translation doubts...

[Skuda]

I've been recently been playing on the Japanese language for PSO...and I've noticed something. In the ruins, there is the enemy "Claw". I'm pretty sure everyone has heard of it (just incase a newb is looking). I looked at the japanese word for the enemy and it is pronounced "KuRo-(as in crow)". Obviously I can read japanese, but I'm wondering, what the heck were the english translaters doing??? I hate when translator mess around with the japanese words!!!

[CGoodness]

I don't think that the translators really care. lol

They rpobably figure that the English people won't be able to read the alternate languages anyway so it doesn't matter if the do it perfectly lol.

[Skuda]

but If you're going to do a job, why don't you do it 100%? there are so many translation flaws it's rediculous!

[CGoodness]

On 2004-01-08 17:07, Scott_Kuda wrote:
but If you're going to do a job, why don't you do it 100%? there are so many translation flaws it's rediculous!



Sonic Team slacks off on all of the important stuff, why would they have any reason to do the minor things correctly? lol

[Soukosa]

I don't think it's a mistranslation. Look at some like a Booma's Claw in Japanese and the "claw" part is spelled that way as well.

[Neifan]

Translation errors, in a Phantasy Star game? No!

Heh. Get used to it, my friend, or that scary woman Noah will come and get you.

[Nai_Calus]

It's not the questionable romanization, it's the things that are spurious(i.e., apparently made up for the English version) and horrible grammar that irk me.

I'll pick on SotH because it's one of the only quests with enough dialogue to pick on. A couple of words are spelled incorrectly, at least 30% of the lines contain some sort of grammatical error, usually glaring, and at least one line is translated in a such a way as to make absolutely no sense whatsoever, to the point where my brain breaks, refuses to attempt to make sense of it, and blots it out and replaces it with something else that makes some sort of sense. O_o;

Granted, I realize the game was translated by a drunk Japanese person on their lunchbreak, but yeesh.

[Omni-Man]

Ok I'm going to play Devil's advocate for a bit:

Translating is not always easy, especially when you have something written in a symbolic language like japanese, and are trying to translate it in to a literal (and messy) language like english.

If you think the translation on this game is bad, I recommend you dust off your copy of FF Tactics (PSX) and wonder how anyone could misinterpret "breath" for "bracelet".

Or an even better example would be to play through the SNES Enix RPG "Robotrek"

.... "are you OK Kid? Blackthorne is going to help defeated!"...

and just remember...

All your Word are Belong to Us

http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_smilejap.gif

[Nazo]

On 2004-01-08 15:31, Scott_Kuda wrote:
I've been recently been playing on the Japanese language for PSO...and I've noticed something. In the ruins, there is the enemy "Claw". I'm pretty sure everyone has heard of it (just incase a newb is looking). I looked at the japanese word for the enemy and it is pronounced "KuRo-(as in crow)". Obviously I can read japanese, but I'm wondering, what the heck were the english translaters doing??? I hate when translator mess around with the japanese words!!!



Having lived in Japan for 6 years, let me add my 2 cents. *clears throat importantly*

A-HEM!

In roman, we pronounce claw- commonly known as an animal's sharp fingernails- as k-law (slurred). Let's look at this:

Claw.

Now, Japanese don't tend to directly translate from English to Japanese. For example, we have "Training Pants" which becomes tore-ningu pantsu (or zubon, since pantsu usually refers to girls' underwear 0.o)... but anyways, Japanese tend to have a lesser gap between the aw/ah/ao area, making Claw a perfect example. If we translate Claw DIRECTLY, it would become

KU-RA/LA

-_-... obviously that's as close as alphabetically possible with Japanese alphabets, and doesn't make sense. Therefore they use "Cu-low", logically closest to the Japanese language. And I haven't played ruins in Japanese, but I'm pretty sure there is a - (dash) after 'ku' and 'ro', telling the reader to slur or elongate the last letter.


Pardon my use of training pants as an example http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_lol.gif ...

[Zelutos]

Tell me, does it really matter how they translate things. I must adit, i would sound better as KuRa because it sounds more like Claw. But oh well, don't go loosing sleep over it!

[Skorpius]

yup, engrish =x