i saw on twitter a screenshot (i forgot to save it, sorry) of an interview by localizers admitting that they've completely scraped the Japanese dialogue of entire scenes and completely changed entire story scenes before.
That's how bad it is. We need to look at Japanese games over the last decade or so and retranslate all of them i think
Like Squall in Final Fantasy VIII. He had a completely different personality.
But they made him a reclusive emo in the american version for seemingly no reason.
Wahr is he like in teh original? He still seems rather edgy, especially in that ball cutscene (at first).
here's a solid rundown
This is why I gushed so much about Star Ocean: The Second Story R yesterday.
It was so refreshing to see a game NOT do this.
They even improved upon the original translation in that regard, by returning the 10 Wise Men to their actual names instead of the made up ones for the original release.
Though, tbh, I liked the made up ones more. Simply because fighting Lucifer and Michael and Gabriel again in a JRPG has gotten stale.
At least Lucifer has one of the most amazing English voices I've ever heard.
And to think, his actor has no other acting credits whatsoever.
Neither does Ashton's actor, who also gives one of the best performances in the game.
That's why Fansubs were great. Back in the day that demonoid was still active, you could get accurate fansubs for so much manga, anime and even playstation games. (Assuming you had a chipped)
Got my first taste of Yakuza looooong before any version of it hit the west thanks to them.
Undubs are literally a thing in the romhacking community. It used to be to redo bad localization now it'll be to unfuck woke indoctrination.
Unfortunately I would venture that many of the romhack translators these days are also woke as fuck.
Possible, I don't play enough to notice as most of those are for JRPGs and I ain't got time for that.
I would say that undubs are typically seen as an effort to correct shoddy localizations in fifth generation era on down. But even PS2, PSP, DS games gets some of love. Most are done by diehard autist and while I'm not a part of the scene I imagine pulling woke localization and calling it undub would earn you the same level of shame and notoriety as a speedrunner caught cheating.
But I'm talking out of my ass, all I know is if given the option I always go undubbed and it never failed me yet.
I'm OK with this if its something like ghost stories strangely enough. An already mediocre anime made funny is a lot better than what they do now. Even making fun of politics was fine there, why was this a once in a life time thing though? I never got that.
All anime and manga deserves to be faithfully translated regardless of the quality of the story.
The dub of the anime The Devil is a Part-Timer had a reference to Super Size Me in the first episode.
To my shock, it was also in the Japanese audio track...and the original light novel.
References to American stuff like that is so cool when it's actually part of the story and so bad when it's being invented by a nasty freak.
Yeah, I rolled my eyes at this too, until I learned that was also in the source material.
Doesn't change what they did with the second season's dub, which IS cringe. They put in a Spongebob joke, among many other things...
References to American media in Japanese media aren't rare. There's a reason Katawa Shoujo, a loving western parody of eastern visual novels, had a character just wearing Bush/Cheney For President T-shirts... Long after his presidency, both in development and in-universe. They like random Americanisms.
But those are their references to make, not the localizers'.
The difference there is that no one involved in Ghost Stories ever pretended they were really trying. They were selling it as a joke thing they made because otherwise it wasn't worth the time and money for such a generic series to dub.
Have you ever heard of the super milk chan show ADV dub? No? well, that. Sometimes it just doesn't work
Ghost Stories never pretended like it was telling the legitimate story. No writer went "yes, this is what the author intended", or worse yet, "this is an accurate translation of the context, bigot." It was clear from scene-1 that they were taking the piss.
Worse, that one show got the worst dub director in all of anime, Steven Foster, job security for about a decade.
Foster eventually got himself blackballed from the business by the very actors he was directing, because he gave absolutely no shits about doing anything resembling a passable job.
One of these days, look up dub scenes from the second half of a show called Guin Saga. That was a Steven Foster dub, and he was so checked out, he didn't bother to check to see if the actors had stopped taking the show seriously--because THEY KNEW he was too lazy to check.
As a result, completely serious scenes are loaded with silly voices, because Steven Foster went "yeah, sure, whatever" and let them stay in the show!
I specify the second half because the FIRST half was played straight.
When Lufia II : Rise of the Sinistrals was remade into Curse of the Sinistrals ( largely inspired by the original game, not a faithful remake ), I immediately noticed Selan's dialogues was hit with the ''teehee I'll remove all those offensive, harmful gender sterotypes'' stick.
It turned me off enough to drop it.
The over-the-top creepy soy-smiles on the character portraits during dialogues didn't help.
In the Live A Live remake game they ruined the translations, they changed the dialogue in to something completely different because the JP version was "sexist" https://vid.priv.au/watch?v=scD7JMJsjR8
Just check out the Varishangout thread for many examples.
Skies of Arcadia did that back in the 1990s, where the translators basically rewrote the entire story and never bothered to reference the dialogue in the original material. Bad translators have been a thing for decades, it’s just now they are doing changing dialogue because of how indoctrinated they are by the woke cult.
I've seen some of their handiwork, yeah they are bad. It's bad translation mixed with genuine incompetency and disrespect for the creators and fans alike. Hell, I could probably do their fucking jobs better.
You could just use DeepL like they have been (they lie about this) and easily do a better job than any leftist localizer.
At this point I know enough Japanese to buy and read raw materials. This is why I had no idea just how smarmy and giddy the localisers were in charge of ruining the source. I only found out how flagrant and shameless they have been doing this couple of days ago. Honestly lack of professionalism and respect they have a little shocked me. I know there are lots of westerners that aren't shy about their disdain for Japan but I got to find out just how far the hostility goes.
There are some who are good at it, like the guy who translated the Ya Boy Kongming anime did an exceptional job at translating Japanese rap to English while maintaining the meter, rhyme scheme, and nouns, but for every one of that guy you have a gross ugly caricature trans person who thinks they have a moral duty to rewrite stories and gloat about it.
Too bad they didn't even try to dub the stuff. Hell, didn't even have Juliet Simmons (one of that area's best female VAs) sing that ENGLISH song Eiko kept singing every episode.
Certified English Philologist: Translator here.
The actually professional translators worth their salt do not work for joke money paid in gaming / anime industry. One thing I definitely remember from my last college year was being told to pick one specific field and learn all its terminology. I'm talking all the terminology in something like car engineering where you need to know how each car part is known in two languages so you can get a job at a car company translating all the relevant papers covering the assembly process.
These are the kind of translators who seriously put effort into their jobs as the accuracy of their translations directly affects the production pipeline down the line between two different countries.
Other high grade translators work in government institutions or translate political speeches LIVE as they are told in real time.
If the anime/gaming translations suck then it's because the money sucks.
it wasn't the one I posted yesterday.