6 posts tagged “japanese”
The newest reason that I love the internet, and Japan, is the hatena haiku (think Twitter in Japanese) meme "konna iPhone wa iya da." Literally, it's something like "I wouldn't like this iPhone", and it consists of people proposing weird hypothetical iPhones:
How have people mispronounced your name? How is it supposed to sound?
Submitted by Lorie.
My last name, from Flanders, Belgium, is Van Hecke. My family pronounces it [væn hɛki]. About 90% of strangers mispronounce it [væn hɛk]. A while ago I met a Belgian guy and a German guy who knew its original pronunciation; something more like [va:n hɛkə]; a super-informative site about the Dutch language confirms it.
When filling out official forms in Japan, I used to spell my last name ヴァンヘッキー. After a while of finding this to be a bit cumbersome, and after learning the original pronunciation, I switched to the slightly more accurate and more attractive ヴァンヘッキ.
- I had hope for the voices. I really did. I believe in my heart that it's possible for people speaking English in a video game can sound cool and captivating. But once again, I found myself rushing to switch the audio to Japanese, to avoid embarrassment in front of my coworkers.
- Within 10 minutes of starting the game, centuries-old solemn protector Shurelia said the line "cut the chatter". We'll see if that was a fluke or if this is going to be another game where every character sounds like some flippant young dude. It's hard to tell yet because most of the dialogue so far has been between Lyner and Jack, two flippant young dudes.
- So far the localization has been solid, so maybe that line was not indicative of how Shurelia is going to speak for the rest of the game. Most lines are translated just about the same way I would have done them myself, with about 75% emphasis on saying exactly what the original line said, and 25% on making it flow naturally.
- NISA gets some credit for sneaking zombo.com references into the story. I thought the "unattainable is unknown" line might have been a coincidence, until "the only limit is yourself" was said about the same topic.
Of course, I'm thrilled to be playing through the game again. NISA gets mountains of thanks from me for bringing this to the USA.
Macworld was one of the most enjoyable weeks of my life, I think. At times like this, the best I can do is try to enumerate the excitement:
- The main benefit was, of course, meeting the people who use our software, or turning new people on to our software. Person after smiling person came by to say, "You guys rock!", "I didn't know you could do that!", or "What's that cool-looking thing you're using?"
- I met all sorts of cool people: power users, noobs, people from around the world who want software that works in their languages, a girl who made an OmniWeb feature request in Japanese, deaf people (one of whom conversed with me in a TextEdit document and was pleased to see that I use Dvorak too), people from dozens of cool companies, people who do cool jobs like user experience design and literary translation. My little business card holder ran out of my own cards and filled up with other people's cards quicky quick.
- Spending a whole week with my coworkers tends to cause Face Hurts From Laughing Syndrome. A couple of rousing games of Old Maid with Rachael and Liz were particularly hilarious.
- At night I'd relax and play Summon Night on the DS, read The Language Instinct, then have the luxury of falling asleep right away because I'd been doing things all day.
- Dinners were fancy, and often involved people whose names I'd been reading on the web for years. Dippin' sauces were plentiful.
- I met the person who designed my bag, and she agreed that it should have had a handle, but no one would listen to her. A new version with a handle is coming.
- We went to see Children of Men; that movie's got something special going on. I went to see it again a few days later, even though it's tough to get me to go see a movie once.
- On the way there and back, I got through a good bit of my 12 Kingdoms novel. I'm pretty proud to be busting through a book of such a significant reading level.
- Oh, I guess Apple announced the iPhone. That's cool.
All in all, I'm more motivated and more energetic than I've been since who knows when. Being back to one short week of work, then rushing around Tokyo for 10 days, then coming home with Piroko in tow will have everything topsy-turvy. Happiness happens.
At some point in Chicago, though, I also picked up the first Twelve Kingdoms book (in two volumes), after having seen a few episodes of the anime with Hiroko. She went on to watch them all as quickly as she could, and I fell asleep, so I never saw the whole series. But there in the bookstore, I must have been feeling that awful overwhelming feeling I still get at Kinokuniya, that there is so much stuff out there that I could be getting into, but that I don't know where to begin. I felt cool for knowing about one of the novel series there and bought it.
I'm still trying to remind myself that it's not my job to find and buy all of the cool new stuff that comes out; it's the creators' job to find me, whether right away or much later. In this case, I had heard about the anime, checked it out, and liked it enough to pay money for the books. That's how it's supposed to work: for some external reason or another I hear about a work, then I may or may not end up getting into it. I need to quit stressing out thinking that I need to seek this stuff out.
Anyway, the books were quite above my reading level back then, but now I think I can tackle them. I think they'll be just the thing for me right now; I'm quite in the mood for something not quite pure pop and not quite pure snooty literature; I want to level up my Japanese skill some more, and, uh, this is the most disorganized post. I'm reading a book I bought a long time ago, and I think it's going to be pretty good.
Offering the original Japanese voices with the translated English text is one of the greatest gifts NIS America has given gamers. They should be applauded and thanked. But this bilingual mode exposes the accuracy of the translation to judgment.
For the most part, the translation is good. Sometimes I encounter bits I would have treated differently, especially when a character's whole demeanor or intention is obscured: Beggur in the first Atelier Iris, a melodramatically chivalrous knight, talks smack like a wiseass teenager in the English version; often, plot points are dropped on the floor beween the languages. But other times a line is simply wrong: The unnamed subject is misunderstood, or one word is mistaken for another.
What's cruel is that in a game localized by any other company, we'd never know the difference. The only reason we catch it is because NIS America has the guts to let us see the original side by side with their interpretation of it. I'm sure that with tight schedules and limited budgets, it's impossible to get everything right. So I'm doing my best to appreciate that these lovely games came out in my home country at all, and cherish the inspired translations, while letting the blunders slide.
Maybe I'm just taking the chance to say that I've looked at a professionally-made product and, after having done amateur translation for 4 years and written professionally for 2 years, felt that I had some authority on its quality. Maybe next time I'll critique the user interface. :D
