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I have never read the official translation of the game, so I guess I'll stick around. I've talked about it several times in the past, but I can't stand reading my own version these days. It was my first attempt at translating anything at all, combined with the fact English isn't my native language and that I don't think I'm much of a writer, and the result doesn't read very well. Still, I'm still very much in favor of my ideas and attitude about how things should be translated, especially in a game like this which very much has a voice and was largely written by a single person who can actually write prose pretty well. But nevertheless, before I say anything else, let me say this translation flows very well so far. The translator clearly knows how to write and doesn't fall into any of the classic awkward English that far too often results from a too literal translation of Japanese syntax and idioms. We still haven't got to my single largest gripe about this translation (which, as far as I can tell, it was mandated from above), but here are comments on what has been discussed so far. SHSL vs. Ultimate: I still defend my version. The main thing about this is that it sounds ridiculous in Japanese too, especially as we get into higher concept stuff later in the game and series that still slap that title on top of things that most certainly don't fit it, and where "Ultimate" sounds just about right. It's a broad joke in Japanese that gets funnier the more it is used, and I think a translation should attempt to keep that. The series later expands the joke with "Super Elementary School Level"s in AE - can someone let me know how that's handled in the translation? Titles: I think the phenomenon of the Japanese idol culture is well known enough in the west (and especially among the prime target audience for this game) that they should've just kept it, but that's a fairly mild change. The one that's far more interesting is Gyaru -> Fashionista. It's actually very clever, and an excellent choice if I thought translations should hide specific cultural artifacts from readers. It's certainly worlds better than that other translation group's Supermodel, which completely misses the point of what a Gyaru actually is. I have complicated feelings about this, though, as my thoughts about translation in general tend more toward subtly explaining foreign culture in an unobtrusive manner instead of deleting it. I don't really like how they handle the characters' names here for much the same reason. I can keep commenting if people want me too, but let me know if it's too obtrusive and I'll be happy to just watch from the sidelines.
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Sep 14, 2015 01:49
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Trivia: There's at least one officially licensed item of DR2 merchandise in Japan that says "Super High-school Level" on the box. I believe it's from before the official translation was released, but it must have been when it was already in the works. Of course, it's a fairly direct translation of the Japanese term, so I have no idea if my LP was an influence or not.
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Sep 14, 2015 03:42
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A Cup of Ramen posted:Has there been information released on how well the localisations have sold? Yes.
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Sep 14, 2015 08:26
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C-Euro posted:That's funny, the "Owie Asahina" is my signature wrestling finisher (I always wondered how you pronounced "Aoi"...) I wasn't going to listen to the English voices because ever since I could understand Japanese I've never heard a dub that didn't make me cringe, but I gave that one a listen and it's just offensive. Seriously. Put a character of a European nationality into a game and the actors will go to great efforts to pronounce their name the native way (often without success, but still, there's effort), even if it collides with English phonology and stress patterns. Why is it with Japanese names it's always stressed the wrong way, or sometimes completely mangled like here?
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Sep 15, 2015 02:09
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EponymousMrYar posted:Simplest answer is that the VA doesn't know Japanese phonemes very well and their voice director didn't correct them, tried to and failed, or was nonexistent in the first place (such as the VA getting handed a script with directions and nothing else.) That's a great answer for an average American, but I expect professional voice actors, especially those of them that mainly do Japanese-produced entertainment, to train their ears for accents and foreign language phonetic differences and to be able to produce a close approximation of them.
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Sep 15, 2015 04:29
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mkwong98 posted:I keep thinking of this game as the anime game adaptation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game) Japan had a little Mafia (in its werewolf-themed variant) craze a few years back, and you can still find a lot of stuff based on that game around. In particular, there's an actual DR licensed mafia-like card game out there. There's also another murder-game PSP adventure where the murder game is much more directly influenced by Mafia/Werewolf: Tsugi no Giseisha wo Oshirase Shimasu (Now Announcing the Next Victim). It's in three parts and I played a little bit of it. It seems somewhat interesting but a whole lot more generic than DR.
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Sep 23, 2015 01:39
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hopeandjoy posted:...Genocide Jack is a name that will take some getting used to. Why didn't they translate it as Genocide Sho? Genocider Jack is one translation I like a lot (as opposed to most other "localization"-style choices made here) - it pretty much nails the original nickname, and would even sound good back-translated into Japanese. I really really don't like what they do with the name later on, though.
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Sep 25, 2015 02:32
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BlazeEmblem posted:Genocide Jack Yeah, I'm all for that too. Wait, I'm actually of two minds. On one hand, my current stance is that when you encounter any Katakana "English" word in a Japanese text your first instinct should be to think whether something else is more appropriate/correct and that you should only translate it to the same English word after careful consideration. On the other hand, this is an Internet nickname given to an anime serial killer by Japanese 2ch'ers, and "Genocider" sounds perfect in whatever language for that particular scenario.
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Sep 25, 2015 08:23
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Oh, they just totally ruined this joke in a way that makes me feel they just didn't understand it. In Japanese, Monokuma teases Naegi with, "it's raising/standing (up), isn't it", just to finish with the punchline - "the flag". In Japanese gaming lingo "raising a flag" means (among similar things) getting the conditions right to set you on a particular girl (or guy)'s route in romance games. And instead they just use the same general English word that I can't read in any other way than as a reference to what the joke was pretending to lead to in the first place.
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Sep 26, 2015 03:39
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alcharagia posted:Dick jokes are funny. And it was a dick joke originally, turned into not a joke at all (and also just a little too directly vulgar coming from Monokuma). Compare with the other one a couple of dialogue lines later which keeps the joke part.
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Sep 26, 2015 04:41
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EponymousMrYar posted:It's pretty much just there for the 'blackened vs. spotless' thing he said this update, of which there are a ton of better words for that (darkened, corrupted, marked to come up with some off the top of my head.) Here's my thoughts on why this is a translation miss. The original uses "kuro" and "shiro", literally black and white, to designate the guilty and innocent parties in the murder game. Here's the important thing: in Japanese, "kuro" and "shiro" have the meaning of being guilty or innocent in a "commited a crime" sense anyway. When I first translated the game I looked in several J-J dictionaries and they all list it as a sense. It's not new usage or slang either - none of the dictionaries list it with a colloquial tag, and some give usage examples dated decades back. Sure, they're not the words you'd use in a formal speech, but it's a proper meaning of the words that everyone recognizes. DR obviously also uses these words because Monokuma is black and white, which works very well in Japanese because they're literally the same words. This is something a translator has to decide whether they should attempt to keep, and in this case they did the worst possible thing which is going half-way. They give us black vs. spotless instead of black vs. white, and in the process introduce awkward terminology that also has problematic connotations in English. I went with the straightforward guilty vs. innocent in my translation, and I still think that unless you can come up with some brilliant wordplay on black and white, that's the proper way to go.
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Sep 29, 2015 02:49
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YggiDee posted:Come on guys, you don't know a Shawshank Redemption quote when you read it? If they were willing to give Yamada western culture references, I wonder why they didn't put something from, say, Sherlock Holmes to replace the Kindaichi "Mystery solved!" catch phrase. Maybe the translator didn't know it was a reference in the first place.
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Oct 2, 2015 02:49
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EponymousMrYar posted:The Sayaka twist slows it down a bit since it plays with everyone's expectations. There's a lot of competency from Byakuya, Kyoko and Sakura even at this point. Kirigiri is kind of a special case because she has clearly figured out the entire thing by the time the trial begins, but for her own reasons decides to let Naegi go through the motions.
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Oct 11, 2015 11:36
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Lord_Magmar posted:Her indifference to the whole thing if I'm being honest. Also from my point of view as she does in fact know everything she should be the one leading/refuting this stuff not Naegi. It's also a bit of game playing stuff because I don't know if you can fail this trial but if you can it'd mean she knew what was happening and still let it occur. If you can't fail this trial than I apologise, doesn't change that she's very uncaring about the whole thing though. The game's Game Over sequence is as low-effort as they get, similarly to how they're handled in the Ace Attorney games. If you run out of health, there's a short unvoiced sequence that doesn't change according to context, where Monokuma says there was a vote which was wrong so everyone's going to die, and the player gets a chance to try again or quit. Even if you leave Kirigiri out of it, there are places later in the game where other characters would definitely chime in with information they're withholding if the situation required it, so this sequence should probably be taken as nothing more than a formality so that failing the mini games have a consequence. Given all that, I'm pretty sure that if the case were seconds from voting wrong Kirigiri would have revealed her opinions and evidence. It's just that in the game's canon story Naegi gets it right in the end and she doesn't have to.
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Oct 12, 2015 12:20
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Glaive17 posted:That came up during Oren's LP as well, I believe the reason is that is was written in English in the Japanese version as well, and English letters look very different than Japanese letters. Since it looked like numbers, which are much more familiar, they were interpreted as numbers at first. Nah, they are all idiots for not seeing it. It's not like the roman alphabet isn't all around here in Japan, and I haven't seen a single Japanese LP player who didn't see it a second after discovering the message.
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Oct 13, 2015 23:37
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I believe there's optional dialogue between Maizono and Leon early in the chapter where he tries to hit on her, which is probably why she went for him.
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Oct 15, 2015 02:07
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This video is much too early to be called a "beta" - it was part of a video presentation writer Kodaka and artist Komatsuzaki prepared to get the project greenlit by Spike management. As such, it was one of the very first things done for the game, back when they haven't yet settled on an atmosphere and style, and they ended up just reusing it verbatim for the final game to save costs.
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Oct 16, 2015 22:54
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fractalairduct posted:Why change the joke about iceberg lettuce to rock candy? Or was it something else in the original? I believe I explained this somewhere in the original thread -- in Japanese it's koorizatou, literally "ice sugar" but means what we call crystallised sugar in English. Celes asks why Hagakure's acting as cold as ice sugar, to which Ishimaru replies, "Ice sugar isn't cold, it's sweet!". My translation strategy was to find something in english that has ice in the name but isn't actually cold, replacing Ishimaru's line from "it's sweet!" to "it's green!". The official translation kept the sweet part, which I think makes a little less sense, but whatever.
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Oct 25, 2015 12:11
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AlphaKretin posted:Was there originally a Beatles reference? I know they were as popular in Japan as anywhere else but they don't seem like the kind of band to inspire a delinquent punk wannabe. There wasn't. The original line was about a real baseball star and a real musician who both share Leon's last name, Kuwata. Leon says he wants to be more like the latter than the former.
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Oct 28, 2015 02:34
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Fedule posted:As I've said before elsewhere, and as a bunch of people have said in this thread, the general moment-to-moment editing in this localization is pretty good. But not here. My big nitpick with the translation is, of course, that what Monokuma is talking about has nothing to do with passive vs. active. Both sentences he offers are active. This is a difficult one to translate. In Japanese, Monokuma points out the difference between the straight active verb and the Japanese construction "verb-te shimau", which adds a sense that the action was unintended and bad for you. This is a very common construction and you'd pretty much never say sentences like "I lost my wallet" without using it. There isn't really a grammatical construction like that in English, and "oops" vs. "that's right!" sounds okay to me. Except it's not active vs. passive so shame on the translators.
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Oct 30, 2015 02:10
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W.T. Fits posted:I just figured they wanted it left untranslated because it's the character's proper name. It would be like localizing Makoto's name as "True Seedlings" or something to that effect. So yeah, I didn't exactly lose any sleep over them deciding to just keep him as "Monokuma" for the Western release. Except it's not that simple. First, Monokuma isn't strictly a proper name. There are many of him, so it's sometimes used in plural form, for example. In a later game it's even the collective name of several different robot types, with a descriptive adjective attached to separate them. Second, they changed Syo to Jack, which is a much more straight adaptation of a real formal name, so they certainly don't have an agenda against this kind of thing. Third, even if it is a formal name, it's a formal name like "Mickey Mouse" or "Daffy Duck" or "The Brain". Now, the first two aren't treated the same all over the world. In my own native language they were left alone in translations, but I know many cases where the meaningful part was translated. I don't know of a single translation where "The Brain" was left in English, though. If you want a related example in the reverse direction, do you really think it would have been a good idea to keep Brainy Smurf "Schtroumpf à Lunettes" just because it's his formal name? I'm still convinced Monobear is right and Monokuma is wrong, and I'm getting more convinced with every new member of the robot family added in the sequels. The interviews certainly make it sound like it was an order from Spike-Chunsoft and not a translation decision. I guess the character's kind of became the company's mascot now and marketing wanted a consistent global name.
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Nov 6, 2015 03:39
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EponymousMrYar posted:Plus the pun connecting Monokuma to Monochrome is still there, so while Monobear is more correct it looses that. I don't think anyone could connect Monobear to monochrome. I bet no English speaker connects Monokuma to Monochrome either, at least not anyone who actually needs the k sound there to realize the Mono in the name ties up with the black-and-white theme and is short for monochrome. I also bet most Japanese players don't get the pun either. It's not a very good one. Here's the most important thing about the name, as far as I'm concerned. A Japanese person who sees it, even out of context, knows immediately it's a bear's name, and that the bear is most likely a cartoon comedy bear. It's exactly like Mickey Mouse in that respect. Then, every time the name comes up, the bear part of it jumps out and reaffirms that it is, in fact, a cartoon bear name, which puts the reader in a certain frame of mind. Put it in an English translation and, except for the tiny fragment of the audience (present company included) who knows what the Japanese word for bear is, it becomes a random string of syllables like every other Japanese name in the game. For most characters that's okay - whatever tiny amount of relevant literal meaning behind their names is disposable. But I don't think it is here. A translator's job is to judge when to keep things literal and when the spirit behind a choice of words is more important than staying completely literal. They should also make that decision for the most common type of reader, who doesn't know anything about the source language. This is extremely difficult, but I think in this case most translators would agree with me and that had management not interfered with this particular decision they would have made the change.
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Nov 6, 2015 05:09
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Speaking of, that's one of the lazier photo editing efforts I've seen so far from the translation team. Not only did they copy and paste the location of the two murders displayed here (they were different originally), but the "Blood Lust" graffiti seems to also have been copied and pasted instead of hand-drawn into each victim's photo. And then the close-up on the victim's hand on the left page was not edited at all so you can see the チ that is at the top of the Japanese graffiti instead of the English edit. Besides, who can even make graffiti written in a 90 degree angle like that? At least tilt the thing if you can't completely change it to be horizontal.
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Nov 6, 2015 12:57
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DialTheDude posted:Can't speak for the Japanese version. The Japanese puzzle is the layman word for "multiple personalities", not any of the more specific medical terms.
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Nov 9, 2015 06:08
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Omobono posted:Genocider Jill self-identifies as woman too. The Jack name is an English translation thing, because if a completely unknown serial killer was making the rounds he or she would be given a masculine monicker by default until the actual gender could be determined. I believe the Japanese Syo is gender neutral, am I correct? You're not. Sho (with the specific kanji used) is specifically a male name, and one I get the impression is nowadays used mostly as a pseudonym (though there are people out there who have it for their real name). Fukawa's alter ego completely embraces it in Japanese so I'm not sure why they decided to not do the same in the translation. I thought it was both a good joke and said something about the character.
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Nov 9, 2015 23:10
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Lacedaemonius posted:What is the kanji? The only I can imagine fitting on their own would be 諸 ＯＲ 庶。 It's 翔. Examples of real people with that kanji as their name: Shou Aikawa, an actor and Shou Itou, a soccer player.
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Nov 10, 2015 23:10
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Mraagvpeine posted:How did Chihiro refer to him/herself in Japanese? His first person pronoun of choice was "boku", which I guess is kind of a hint although there are plenty of other female Anime characters of the same personality trope who also use it.
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Nov 17, 2015 07:11
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In case anyone is interested, tomorrow is Dangan Ronpa's fifth anniversary (the PSP version went on sale November 25, 2010), and there's a special 4 hour countdown show on Niconico Douga starting 8pm Japan time, which is about an hour away as I'm writing this. I don't expect any real announcements, as they also have an actual announcement event in a couple of weeks. You need an account on the site to watch and It's likely to be a lot of people talking in Japanese about the series and of limited interest if you don't understand the language. Still, Kodaka and Komatsuzaki are scheduled to appear, so I thought someone here might be interested.
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Nov 24, 2015 10:52
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Waffleman_ posted:The original LP was stumped at Yamada's references too, but I do know that mecha musume is an actual thing. For what it's worth, I searched again and there's still nothing. The only thing I can find is forum posts from Japanese players who are also stumped by the references. Also that Kodaka apparently made an amateur movie called Pumpkin Head when he was a film student, but I doubt that has anything to do with it.
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Dec 2, 2015 06:32
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Carbon dioxide posted:Wait, when was Sakura last referred to as 'Ogre'? I feel that came up much more often in the original version. Nah, IIRC only Hagakure consistently referred to her that way. She was Oogami-san to most people and Sakura-chan to Asahina. Syo probably had a couple of other nicknames for her too.
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Dec 6, 2015 23:43
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Lacedaemonius posted:To Oren (or anyone else who knows), what term does robo-chihiro use to refer to "Master" in the original game? ご主人タマ (goshujin-tama). Using -tama instead of -sama here makes it incredibly cutesy.
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Dec 7, 2015 05:37
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Lacedaemonius posted:Doesn't that imply a romantic relationship though? I have trouble imagining that even from Hifumi, nevermind Chihiro. Not at all. Nowadays, goshujin-sama is mostly identified with Victorian maids and Akihabara maid cafes - this is what the waitresses call male customers in them (female customers usually get ojou-sama, which is kind of the female equivalent). It's mostly used in master-servant situations and, as I said, turning -sama into -tama makes it cutesy.
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Dec 8, 2015 02:28
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Carnivore women and herbivore men are terms that were in vogue in Japan 5 years ago, when the game was first published. There were dozens of "the problem with modern society" articles about it in newspapers and clickbait websites at the time. So, yeah - carnivore women are women who speak their mind loudly, actively go out and seek men and make the first move. Herbivore men, which was the more problematic of the two as far as the stereotypical Japanese society was concerned, are men who are meek and shy and not aggressive.
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Dec 8, 2015 06:34
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FPzero posted:I've noticed a trend of the multiple choice questions in this game usually being pretty obvious about what answer you're supposed to pick. I don't remember if that was always that case in the original Japanese or oren's translation though. The one about why Jill couldn't have killed Chihiro sticks out in my head since the answer probably relies on the Japanese player easily being able to tell that the names of her victims are all male. In NISA's translation though, they can't expect the player to necessarily be able to recognize that fact. I don't know if I could have without prior knowledge. So then they went ahead and did this: A good translation would point out all her victims are male without being to conspicuous about it. When Naegi first reads the file, they could have pretty easily inserted an offhand comment about it. The difficult part, of course, is that the translator has to be aware what their audience might not know. It's an easy trap to fall into when you're very familiar with the source language and culture, and is why having at least one editor who isn't is valuable.
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Dec 9, 2015 01:32
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The series' creator/writer is known for saying the way to get the story as intended is to go DR1 -> DR/Zero -> SDR2 -> AE -> (DR3, the anime one, in 2016), but given that Zero isn't that accessible in English (at least not in a consistent, well translated way), you'll probably have to skip it. Edit: fractalairduct posted:Also, if you can find a translation of DR0 (there are no official ones at this point), you should read it alongside DR2. DR/Zero was published well before DR2 was released, and should be read before playing the game for the full effect.
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Dec 27, 2015 07:01
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Kloro posted:Did you ever finish the translation you were doing alongside your DR2 LP? Or did you set it aside like the LP once they announced DR2 was being officially translated? I stopped translating when the LP thread was closed. I sometimes think about doing something with the Kirigiri novels, which despite some major flaws are strangely compelling. Then I remember the amount of work translating a novel takes and I give up.
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Dec 28, 2015 20:29
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Zakrelo posted:The fact that there are 'Kirigiri novels' might constitute a spoiler, but you'd know better than me. They're prequels, taking place about 10 years prior to DR, and have almost nothing to do with the plot of the game besides starring a character that's in it.
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Dec 28, 2015 21:11
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Pittsburgh Lambic posted:Justice Robo's J and R are painted on, and they're backwards. Never try to personalize randomly-found gundam suits; it doesn't work. The kanji are in the correct order in Japanese, so I'm not sure what prompted this. Well, I guess there are arguments that both orders are correct in Japanese, but the one in the game feels more natural to me. Hagakure's note (from the update further up on this page) is one more example of how lazy the graphic translations in this game are. Japanese had some nice real calligraphy, but this one looks like a bad font no one can actually technically handwrite. Fancy cursive would probably be the best way to do it.
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Jan 3, 2016 08:05
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AlphaKretin posted:I won't link it because that'd technically be linking to spoilers but the original thread title in LPArchive pages is a link to the original thread. The first half or so of that thread -- about to where this current thread is up to -- is pretty great and I sometimes go back to read parts of it myself. The second half is a brisk descent into internet fandom madness.
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Jan 11, 2016 11:48
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Be forewarned though that the thread is full of dumb newbies from tumblr etc. who regged just to read it so it's not as enjoyable to read through as you might think. Intriguingly moe~
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Yamada's original dying words directly quote perhaps the most infamous of Japanese gamer memes, "hannin wa Yasu" the culprit is Yasu (which is why there are a bunch of ellipses before he completes saying the name). Those exact words never actually appear in The Portopia Serial Murder Case, but did become an endlessly quoted mantra over the past 30+ years.
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Jan 15, 2016 03:12
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