Why do people think that "localization" is needed in video games?

How were the majority of gamers convinced that localization is needed when bringing japanese games to english speaking countries? People call out all sorts of bullshit in the games industry but localization isn't called out anywhere near as much.

Pic rel is from NEO: The World Ends With You. I saw someone online claim that the japanese version has slang and characters speaking in a certain way that MTL can't capture/translate and that the localizers had to use western slang, memes and dialect to capture the same feeling. How do people believe this shit?

If books and films were "localized" like japanese games are, people would be calling them out and they'd get fired but for some reason it's acceptable to do this to video games.

Google Translation/MTL always looks more accurate/faithful than the vast majority of english "localizations"

Grok summarize this post for me.

because videogames are a product being sold, and the people who complain about it are a smaller fraction than the people who localization appeals too

Literal translations of Japanese don't work.

Idk why you use a terrible example for your own thread when there are FAR worse "localizations"
WEBM very fucking related.

They're better than what localizers do. Do you think the MTL translation or localization in the OP pic and this pic look better?

Who cares, why are you making such a big deal over a small thing?

Because it is a big deal if you throw on Japanese voices and none of the words match the text shown on screen. Fansubbers and ROM translators were creating more accurate translations for free in the past. Why do racist publishers have to hire failed writer tranny activists to fill in JRPG speech?

いただく is a very humble word already and the localization at least tries to get that across, even if they add too many words imo.
The only thing wrong with this is them adding more words than necessary. Meds, sproke and bwc.

Oh really? Bet you think these are good localisations too huh?

If books and films were "localized" like japanese games are, people would be calling them out and they'd get fired but for some reason it's acceptable to do this to video games.

They ARE though, this just proves your lack of understanding and experience outside videogames.

What I don't know/understand can't hurt me.

Stop being a bigot, people who speak more than one language, and understand two distinct cultures, play video games too, ya know. There's also the fact that you're paying for the value of the original Japanese game but with subpar service in translations so you're getting fucked value-wise, especially if it's a game that's heavily story/dialogue-driven to understand and enjoy.

Because a "purist" more literal version does not sound natural to the audience it is being sold to and damages the intended presentation of it. Just compare the scripts here. Voice dubbing aside, even though they communicate the same things, one of them clearly sounds more correct and natural.

youtube.com/watch?v=jVFQT8YN5-M

Legitimately stop making these threads. You are a fucking lunatic who has spammed this exact topic over the past week or so, and every single time , you get called out for how horrendous of an understanding you have on translation and linguistic/cultural exchange.
For the thousandth time, literal Japanese 1:1 translations do not work unless you are handling legal documents/signs/etc. If you are translating an artistic work, you need to do more than just plug lines into software, otherwise you get a very stilted and robotic product.
You have to be autistic because I genuinely cannot fathom how someone can be so simultaneously stubborn and stupid.
Please stop making these threads until you at least reread the billions of times you’ve been proven wrong in every other attempt at doing this.

She's obsessed with a gacha game that re-imagines feudal historical figures as bishonens, and she speaks with old timey polite mannerisms associated with Samurai and that era.

Why do racist publishers have to hire failed writer tranny activists to fill in JRPG speech?

It makes sense if there's a pun, rhyme, or play on words that cannot be translated to another language; that's understandable (arguably, to some, even some cultural reference, but I personally feel that still robs people of an experience if those are altered/left out because it's a missed opportunity to look it up and understand more. The problem here is when someone takes it upon themselves to alter/leave out something they could easily get across, but personally feel it's 'problematic' so they don't).

the average person doesnt think about localization. like when youre a kid watching 4kidz, thats them their entire life.

most people (normalfags) don't play videogames thinking that they were made by people with very different worldview, culture and language so they need localization

Adding more words than necessary is shit localization too. Is like niggers adding so much salt or cornstarch to their food you don't even feel surprised they have diabetes and hypertension.
I can't Super High School Level HOPE enough AI replaces localizers soon enough.

Honestly with how bad things are in the game localisation industry, I'd rather have literal translation even if it is stilted over the garbage localisers write. At least I'd understand the characters and story and know some woke blue haired Californian didn't vandalise it

I don't care about accuracy and neither do most people you schizophrenic fucktard.

Because the people that are smart enough to actually learn japanese obviously think differently than the assblasted n4 weebs that spam this board

Unfortunately the schizophrenic fucktards of Anon Babble don't know anyone that isn't a schizophrenic fucktard, so they get this idea that their opinion is valued by normal people.

How difficult is learning moonrunes Anon Babble? I've been wanting to start but hiragana and katakana having 46 characters and kanji having over 1000 characters scares the fuck out of me.

You must fold your brain into creases over 1000 times like Nippon steel to even begin.

For the same reason germany just killed democracy, kike subversion.

How difficult is learning japanese? I've been wanting to start but hiragana and katakana having 46 characters and kanji having over 1000 characters scares the fuck out of me.

youre a decade too late, kikes already ruined all EOP learning materials so they teach you wrong as a joke, enjoy being a cuck for the rest of your life lmao

is TWEWY translation bad too? I've never seen people complain about it

This place should’ve stayed dead.

he's been complaing about that one too for years

It's basically just reverse resetera with more spam

just learn japanese, bro

just close the tab, bro

I legitimately checked to see if anything actually changed somewhat since I haven’t been here for months and heard that it was temporarily down. Nope. Still the same old retarded conversation topics repeated ad nauseam for years, propped forward by the same autists. This place is basically a corpse.

unironically this

There are so many easy examples of crap localization in Neo TWEWY and you pick this one that's fine? Fucking moron

She's speaking in keigo and so the English flowered up her speech to old timey dogshit so reflect that. It's verbose, but not wrong.

Neo TWEWY is a goldmine of dogshit translation and you give an example that's easily defensible.

I've lived in Japan a long time, worked in games for a while and yes, you're right, the vast majority of people working in games are morons that couldn't pass the N3 but you need to pick your examples better if you want to actually dunk on them

this fucking thread

again

There are so many easy examples of crap localization in Neo TWEWY and you pick this one that's fine? Fucking moron

She's speaking in keigo and so the English flowered up her speech to old timey dogshit so reflect that. It's verbose, but not wrong.

Neo TWEWY is a goldmine of dogshit translation and you give an example that's easily defensible.

I've lived in Japan a long time, worked in games for a while and yes, you're right, the vast majority of people working in games are morons that couldn't pass the JLPT N3 but you need to pick your examples better if you want to actually dunk on them

Adding more words than necessary is shit localization too.

I agree, but it's not something to start drama over.

Unfortunately Hundred Line gave one guy a massive melty so now anything weeb related is getting spammed hardcore by him and a few secondaries. Usually there's an actual discussion thread and a containment thread up at the same time to handle them.

It’s unfortunately going to stay this way for god knows how long. And frankly, I don’t think Anon Babble is ever going back to normal after the leak showed off everything. Just look at how activity has slowed down across the boards.

Localization to make a sentence sound more natural in English and/or make a wordplay similar to the original

Fine, sometimes necessary

Localization to make it more appealing to EOLs and a certain political persuasion

And you lost me.

Sex with Gaku

Funny how nobody has replied to this ultimate testament to the utter uselessness and outright maliciousness of english translators in vidya. The proof is just too strong.

You will soon realize the problem isn't memorizing individual kana and kanji, because you can reasonably learn that well, but grammar will fuck you up as an English speaker.
Japanese not only has a different sentence order, but is way, way more verbose and less information dense until you get to casual conversations where subjects and topics get dropped because the language is very context based. Start immersion based learning and mine kana and kanji from your immersion, that will at least give you a good start.

seethe trannyslator

This is the guy that literally made a reddit account to try spam the same posts there including trying to reference his Anon Babble posts. He also outed himself as an ESL..

wh-why does no one care????

If people and companies can pivot every problem they contribute to or create, into some aspect of a "culture war", they can then conveniently claim some form of bigotry or malice as the sole motivation of their critics, and never have to be accountable for their laziness/ignorance, and even their agendas, that show up in their work, and think they'll maybe even get a few extra bucks out of the handful of people who have the "let's buy 200 tickets to this movie/buy 200 copies of this game for ourselves and our friends, to show our support for the company!" mentality and are dumb enough to actually follow through.

Depends, if it's just being verbose a la FFT or that Overlord Unicorn game, then it's the lowest level of being a hack or a failed writer. They keep a bit the OG intent, a BIT depending in the case.
The example from earlier reeks of "I can do better because japanese writing is stale and dry and I can add soul", some snob thinking they can do better without doing their own work yet clearly lacking creativity.
Highest order of bad localization are dead memes, complete rewritings (like that certain Fire Emblem games) or (modern) political agendas, etc. You know them, I know them, we know them.
All are bad, just different levels of bad and I wish we had none of those. Let the OG author be judged by his own merits and while starting drama is usually such faggotry done for internet points, it's the best we can do as the customer/fans/gamers/fans so they listen to our grievances and do what we desire if they want to have food on the table.

Also wish AI replaces localizers soon enough, we need to have our personal NetNavis by now.
And also wish localization defenders stop being fucking faggots for once in their lives. Yes, you can like the games too, but don't defend a sloppy work mostly done by people who hate anime, vidya and japan... in public.

Come on now, nigger, you can have your grievances with OP and still agree that's dog shit, especially if you've seen the list of changes between versions of Fire Emblem Fates that completely change the tone of interactions and even parts of the story itself for no real reason.

That's not even scratching the surface, memorising the kanji isn't even the hard part, it's each kanji having multiple different readings that get used arbitrarily because the language doesn't even follow its own rules.

She's speaking in keigo and so the English flowered up her speech to old timey dogshit so reflect that. It's verbose, but not wrong.

It's absolutely wrong because it's excessive and over the top when the Japanese isn't.

Almost nobody outside of deluded progressivist trannies defends what localization actually is. Some people reflexively defend localization because they erroneously believe that translating the meaning of text from one language to another instead of the literal words is localization (it isn't, it's just a slightly looser form of translation). But even then, it's not "most", most people oppose localization.

This. You can easily learn new words by looking them up in the dictionary and thus figure out what's being said, but the grammar part is more difficult and you can have spent thousands of hours mining words and still get confused by grammar as the process for learning that isn't as simple as opening a dictionary.

Because the publisher's primary goal isn't to translate the original, it's to alter the product to cater to the market so it'll sell the most copies and their target audience is libshits and trannies like themselves.

So how would you get the humility of the humble verb across. English doesn't have humble or honorific verbs. You have to be more verbose just to even attempt to match the tone of the original.

If books and films were localized like jap games are

He doesnt know

Based retard. The bible alone has 40+ versions with critically different texts that tried to appease different cultures by turning folk heroes into saints.

So how would you get the humility of the humble verb across.

"Y-you'd really let me have it??"

I don't think you've ever once read scripture. There are no folk hero saints in it.

There's literally no humility in that. That's just plain ordinary English. The original Japanese uses a humble verb, not a normal verb. It doesn't properly convey the tone of the original, which is self-deprecating like "my shitty unworthy undeserving self can have this...?" and nobody would say that in English, but that's how hard she's bashing herself.

most people (normalfags) don't play videogames thinking that they were made by people with very different worldview, culture and language

Pretty much this also, similar to that korean kid getting his competitive overwatch career ruined when he cosplayed as his favorite character, because Americans and Western Europeans lambasted him for "blackface", when that's not even really a thing widely in Korea, much less did his cosplay even fit the actual criteria of "blackface"; most people are bigoted retards, even those who believe themselves to be enlightened and so much more than just "tolerant" (especially those).

so they need localization

They need to touch grass desu, but then a suit knows touching grass is time they're not consooming product.

Using 'bestow' probably get's the point across fine.

There's literally no humility in that.

There is. If you wanted to emphasize it, you could put "me" in bold or italics. You are retarded and autistic.

There's literally no humility in that. That's just plain ordinary English.

Are you retarded?

You'd hand it over?

You'd give it to me?

You'd let me have it?

You'd allow me to have it?

You'd permit me to have it?

You'd relinquish possession of it?

There's a whole fucking scale you can go down of increasingly polite and humble English before you get to the abomination in the OP.

None of you fuckers know Japanese, so who are you to criticize?

You aren't a mechanic, so who are you to complain that we put a square wheel on your car?

I know japanese actually

OP is a fag

When I can hear English words used in the Japanese audio that don't show up in the English text, or what's a very short line of audio is an entire sentence in English text, there is a problem.

Autism, ESL or tranny.

Localizers don't know japanese either, meaning we can criticize them too. kek

You fuckers rely on Google Translate and fuck up the translation.

Projection thy name is anon.

There is nothing wrong with the translation. The core meaning is the same, and it conveys the character's humble language.

To say that "localizations aren't needed" or "shouldn't exist" is an ideological statement that I have zero interest at.

But let me explain you why they already exist and will always exist.

The main point of a translation is to sell the game in a different market place.

Turns out different market places often have different cultures. And tailoring your product to said culture can lead to more sales.

There is a certain number of customers that are autistic like Anon Babble and care way too much about how faithful it is to the original script. On the other hand, there is a 100x larger number of customers that enjoy the localized's references to pop culture, its sensibility with themes like racism/sexism, and so on.

Capitalism, bitch. You are a minority. Companies won't pander to you. Deal with it. You can shit your diapers and whine about how it "shouldn't" be this way all you want. It is a completely pointless and futile exercise. You are talking about "shoulds" and "wants" in a commercial product whose choices are driven entirely by profit. And localizations are way more profitable than 1:1 translations.

Capitalism should be dismantled and replaced with a different system.

Fuck Trump and his tariffs. They have ruined everything.

AI will be cheaper and are actually better than localizers.
Coal mines for localizers, NOW. Also tl;dr.
One not exploitable by jews. Please.

Wrong thread, faggot. lol

Trump should actually tariff localizers if that were possible.

This place is basically a corpse.

It was a corpse before, after the downtime not even the carcass remains at this point.
Smaller threads on smaller boards are dead as shit.
Hell, smaller boards in general are largely dead now when they used to get SOME activity.
It's unironically fucking over for this site.

I'm fluent in japanese and english. I often play english versions of RPGs because the dialogue is more interesting. Japanese dialogue is written like a novel for third graders. Very direct and plain.

it's OP laying out fresh bait because his starter one is dying

Localizers are already dirt cheap.

AI will never be better than localizers because it doesn't have the tact to adapt the right bits and leave preserve the meaning of the rest. A good localizer will always rake more money than the AI would save in the pitiful salary of the localizer.

I'm also fluent in japanese and english, and this isn't true.

Okay, if localization weren't necessary, how would you translate a cultural reference that only Japanese people understand?

They already had the right idea with "bestow" but the trannylator had to go and add all that other garbage.

The posted screenshots here literally show that it's exactly the case. "You'd let me have it?" is a very direct and plain sentence.

The left can only corrupt and destroy. That's it really.

And meanwhile, complainers like you can't create anything.

Given it turned out a literal crunshitroll employee was a Anon Babble janny it wouldn't surprise me if a trannylator was a Anon Babble one.

If books and films were "localized" like japanese games are, people would be calling them out

Dante's Divine Comedy has like 500 different translations because people keep arguing about how the previous ones were done. While people that complain about video game translations can only scream about how it's wrong without putting in the effort to make their own version.

ironically enough due to nigglish devolving even further that would come off as pretentious or even haughty due to using complex lingo instead of nigger noises

You don't. You're playing a game meant for weebs. If they can't understand anime terminology, pop culture, and tropes, then they're not the target audience.

I still don't get it

Google it.

Trannylator already projecting.

"A discriminator" is a weird translation. Somethingome "is this discrimination?" Would work better in English. But it's not as accurate I guess, and if you give someone an inch they'll take a foot and soon you won't have a leg to stand on.

Unironically may be right cause I read an English translation of what was supposed to be Japan's best literature, No Longer Human, and it was boring and uninteresting and I regret wasting my time with it

Learned Japanese

This happened

Now what?

Because retranslating old stuff for the 500th time is half of what you can do with a degree in literature or philosophy. Also Dante won't sue you over copyrights.

globalism is over, so you don't have to worry about this happening anymore

10 years in the joint made you a pussy.

mah brudder in shite, this is news older than the average poster in this shithole of a site

whatta faggot

Why haven't YOU joined the industry to improve translation, hmm?

I hate this argument because no one understands what I want

YOU JUST WANT A LITERAL 1:1 TRANSLATION OF ORIGINAL TEXT

No, because that's retarded and not how languages work

Some other retard: OH SO YOU WANT THEM TO CHANGE THE ENTIRE CONTEXT OF THE SENTENCE FOR POLITICAL SHITE

No, because that's equally retarded and removes the entire point of translating. There is nothing wrong with changing wordplay that makes sense in one language to a similar wordplay in the translated language, you have no idea how many jokes are missed because of it, but I don't want them to change basic and easy to understand stuff either for no good reason.
Is that too hard to ask?

If Pikachu can become the most popular fictional character in history without needing a localized name, then nothing needs to be localized.

Please stop posting

The English noun for a person that discriminates is "bigot," ESL-kun.

localization of games is mostly fine

Anon Babble spergs out at one part and calls for localizers' deaths

it's heavily gatekept. I actually would really like to be a translator.

Why should I do your job for you when you are getting replaced by AI anyway?

The level after that is where you've done the reps so many times that you give up and just vibe to what the kanji means. Works 80% of the time, else you just look it up.

you play the older games that you love.
you have games to play right?

You can learn hiragana and katakana faster than you think.
From there you're probably best off learning Kanji passively by doing reading while primarily learning grammar, rather than doing something like bruteforce memorization of contextless kanji flashcards.

um just google it

Way to break people's immersion.

When I wished for a TWEWY thread, I guess I didn’t notice the monkey’s paw sitting beside me.

2 more weeks

Anon, it already happened.
It's not 2 more weeks, it's more like 2 months ago.

It’s fucking TWEWY, what discussion is there to have?

More like the average person is just oblivious to how retarded the changes are. I bet you defend 4kids's retardation as well.

To be fair, all those 4kids series that were butchered were still hugely popular

why the FUCK did the remake buff the best pin and double how much damage it deals? yeah it was a bigfix for a bug that made other pins worse but they could have at least toned it down a bit instead of making it so much better than your other options

Then shut the fuck up. You're not the target audience in the first place, yet you force yourself to play a game that's clearly meant for people who are into Japanese and anime culture.
You're confused because you don't understand the references, yet you still don't want to educate yourself.
So what the fuck do you want? Blue Haired Californian dyke rewrite talking about American pop "culture" like egg cracking and skibidi rizz bop bop because those are the one you're familiar with?
Fuck off.

Yes, because it was all people had access to, thus creating a weird form of nostalgia for something so dogshit. But they're not going to tell you, "Yeah, man, they did a brilliant job with those translations!" like how some of the mouth-breathers in this thread are.

the fuck? japanese grammer is easy as fuck, it's literally just kanji that makes it hard to learn. they literally have marker words for (subject), (object) and then its just learning verb endings, its like latin but 10x easier.

how often are we going to have this dumbass thread before you finally get tired of it

He doesn't know

The main point of a translation is to sell the game in a different market place

but the point of selling a japanese game is that that different market is bored of their local games. stripping all the "japan" you can out of it would be like going to a japanese restaurant, ordering ramen, and then being happy they brought you spaghetti, aren't you glad they localized your noodles for you?

How do you translate Japanese wordplay without localization?

English speakers can't conjugate they verbs

there is a way for minorities to wield disproportionate influence over companies, however
you make them extremely uncomfortable until they quit or cave
like shitting up social media, noisy boycotts, harassing employees, slander and threats
you know, what already happened
problem is only degenerate retards are shameless enough to act like that until they get their way, weebs and nerds have more self-respect than SJWs

the woke are talentless losers who can't do anything

also, the woke control everything.

Have you tried?

"The enemy is both strong and weak", it's just the typical fascist playbook.

yeah

and then you realize woke niggers are just useful idiots for the kikes, who are the real problem

Shouldn't you be happy that there are fewer differences between the Japanese and English text and therefore there's less need for localizers, hmm?

character is an otaku

literally is willing to murder an unrelated 15-year-old over not getting some merch

spends half of the game jilling over the fact that one of the party members looks like a character from a gacha she plays

"WHY DOES SHE TALK AND ACT WEIRD!? THAT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE!"

You're completely right.

A lot of retards seem to delude themselves into believing that they are the voice of the majority, when in reality, trannylation work is done for bottom feeders. It's designed for the guy who can't tell onigiri apart from jelly donuts.

The problem occurs when the EOP weeb mistakenly thinks he has attained some small understanding of the original work, through MTL shit, parroting JSLs, or having a healthy distrust of trannies. He starts to think really stupid thoughts like "why aren't translations good?", which is like asking why Ikea furniture isn't good. He becomes convinced he is fighting a noble fight that makes no sense because he has no concept of how business works, and is a pure idealist who is as delusional about reality as the trannylators he hates are.

The dichotomy between their perceived elitism for watching 500 animes, and the stark reality that they haven't watched a single show because they've been reading third rate fan fiction instead of consuming the original media, breaks their brains.

we want literal translations!!

translate これ as "you"

lol

I'll progress beyond you since I always force myself to play it in Japanese.

retard

translate これ as "you bastard"

I suppose that might be a matter of how you're learning it.
When I see a word or kanji I don't know, I just look it up in a dictionary, which I've gotten very comfortable with since I've done it thousands of times now and my concentration doesn't dissipate very much and I can still focus on the sentence.
When I read a sentence and I forget what's being done to who or I'm confused by the role of the で particle, or the character is speaking in a dialect, resolving that isn't as straightforward and often requires googling it or referencing an ai and this can take several minutes, which breaks my concentration even more. This still happens even though I've memorized thousands of words and done it for years.

How do novels get away with not localizing?

?

erm, you can't just heckin' directly translate a foreign language cause of grammar or something, that's why my wholesome 100 weeb trannies need to vandalize everything they touch

SHUT THE FUCK UP, FAGGOT

It's heavy handed, but some localization is needed if you want to preserve the different levels of respectfulness in the dialogue (left character is using respectful language unusual for casual conversations), which doesn't have a direct equivalent in English

How do novels get away with not localizing?

Novels are heavily localized. This fantasy world you've created where only J>E work is bad, doesn't exist. Toda Natsuko has been fucking up E>J films since before you were born.

This, a literal translation would be hard to read, especially with all the Japanese idioms that would be hard to understand if translated word by word.

useless losers fronting fashionable politics control everything

Yes, that is why everything is going to shit. I'm glad we agree.

How does this fit with Trump being in power?

Reminds me of the nonsense "King of the Cavern" thing from the Japs weird translation of Count of Monte Cristo

God I hate localizers (they're probable women and trannies from california)

It's also correct.

problem, reaction, solution

Man, that game was so fucking boring and samey. What a letdown.