(This was originally written around this time last year for a failed website. I figured it would be worth republishing here, with additional editing and some more recent images.)

Fan-made translations are a wonderful idea. Where the complexities of corporate wrangling and conflicting ideologies (Square’s reasons for not localizing it’s follow up to Secret of Mana, so I faintly remember, was that the game was “too buggy” for western audiences, and that they’d probably be seen dead before they’d give the source code to their US branch to fix it up) failed, a pack of hygiene-impaired doofuses with a year of high-school Japanese between them picked up from Naruto fan-subs can succeed! Unfortunately, true successes are perhaps a rarity in the realm of the fan-translation, and I put it down to a little thing called Literalism. (Not to be confused with Liberalism.)

The key to making a translated version of a game fun is not just in converting the text from one language to another, but in adjusting, editing, and re-writing to fit the cultural whims of the new territory and to be an easier read. One reason for this, simply, is text size – the nature of Japanese text is that it can fit more in a text window than the same message in English. You might notice that the four-character limit on player names in some old NES RPGs like Final Fantasy 1 is a hang-over of this. Another, simply put, is that a direct translation of Japanese to English often makes for a dry, boring and overly verbose read.

First, let’s look at some good examples of a fan-translation – Cave Story and Shiren the Wanderer, both Ingles-ised by one Gideon Zhi and his merry band of cohorts. Now, everybody’s been sucking Cave Story’s metaphorical (and most likely four colour and 16×16) cock for quite a long time, but the script is probably a very good reason as to why. It’s well-written, characters talk naturally and have different “voices”, and most importantly, the mood isn’t changed. Jokes are still funny, and sad moments are still decidedly glum. Shiren also shows great care and quality, with the various bit-players to your anonymous hero each showing a distinct personality. She’s a ditzy prankster, he’s a shiftless drunk, she’s a grumpy old crone, and he’s mysterious and creepy, and so on.

But this isn’t about good translations! This is about bad ones! The dry, ugly reads! The ones that still make you spend a few minutes trying to figure out what the fuck was just said, even in English! Also, my keyboard is playing up and it’s making me grumpy! Grr, bad keyboard!

Anyway, the main issue with bad translations is that it flattens the character and “voices” of the characters. Now, I’m no writer, but I know enough to know that characters should be different from each other, and maybe have the odd “quirk” to break things up. Many bad fan-translations read like a uptight, hollow shell of a man having a conversation with himself.

Also, obscenity. Some fan-translations seem to walk down the well-beaten “Grrr! I’ll show those Nintendo guys who censored things that didn’t even affect gameplay!” path, with, shall we say, predictable results. I vaguely remember a FF3/6 fan-translation having a line that was something like “So who is this “bitch” you speak of?”, which sounds pretty damn forced to me.

Course, it really doesn’t matter, call your Espers Phantom Lords if you will, because no fan translation will ever be this bad ever again: