orenronen posted:

This has been somewhere on the back of my list of games to sometime play for a while now, and the thread inspired me to fire it up in Japanese and play through this first update doing a line-by-line comparison with the translation.

It's... weird. I'm pretty sure the text was written by a native English speaker - there are choices made here I don't think even a fluent Japanese English speaker would've made unless they were an experienced translator, and if they were I'm pretty sure they'd also be a better writer.

There are several aspects to why this script feels so awkward. First is that, yeah, it's just clumsy writing. The Japanese script won't win awards for prose, but I've read much worse and it does occasionally come up with a nice turn of phrase. The English script, on the other hand, just reads like someone who doesn't really know how to write. More importantly, though, is that it almost looks as if it was under a strict character limit constraints - the translation takes the Japanese text and strips it of almost everything that's not essential to the bare meaning, and sometimes also of stuff that is. It's missing fine details from descriptions and all sorts of nuances that makes a better logical flow between sentences. There are also some real translation mistakes, some of which you pointed out (but I'll add that I'm pretty sure the line with "The vicious growls of animals" actually refers to just one animal - the dog that shows up immediately after it)