screenshot Ike's FE Megathread {15.5}

[sirmola]

speaking of fe5 i want to see how you talk about Evayle in terms of Briggid and if that's any excuse for her lack of character

I want to see what he thinks of fe5 in general, and the various retcons in perticular. Eval, sias, fe4 chapter 8 playing out entierly diferently in thracia, and so on.

Edited June 15, 2016 by sirmola

[SB.]

If FE4 Chapter 8 played out exactly the same way in Thracia then it would be really lame/restrictive from both a story and gameplay standpoint imo. I can understand why the designers made changes there.

Raquesis' characterisation is that she's naive as hell (except for realising that Chagall is the scum of the earth) and thinks anything involving her brother is perfect. Look at her conversation with Beowulf in Chapter 2 which doesn't make any sense (how did her brother tell Beowulf to check up on her when he's been locked up since the chapter began?) but rather than questioning it she takes him at his word and starts gushing over him as soon as Eldigan is in the picture. In Chapter 3 her conversation with him shows their closeness but then its never touched upon again. Ever.

She has no more lines until Chapter 5 where her Dew conversation still shows her as being the same naive girl who joined up three chapters ago despite that the fact that her brother's death should've had some kind of effect on her. If she marries Noish she kind of has a spine (although she somehow loses track of Aless how the fuck???) and Beowulf basically implies he was using her for sex and was using her all along even if he developed some feelings for her along the way maybe? So pretty much nothing changes with her throughout.

There were a lot of opportunities to throw in more development for her between Eldigan's death and Chapter 5 but they were all bypassed which is kind of lame. Off the top of my head I can think of:

-"oh god my brother died" after capturing Chagall's castle

-"how did you know my brother beowulf" at basically any time after his death which would've helped give more depth to him as well!

-a talk with basically anyone comforting her about it

-probably an interaction with quan considering he was one of his brother's best friends but they never interact at all in story iirc?

But none of these happens. There were even a couple of different ways that she could've developed (more serious and gloomy, more self-reliant without eldigan, etc) but instead nothing happens. It's pretty lame.

[Integrity]

good shit, thanks, edited it into my post

[sirmola]

I've bee thinking about things, and i think that you should do fe3 after fe5. I have two reasons for this:

1. Fe6's plot is in many ways based off of fe3's And you might want to compare the two.

2. It's really hard to talk about fe12's plot (and especialy the avatar's role in it) without comparing it to fe3. What was changed says a lot, and helps give context to discussions about awakening and fates.

Alternatively, you could play through fe3 and fe12 at the same time.

[Parrhesia]

Why not just look at FE12 as the finished version of FE3?

[Integrity]

1. Fe6's plot is in many ways based off of fe3's And you might want to compare the two.

i do not

2. It's really hard to talk about fe12's plot (and especialy the avatar's role in it) without comparing it to fe3. What was changed says a lot, and helps give context to discussions about awakening and fates.

Alternatively, you could play through fe3 and fe12 at the same time.

it is very easy to talk about how fe12's story is bad without considering that it's an adaptation of fe3 mate, reading another fe12 lp is actually one of the things that inspired me to make this thread

if i need to make comparisons i'll pull them from the script handily available on this site

[Katie]

1. Fe6's plot is in many ways based off of fe3's And you might want to compare the two.

It really isn't though. There's some vague similarities there, but they're nowhere near as similar as people claim them to be.

[sirmola]

if i need to make comparisons i'll pull them from the script handily available on this site

That works.

[Integrity]

Aight, buckaroos, let’s talk about the quiet heroes behind Fire Emblem: the localization teams. Today’s update is about translation and localization, and why it’s a really hard thing to do properly. I’m by no means an expert in this field – I only speak two languages with anything approaching fluency – but I’m a bit of a language nerd and hopefully I won’t drag myself too deep into technicalities and leave myself open to get owned by somebody who has an idea what they’re talking about. Or maybe it would be better if I did, let’s be real here. Next update’s chapter 6, so you can tune back in for more pictures and opinions and less real talk stage setting.

First up, time to attack the semantics: translation and localization. Translation is taking an existing work and exporting it to a different language, while trying to keep as much as possible about the original work intact. Artistic works, for instance classic literature or philosophical works, particularly if conveying a message is the core reason for the work to exist, tend to be translated. Turn the one language into another language, what could go wrong? Plenty, as it turns out, could go wrong. A major sticking point for amateur translators is simple things that are difficult to translate. Idioms and other colloquial expressions are an obvious thing – generally, translating an idiom 1:1 will not work out, but there’s often an equivalent idiom in the target language that one could use. To take an example from my other language that’s fresh in my mind because a mate reminded me about it a few days ago, there’s a German statement that goes hätte, hätte, Fahrradkette. Fairly literally, “could have, could have, bicycle chain.” Less literally, it’s a cute little rhyme that makes “could have” sound ridiculous, similar to how we Englishers do stuff like “consequences schmonsequences” to belittle them. Idiomatically, it’s used pretty much the same as “shoulda woulda coulda” – can’t change what we already did, what’s the use crying over spilt milk? And that’s comparing two idioms from pretty similar languages – it can get a hell of a lot snarlier going from Chinese or Russian.

Another, subtler difficulty with straight translation is that translating is certainly not always, and really often isn’t, 1:1. An oldish Google Translate (I first heard about it for Babelfish, probably dating my internet usage…) game is to punch a phrase in and, depending on the variant, translate it back and forth from English to Chinese repeatedly or translate it through X different languages before getting it back to English. I took a sentence from the first paragraph with a little bit of idiom through a pretty short string, English-Hebrew-Basque-Irish-Tamil-Persian-Chinese, and went from “or maybe it would be better if I did, let’s be real here” to “or maybe it would be if I had not better, you will not be realistic.” Try it sometime – translators are getting better at doing this, but you can still get some comedic ones, particularly with longer strings. Another way 1:1 translations can struggle is when the source language has multiple words that all translate the same way, or when the source language has one words with many translations. You’ve probably heard some variant of the “did you know the Inuit have over 50 words for snow?” gotcha that goes around playgrounds, for instance. More concretely, and probably as famous, is the Greek words for love: agape, eros (from which we derive erotic), philia (from which we derive various –philias and also Philadelphia), and storge. It’s not wrong, contextually, to translate all four of these as love, but what if a work is making a distinction between eros and philia? If you have unlimited space, you can use extra words to explain it – erotic love and brotherly love are common for those two – but you don’t always have that luxury, and it can get complicated quickly. The other way around can be even worse; if you’re translating a work from English to Greek and the author uses the word love with no qualifiers, which word do you pick? Imagine being the guy talking about God’s love for his people and using the word eros in your translation. It sounds outlandish, but this is shit that actually happens.

Vocabulary aside, we can’t forget grammar. Finnish has (I think) six infinitives. We have “the infinitive.” Latin has six noun cases, English hardly even has two. What do you call the second-person plural in English? It’s y’all, by the way, all the way. You’re probably most familiar with the problems of grammar as it relates to honorifics, a special thing there’s no real clean way to translate into English a lot of the time (though we might just be co-opting senpai) – after all, it’s really difficult to express the difference between Ike-san and Ike-sama in a consistent, cohesive way. With a little creativity, it can be done; I’m reminded immediately of Simon and Kamina just yelling “bro” at each other all the time in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, a trend which needs to stick because “bro” rules. On the other side of the fence, I read exactly one volume of Pandora Hearts and there were all these –sans and –kuns and shit in my Edwardian England or wherever that was set and it was really jarring and I only read one volume of it for a reason. Hell, as another example, Korean has counter particles that are different for all sorts of shit, and different things are assigned different numbers systems (they’ve got two) traditionally based on what they are. You count days and Won in Sino-Korean numbers, and people and cabbages in Korean numbers.

Rhythm and meter can also hose you over pretty good. Nena’s

and

are good examples of a hugely popular song that was translated from German into English (and a bunch of other languages) while maintaining the rhythm, and one translation change is right there in the title. Luftballons is a German compound noun (they love those) that just means “air balloons.” Nothing about them being red at all. But the title (often sung) 99 Luftballons is seven syllables, and the equivalent 99 Balloons is pretty obviously five. One syllable could be made up for with a longer syllable in one place, but two long syllables out of five would feel pretty forced – anyone who’s played Fartes can attest to how weirdly Rena Strober (God bless) had to stress the Azura song to mostly get it in time with the music. However, the Luftballons in the original music video were red, so Luftballons became red balloons to preserve the meter in the song. If you’re not re-recording, a problem with dubs in general, but most of you are probably most familiar with from anime, is that you have other moving parts like music to set to or peoples’ mouths moving that you want to at least try to ape. After all,

There’s tons of other problems one can run into with translation, and we’re ignoring that someone might not be 100% fluent in both languages with regards to homophones and homonyms and connotations and whatever, but I need to move on to localization. Localization is taking an existing work and exporting it to a different culture. Censorship is a natural part of localization, since the intent of localization is not to preserve as much as possible about a work, but to preserve the important parts of the work and hammer out the other parts to create a work that’s more palatable for a culture that has potentially extremely different values to the source culture. Translation is a part of localization, too, but only one part – there’s a lot of work that has to go into remaking fonts, resizing menus, and a host of other things, and that’s only considering video games!

I have a copy of various translations of classic Greek comedian Aristophanes that, as of this writing, I’ve sunk nearly a half hour into trying to find. I’ve instead found my sister’s entire Harry Potter collection, my dad’s entire Narnia collection, a collection of German magazines, my mom’s high school diploma, my dad’s White Dwarf collection, four Bibles, the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster???, all of my first year of college worth of homework and exams, and every Calvin and Hobbes comic ever printed. I updated that list as I walked into and out of rooms and now I finally have it with me. Let’s get back to it.

The opening to this book (Jeffrey Henderson, Acharnias, Lysistrata, Clouds. Focus Publishing, 1997.) contains a quote under “translation”:

Where the original text refers to people, places, things, and events whose significance modern audiences cannot reasonably be expected to know or to infer from the text, and which are inessential to its main themes, I have tried to find easily comprehensible alternatives that preserve the import of the original. (Henderson, pp.10)

In essence, this guy replaces jokes and assorted other references to real things in ancient Greece to real things in contemporary America. It sits somewhere between translation and localization – he tries to maintain the spirit of the original, but cuts the material out wholesale and replaces it with his own. A particular one I have an empty Hershey’s wrapper marking is, very simply, “those from Suckerville” – footnotes clarifying it as “’Chaonians,’ a fierce group of people of Epirus with whom Athens was apparently negotiating. Their name is intended to remind us of the verb khaskein, ‘to gape’ (be gullible).” (Henderson, pp.53) Another line on page 66 calls to “the Model T of poetry.” A third line I can’t be assed to skim enough to find again involves Greeks referring to other, lesser Greeks as “godless Commies.” It’s anachronistic and a little jarring at first, but the goal is to make the humor accessible, while preserving the meaning, without resorting to half a page of footnotes. Ever read a study version of the Bible? Yeesh.

I mentioned earlier that censorship is a natural part of localization, and you’re all familiar with the really obvious (to our community) one – two sixteen-year-olds nailing in print or on screen or whatever is really skeevy in modern American culture, all moral judgments aside, and that’s not true around the world. Because of this, localizers age characters up. I don’t need to list examples for this, every one of you probably has at least one in your mind, but what about other stuff? What someone wears could be mild in one culture and wildly inappropriate in another culture – unless that character’s fashion sense is meant to be a statement, a localization team could make the call to cover up images slightly or to omit some descriptions from print. Another example you’re probably familiar with is the depiction of swastikas in Germany; it’s not always censorship by order of the localization team, sometimes it’s mandated by external factors. Copyright laws are stricter in some countries and looser in others, etc.

When you’re taking a relatively complex piece of work from one language and culture to another language and culture, these two processes have their work cut out for them. A lot can go wrong here for a whole lot of reasons. When you’re translating a setting, for instance, do you keep it situated in the original place or do you move it to take place somewhere more familiar to the new culture? Do you just change all text references to a familiar place and leave everything else intact? No, you shouldn’t, but it’s really funny when it does happen sometimes. On the other side from that comic, Project X Zone 2 (and 1, but less attention was called to it) still totally takes place in Japan, and even has the characters speaking Japanese – an American character introduced fairly early speaks really shitty broken English desu, standing in for bad Japanese.

Somewhere between localization and translation, too, is problems that arise from writing in general. Bear in mind that a localization effort is still a writing project, and is subject to every one of the potential failure modes that the original project was subject to. In particular, consistency. A character could be fully consistently written in the original work, but two different people translated her lines for different scenes and there wasn’t enough QA and she’s a broken hodgepodge of characters in the final version. We’ve seen this happen in the very game which I have freshly finished! Well, you haven’t, actually, but I teased about it a little bit: Ardan.

Back in chapter 0, Ardan showed himself to be a man of strength, highly fed up with the teasing of his comrades:

Arden: “Hrmph. I can live with the strong and reliable part, but leave the slow bit out of it, ok?”

Arden: “Alright, I’ll do it. But you gotta promise to take me to battle with you sometimes.”

The teasing wears on him. He’s not dumb, just a little bit Strong And Slow, and he just wants to be treated like one of the lads, same as any of us do. He has some problems with envy from dealing with comrades who are just all-out treated better than him:

So you pity him. Man, maybe you even like him. You get him a nice wife, settle him down, and-

Arden: “You can bet on dat! I ain’t dyin’. Not after gettin’ someone as perdy as you for my wife! When dis war’s done wit we’s headin’ back t’Silesia. We can open a little veggie stand!”

Arden: “Yeah well, I think so at least. You’re the perdiest girl I can think of.”

Ira: “Arden, are you sick or something?”

Arden: “I might as well just blurt it out… Ira, I love you.”

W-what?

Arden: “Heh… I got married and got a kid! My family’s gotta come first, so I best not be dyin’. What’s dis ole book sittin’ here. Hmph… Dis is all gibber gabber. Eerrrr… mmmmnugh! What da… Wow! I feel all my senses done renovated!”

What??

So what happened here? According to my Japanese Source Specta, nothing. His speech mannerisms don’t change in the original Japanese between chapters 0 and 5. Ardan’s brain doesn’t just fall out arbitrarily over the course of the game. Japanese changes significantly based on the speaker – hell, what language doesn’t – and Ardan’s speech is coarse and masculine. The first two instances, the translator parsed it as “strong and slow;” the last two, …well, you see. Which is more right? I dunno, I don’t speak Japanese, and a retranslation of the game is well beyond the means of this LP besides. If anyone has the scripts for these scenes from the retranslation sitting handy, I’d like to see them. You’ll get OP credits.

Hopefully this has outlined a lot of what makes translations really damn hard to do properly to you readers, so I can digress onto a pet peeve of mine: transliteration. Transliteration is distinct from translation, but is very much related. Transliteration is when you’re taking a word, phrase, etc. in one script and writing it down in another that lacks some or all of the letters involves. Simply, when we choose to write German hätte as haette, since English lacks umlauts, or when we decide a-i-ku is Ike, we’re transliterating. There’s a lot that goes into this kind of thing; for instance, there’s sounds that are difficult to replicate in a source language.

Usually one transliterates names; Tsubaki may become Subaki to leave the tsu sound off an English-speaker’s tongue, or Jonathan may just become Jon to remove the problematic th. A name might be changed because the setting’s getting changed; we’ve all done this in high school language classes, “what’s your Spanish name” (mine’s Ricardo), but if you’re executing a complete shift from Sort-Of-Japan to Sort-Of-Canada you probably don’t want your whole cast to be named Tanaka and Sakura and Kenshiro. Sometimes the name just sounds weird or dumb in the source language – a woman named Fury (God bless u bookofholsety) or a man named Wood. Fire Emblem’s in a peculiar position here, especially Genealogy, since a whole lot of names are mythological references transliterated in the first place from English to Japanese, and now we’re taking them back and transliterating them here. That’s how you start with Deirdre, get di-a-do-ra, and end up with Diadora. Gae Bolg -> ge-i bo-ru-gu -> Gay Borg. The list is endless, and for the prospective translator it’s not always references. Do we even know they started with Deirdre? Did we ever figure out what the fuck Ichival is supposed to be? Skasaher?

I think I’ve typed enough about this and I really ought to get going on chapter 6 sometime, since I’m past the time when I said I’d have that posted and I’m just finishing this, but I hope this at least gave you something to think about per why translation is a really hard job, and why I’m trying my very hardest to only pick on this series for issues of plotting in general rather than wording of the plots. If I were being fully genuine, I’d cross-check all my criticisms with the original Japanese, but instead I just have an operating assumption that the translation is generally true to the source, if not perfectly. Tune in next time for a slightly happier me, though, since I really like the second generation. Namaste.

Edited June 22, 2016 by Integrity

[Specta]

I'm really hoping someone comes in to point out some nuance in the jp that I missed because Ardan's change in the translation confused the christ out of me, man

I don't even see how it happened

edit:

Edited June 22, 2016 by Specta

[solrocknroll]

Johalva because he's the only Warrior in the game and his stats are better than Johan's. Sure, Johan has a horse, but Lex already wore out the Great Knight shtick.

[Moblin Major General]

Seconding Johalva. Gen 2 is far less Mounted Emblem than Gen 1, and having axes and bows is better than just axes plus riding a horse.

[DarkDestr0yer61]

Johalva because he is a foot unit.

[Parrhesia]

these are all boring reasons and the real reason to pick mighty johalva is because he is the people's champion, has a better portrait and most importantly I like him more.

More seriously, he is the one who actually has ideologies in line with your forces and doesn't just switch sides because he thinks Lakche (what is Lakche meant to be) is hot.

Edited June 22, 2016 by Parrhesia

[maybe]

johan because it's shorter to type

[Integrity]

(what is Lakche meant to be)

larcei, duh

[Parrhesia]

Ohhh right she was part of the Fates crew wasn't she

[TheMoniker]

Thank you for posting that long spiel on translation and localization, I think it's helped me to understand everything better. And of course, it's always good to see Calvin and Hobbes comics.

[sirmola]

anyone who’s played Fartes can attest to how weirdly Rena Strober (God bless) had to stress the Azura song to mostly get it in time with the music.

Out of curiosity, was calling it "fartes" an intentional pun or an unintentional one?

[Katie]

While I normally prefer Johan, I say you should get Johalvier because he has a unique class and makes getting Nosferatu easier.

[Integrity]

Out of curiosity, was calling it "fartes" an intentional pun or an unintentional one?

it's very difficult for me to deliberately type "fates" anymore tbh

i call it "fartes" habitually but that particular instance was very much an accident

[Sylphid]

Finally caught up with the thread, just wanted to say I'm having a blast reading this and appreciate the time and words you've put into this.

Finnish has (I think) six infinitives. We have “the infinitive.”

Close enough: 5 infinitives, first one has 2 forms.

It would be easier to say six infinitives so obviously that's not how we do it.

Our verb conjugation is just all kinds of crazy.

[Specta]

oh yeah the vote

i vote for johan because johalva looks like a little shit

look at that deep center part, your honor, qed

[Integrity]

Close enough: 5 infinitives, first one has 2 forms.

It would be easier to say six infinitives so obviously that's not how we do it.

Our verb conjugation is just all kinds of crazy.

cool! thanks for sharing

Edited June 23, 2016 by Integrity

[Sylphid]

Forgot to vote on something I have no idea about, so let's go with Johan to go against the majority.

cool! thanks for sharing

Your life just won't be the same with that knowledge.