Code: Realize ~ Guardian of Rebirth ~
at Kokoro Cafe Studios
I take back what I said... The translation is horrible. I would rather spend money on something more decent.Pass.
I can not tell you how happy I was when quinrose released Alice in the Country of Hearts for Android and iOS in English. It is the game my customers request the most. Yet it only turned out to be another machine translation level failure.Why is it that whenever a japanese company tries to bring their stuff over and do the translation themselves Like key did with planetarium the translation is almost always horrible. Is it that the japanese think the translation does not matter or that they can not get a half decent translation done?I'm not a gamer, so I hadn't seen first-hand just how bad of a translation this poor game actually got. It'd be hysterical if people didn't actually care about this game. I mean, it's "All Your Base" level Engrish, of the level even Google Translator seems to rise above these days. As visual novels are predominantly text, this presents an obvious problem: lines range from amusingly off ("I don't want to be with the suicide rabbit!!!") to just plain incomprehensible. Reviews on iTunes and Google Play seem to indicate that the quality varies depending on what paths you take. The prospect of slogging your way through this makes me think of watching an anime with Chinese bootleg subtitles.Of course, the Japanese completely screwing up English translations is nothing new. Bad Engrish translations are everywhere. Terrible English bit performances crop up in anime now and then. Occasionally they even try to make an English dub in Japan, with predictably unwatchable results. This is what tends to happen in a country where everyone has to take the same foreign language in school, but the program kind of sucks and nobody retains any of it. The Japanese relationship with English in general seems to be something akin to, "you want me to program an operating system from scratch? No problem, I took a computer programming class in 9th grade!"Native English speakers never see this sort of haughtiness from anybody Japanese in person. As anyone who has ever learned a foreign language knows, whenever you're in front of a native speaker, you realize that you're going to be immediately called out, and seize up. You get nervous, you start to sweat, and manage to eke out an awkward few sentences at most. But among your own friends who are on your level, you'll speak that language endlessly, no matter how terrible it actually sounds. (see: any high school or college anime club.)And that's the problem, really. In a sea of equally-terrible English speakers, nobody feels all that bad or self-conscious about their skills, and then they bite off way more than they can chew. This sort of situation tends to happen at smaller companies who don't have any actual non-Japanese working for them, or even someone who's studied or worked overseas. In a bubble of similarly poor English speakers, it's easy to think, "hey, I've got this!" And when you're on a tightly budgeted project, it's easy to accidentally think that translating into English is something you can handle. Nobody in your immediate vicinity will tell you otherwise.This is the problem whenever a company sets out to do anything that's not in a language they speak well -- nobody in a position of power can really understand how good or poor the final product is. The project producer in this case likely couldn't even tell the difference between a machine-made translation and a proper one. This is clearly not an ideal situation, but it comes up all the time. Don't even get me started on when Japanese licensors have to approve English dub scripts, and consequently don't understand ANY common English expressions or idioms.In case you couldn't tell, yes, I have been on projects where a bunch of Americans have tried to present reports in Japanese, only to be told that we have made utter fools of ourselves and the document we labored over for weeks is completely unintelligible. This is very much a two-way street.
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