an fantabulous translator will introduce errors if given unreasonable deadlines, and editors can't be expected to make a translation consequent when there are so many of them on the aforementioned project. And if subpar staff were present, they certainly didn't rent themselves.

While we can't know for certain what happened, there is 1 cause that we can point to with undeniable certainty: Atlus, either the American or Japanese branch, simply didn't retrieve players would care about Persona five's story enough for translation quality to matter.

Information technology might be worth asking why that is.

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Source: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-05-17-persona-5s-translation-is-a-black-mark-on-a-brilliant-game

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