Thread #12508410
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Why is it so hard to translate Final Fantasy IV even after 30 years?
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>>12508410
It's not, play a version from Advance or later and you'll find the translation annhilates any SNES-based version. This isn't a new and exciting discovery, many people have been saying that for years.
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Because the Woolsey xlation is already good enough.
You can leave, trannie.
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>>12508415
>play remake slop
ahahahaha.
neck yourself zoomer
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>>12508410
>J2e has some Working-Designs-tier shithead on the team that they didn't tardwrangle enough, who cares because this will blow the censored US version out of the water regardless
>PSX version blows them out of the water (doubly so for later versions)
>J2e is too proud to convert their work into a text port, also to release their text tools
>years later, text tools are basically all for FFIIUS (+FFIIIUS) and so editing is a lot easier on US ROMs
>the JP hacks are tarred and feathered so let's just make US hacks that restore JP changes, who'll know the difference
>turns out the US ROMs are full of limitations that you won't find in the JP hacks but you can sort of hide them and hope no one notices
>the esl who made the definitive bughacks of FFVI & EB(0) comes here slapping in a frankenstein's script, gets no pushback because people dislike the JP hack and of course it's an old game so it's GOT to better (nevermind that Hacks have lower threshold and higher visibility)
>years later, LoLguy is between jobs so he bodies that dude out of boredom
>autists are scrambling for a new savior now that they heard the devastating and inconceivable news that Namingwayguy is actually a perma-screwup (again)
>you are here
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>>12508410
>negative thousands
I'm not watching Troonmato's shitty streams to find out, but is that a count of individual errors, or just whole dialogues affected by errors?
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>>12508670
NTA but he's probably just talking about the GBA version which is an enhanced port not a remake, moron.
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>>12508669
Woolsey didn’t work on FF IV
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>>12508858
He worked on every SNES RPG and even some early PS1 ones according to the schizophrenic guys who hate him so much he made them schizophrenic so it must be true.
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>>12508415
And yet they still stubbornly hang on to nonsense lines like "You spoony bard!" because they're too much of an iconic meme to erase.
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>>12508807
Both I think. Namingway is a guesslation made by mixing parts of various rescripts, with no effort to make sure any of it actually mirrored the Super Famicom version (FFIV's Japanese script kept getting updated with every edition just as English translations did). When the author and his fans complained about it in the comments, Tomato updated the scoring system mid-streams with a handicap, apparently because it's poor form to nitpick hackers who are still active but he didn't know since most of these hacks stopped updating when RHDN "archived". In reality, the negative J2E/NAM scores should be about even: both bad, but in different ways. I just don't understand why you would put something like this out there unless you absolutely KNEW it was better than the original, so I'm assuming there were annoying rival kids up their asses threatening to churn out worse rushjobs as usual.
>>12508929
The line's buildup is what was accidentally funny about it, as if it's the worse insult he can think of because he's such a senile fogey. Every subsequent version starts the encounter with it, which borders on parody. It's like how people misunderstand what made "do a barrel roll" funny: it's the conviction and intensity in the old man's voice that makes it humorous. But really, "worse acting than William Shatner" and "Dark Knights are totally sweet" are cut from the same cloth. The DS version is probably the best post-SNES version because it took the text seriously and keeps memey jokes to a minimum. Unfortunately, 3D versions are removed enough from 2D versions that porting the text over wouldn't really be a good fit, not to mention the space issues.
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>>12508858
Woolsey is an idea, not a man.
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>>12508410
Making bad writing intended for children in another language both stay true to the original intent but not clearly be childish slop is pretty well impossible.
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>sentences can be phrased in different ways
This breaks the mind of the weeb
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>>12509085
This is why 99% of translation discourse is absolute ass. It all boils down to
>"w-w-w-well I don't PERSONALLY like it because I wouldn't PERSONALLY have written THAT!!!"
>"UHHH you want me to tell you what I WOULD write? WELL, uhhhhh dude like, I dunno man, I just don't like THAT way!!! GOD!!!"
End of the day, you'll never be happy with what you didn't put down yourself and a year down the road, you won't even be happy with what you put down because your tastes, your understanding, and your approach will all have evolved by then
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>>12508807
It's more of a shitstain meter, where bigger errors count for more.
Also keep in mind the counters started at 1000, not at 0.
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>>12509194
>>12509195
Is it supposed to be obvious which of these is better?
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>>12509215
Not if you can't read nip. But it's this one >>12509194

Note how different they both are from both the original SNES one and the "accurate retranslations/relocalizations" though.
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>>12509223
In this case they're both pretty bad but I'd rather have something that reads better irregardless of which is more accurate.
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>>12509317
The PSX one looks fine to me, what's wrong with it?
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>>12508410
Hard to judge here without seeing the complete translated lines
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>>12508410
Hard to judge here without seeing the complete translated lines
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Why do none of these retranslation efforts ever have actual fluent speakers of the language behind them?
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>>12508410
While all translations have errors and the fan stuff is often specially retarded, this guy's ultra picky and doesn't seem to be that fluent himself, he constantly seems to doubt and need to consult a dictionary, I wouldn't put much weight on his scores.
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>>12509592
The original SNES version had one and look how THAT turned out.
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>>12509317
>irregardless
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>>12509592
Better translators have better things to do.
>>12509596
Funny how the attitude changes when he replaces GBA & GoogleTranslate with fan-hacks lol, criticizing paid work and mtl is fine but wagging your finger at the poor eop pretenders who overrelied on them goes too far.
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>>12509592
Better translators have better things to do.
>>12509596
Funny how the attitude shifts when he replaces GBA & GoogleTranslate with fanhacks lol, criticizing official work and mtl tools is fine but finger-wagging the poor eop pretenders who overrelied on them goes too far.
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>>12509701
>>12509705
Disregard the dupe, tried deleting but the site appears to be shitting itself lately.
>>12509583
>>12509585
I see someone else had the same problem.
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>>12509705
Just seems like a waste to do shit like this. Why doesn't he put this kind of effort into analyzing games with one fan translation instead? Try a recent game like SeGaGaGa or Splatterworld and put them to the test to see if the translators actually did a good job they didn't?
Seems like a better use of both his """"talents"""" and his reach.
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>>12509718
He's an ffivfag and admits as much at least. Also he built a custom version of Snes9x mostly for it. He probably isn't familiar or interested enough with other emulators that can comparably output English/Japanese side-by-side.
>Splatterworld
Don't remind me...
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>>12509592
Because romhacking is fairly difficult to do, so the overlap between people that are capable of it and people that know Japanese is minimal. And most people that know Japanese have little interest in joining a rom hacking group full of eop autists that don't know shit about Japanese but will still boss you around.
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>>12509741
This. Imagine wanting to get bullied by a Dunning-Kruger control-freak whose only skill in life is rote-regurgitating 'conventional wisdom' read on wikis.
That's what happened with the Super Mario RPG fan-retranslation: some double-crossing spastic who uncoothly plowed through Lazy Shell thought rewatching Legends of Localization made him the game's resident 'relocalizer' and bossed around the only RHDN member who never played the game before, and couldn't take a hint from his own wiki source that impatiently plagiarizing right before a remake was senseless. Said source dropped the full retranslation in a technically-incomplete state out of frustration that most wouldn't know was unfinished since it multiplied TCRF coverage size with a sample of info withheld from adversaries, and the only parts that look unfinished are crammed battle text and minor restoration todos like wanting to hack back in Toad's secret code and a custom tiny font to legibly retranslate toss-item text.
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>>12509572
NTA, the sentence structure on PSX has a "literal" feel, and GBA+ looks edited for a more "natural" flow since similar information is being conveyed. Here's an evolution of that scene if you're interested.
>>12510154
Wonder if is this why the Woolsey relocalization hacks stopped. One busybody left their containment game and ticked off the Mario equivalent of KWhazit.
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>>12509215
>>12509223
>>12509317
The only relevant question between the two is the meaning of "give you my blessing."
In >>12509194, the phrasing could be interpreted as awkward or arrogant, which is clearly not the intent as Kain is self-imposing exile on himself.

Ultimately, this goes to show what a total damn waste of time all this fussing over line-by-line minutiae is in these SNES Final Fantasy games. There's absolutely nothing relevant or important in those lines that noticeably enriches the experience, that wasn't present in the original. "huuhhhhhh supass my father ... training on Ordearus... uhuh." None of the verbosity matters at all.

The main theme of the entire game was redemption. Kain was a double-fuckup during the story, so he's on Mt Ordeals finishing his redemption, rather than partying with Cecil and the rest of them at the wedding. This is fucking obvious. The soliloquy is superfluous and could frankly be deleted entirely and the scene would be just as good, if not better.
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>>12512664
>the phrasing could be interpreted as awkward or arrogant,
Maybe that line alone, but not really in the context of the next one.
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>>12512247
>I will go to Mount Ordeals
How the fuck do you even get that wrong?
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>>12509096
Isn't this literally the reason why most people who learn Japanese to play old video games either quit learning Japanese because the concept of nuance is too hard or end up moving on to engaging with more Japanese culture than the 30 year old video game they insisted was better in the original Japanese?
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>>12509604
To be fair, Square had only just realized that American children were actually capable of reading and wanted to make sure they wouldn't get lost.
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>>12512912
I learned Japanese to play old video games, so now I play old video games in Japanese and don't really give a shit about how some fags localized them in the 90s.

I think you'll find it common that people that actually learn to read a language stop giving all that much of a shit how some other people word things in translations they don't have a reason to read.
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>>12509194
>>12509195
>i can't give you my blessing
Kek. What, you don't approve?
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>>12512664
Your post is superfluous and could frankly be deleted entirely and the thread would be just as good, if not better.
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>>12513185
Incorrect, the existence of the thread and the retarded debates on minute phrasing of translations proves that my point is necessary to make, and your seething response confirms the point hit home.
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>>12512917
That's more or less his second point. You stopped giving a shit about translation wanking to "prove" that the Japanese original is "better" and just played your damn games in peace.
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>>12512838
My guess is that the PSP script was built on top of a nonfinal GBA. Strange because PSP has the reception of being a "corrected" version of the GBA one, but it was thrown away for the Pixel Remaster. Partly too, JP TAY was based on GBA while EN TAY was based on DS, so for the PSP package they did a weird hybrid script. In practice it's mainly just GBA with reretranslated terms lifted from DS and TAY flashback moments backported from DS. That means for certain key scenes the dialogue suddenly shifts to DS style and it's frankly distracting. I'd still say out of the official translations DS is best because it actually tried to start fresh, and PSP is second for the most part.
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I don't play any of these games but I'm a sucker for comparisons. Please post more. Bumping
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>>12508410
Google translates this as:

>I cannot absolve you now... Hone your skills on this mountain of trials... When you become a dragon knight who surpasses your father...
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>>12512247
>>12513326
Geez, I feel like SNES and DS were the only ones that involved an actual translator and the rest had budget rearrangers who leaned too hard on previous versions and barely knew what they were doing.
>PS1 and GBA?
I don't know man, considering they flounder at similar parts I have half a mind to question if they just copied J2e's homework and remixed it enough to fool you.

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