Dude, it takes me an hour/20 pages just to translate my mom's English into readable English, and she's a native speaker.
I will also note: the thread title on that cursed image indicates they're probably talking about Final Fantasy Type-0, which is an action RPG. RPGs, especially story-driven ones with complicated plots (like Final Fantasy games tend to be), are probably one of the text-heaviest game genres out there short of visual novels. Even if they were right about "it's a no-brainer, just swap one sentence for another," it'd be pretty funny to hand them literally thousands of individual text files and say "Here, transcribe all of these. It should be really easy. You can get it done by this afternoon, right?"
To make matters worse, you can't fit as much English text (or any text using the Latin alphabet) into a dialogue box as you can Japanese text. Obviously that's not as dire a problem as it was back in the day (a lot of the old "Woolseyisms" are the result of smaller cartridge space and needing to be able to get the same point across using WAY fewer characters), but I can still see it being an issue? EDIT: And there's also the ever-present issue of idioms and puns not translating! It takes creativity to translate this kinda thing, man. EDIT X2 COMBOB: And that's not even getting into the complexities of speech styles and first-person pronouns in Japanese. I admittedly speak less than the bare minimum of the language myself, but from what I've read, there's a lot of complexity there, and speech patterns can tell you a ton about the characters...and are also, from what I've heard, a massive pain to translate.
Like if u wanna be a faithful translator it's a writing thing on it's own honestly. If u wanna capture the tone n such of the original Translating is fascinating, but cursed
ive translated my OWN content and the thought you need to put into context and finding the right idoms and mentally switching between languages is a Lot thats not even getting into like having the right characters or rezising speech bubbles
I'm hoping that's a troll. Or if not, at least someone who would be loudly dismayed to experience extremely direct transcripts of Japanese dialogue.
That's just the tip of the iceberg when you get into the mechanics of translation, yeah. A big one in Japanese is formality levels- e.g., say that in the original, a character uses too informal an honorific for someone important and people get offended. How the hell do you translate that into English? Have the character outright insult the important person? Mostly I wanted to point out that they would be dumb even if they were right, though. Just the process of going through all that text takes time, never mind the translation process. Eh, I think it's more likely to be an American who's either pretty young or pretty insulated from... literally anything that's not English.
Yeah... If it's dialogue a lot of the sentences have no subjects. If it's not dialogue a lot of the sentences are long and wondrous adventures in nested clauses.
Yeah. Example I came across recently: in Umineko, there's a character who usually uses an archaic formal pronoun to refer to herself. In the sixth game, we meet a version of her as she used to be when she first came into existence, who talks in a completely different style. There's a point where the fan-translators gave up and literally subtitled the pronouns in the dialogue: Because how the hell else would you convey that?
that's why i prefer subs to dubs in anime-- i don't speak japanese, but i know a handful of the honorifics, and which honorific gets used with which person's name is REALLY IMPORTANT and it's information i want to know!
Yeah, and I've seen a few pieces of English-translated Japanese media that just straight-up leave honorifics and some Japanese jargon intact. (e.g. Persona) And dubs also get into their own problems- f'rinstance, early in Death Note, there's what TVtropes would call a Wham Line: "Watashi wa L desu." Manga and subs translate it to just "I'm L." The dub, however, had to fit the mouth flaps for the much longer Japanese phrase, so instead they had to pad it out into "I want you to know that I'm L" and lost a lot of the punch.
There’s something uniquely cursed about realistic baby faces where they don’t belong in general, IMO.
