Xanadu I and II - General Translation Project(s) Thread

[SamIAm]

Chapter 3 is done, though proofreading remains.

[SamIAm]

Chapter 3 proofreading is done.

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This is a great game to be working on for many reasons, not the least of which is its easy chapter-based structure.

When I did Princess Crown on the Saturn (another complete script waiting to be hacked in), the spider-web structure of the game's progression made the text dumps difficult to deal with. Script files would typically contain text from one specific area only, e.g. a town, and they would usually contain all of the text ever used in that area. It would be normal to see sentences used in the very beginning of the game not far away from sentences used in the very end of the game, just because they happened in the same location. There was some division, but it wasn't much, and the order of the scripts had almost nothing in common with the order of the game.

Bearing in mind that Princess Crown takes 20-30 hours to beat, it was really hard to recall the contexts of a lot of sentences as I was translating. I had played Princess Crown more than once before translating it, but there were a lot of minor lines that I either couldn't remember at all or couldn't remember the details of the staging and context for. When I finally had the chance to play-test the translation, there were dozens of places where I discovered little goofs based on context misunderstanding and had to go back to make adjustments.

Xanadu I is broken down into 12 chapters, and none of the chapters take place in the same location or have any kind of overlap with each other. The result is that the text dumps are very easily isolated on a per-chapter basis. Together with the fact that it only takes a two-to-three hours to play one chapter, this makes it incredibly easy for me to follow the contexts of the stuff I am working on.

For example, last week, I spent one day playing all of Chapter 3, and the next several days translating it. Even though the lines in the scripts are not exactly in the same order you encounter them as you actually play, it was nonetheless very easy to remember what was happening in each conversation I encountered while translating. The quantity of things I can't translate confidently due to forgetting the context is down to almost nothing.

The time I'll need to spend editing should be drastically decreased because of this, which is good news for all of us.

When it comes to other RPG script dumps, I'm not really sure what the most efficient way to approach them might be. Having a recorded "Let's Play" on hand could make it easy to search out each line in the dump and translate in-order of the game. However, preparing, organizing and searching the videos themselves could be such a chore that it would mostly negate any other benefit.

I don't know, but I suppose I'd like to try the "Let's Play" approach with the next game I translate. I also really wonder how "pro" game localization outfits deal with this kind of thing.

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On to Chapter 4! I played it yesterday, and I'm ready to go on it today!

[SamIAm]

Chapter 4 is at 40%.

Progress is swift not because the amount of text is small, but because I've been sinking in a lot of hours. If you're curious, take a look at this:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32377930/xanadu1_00189800_014.txt

Calculating by filesize, that is about 1.5% of the total script.

My process is to translate somewhere around that amount every day for five or six days in a row, then proofread it all for another one or two days, then move on to the next chapter.

[Vimtoman]

Thanks for sharing that.
it's great to view something like this to get an idea of how much work you guys do.

[seieienbu]

I'm hard at work!

Sounds really good!  It's nice to hear that the script organization allows for (relatively speaking) easy translation.  Thanks!

[SamIAm]

Chapter 4 is at 100%. Now I just have to proofread it.

Chapters 5, 6 and 7 are going to be "the hump", with 5 and 7 being especially large. Once I get those three done, it'll all be downhill.

Unfortunately, my real-life job is about to get really busy until the end of the month, so I don't anticipate being able to finish Chapter 5 until the first week of January. My overall goal, however, is still to have Chapter 7 done by the end of January and to finish everything by the end of February.

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Elmer sent me a test build that let me see a bit of my translation working in-game. It was very eye opening.

The more I do this kind of thing, the more I understand why Working Designs took the approach they did and sprinkled in lots of jokes. It's kind of an obvious move, really. As the translator, you desperately want the script to sound nice, have a good flow, and maybe even be a little memorable, but there's a limitation even in the original writing that makes this difficult. Every line is structured like bite-sized, easily digested finger-food so that it can fit nicely in a text box and connect well with the other text boxes. It makes sense and all - anything else would be a lot harder to follow. But it does have a big impact on the rhythm and the momentum of how scenes play out.

Sometimes you look at a succession of lines you've just translated and think to yourself: This is basically working, but does it fly? Does it sing? Or is it just a string of bite-sized lines that go "thud, thud, thud" and then it's over?

And the thing is, maybe the original Japanese goes "thud, thud, thud", too. After all, these are just silly little sprites standing around saying stuff like "Here's the key to the abandoned mine. Be careful!". There's not a lot of Shakespearean depth going on in these lines. To an extent, you're kind of stuck, and this is when a little voice reminds you that if you just salt the lines with a little sarcasm or exaggeration or some other kind of joke, it will make it a bit more fun to read and memorable.

Often, too, you can't help but think "Well, why not?". For example, if there's an earthquake in the game, and every other damn NPC in a town is just saying some variation of "What a scary earthquake that was!", then where's the harm in re-writing one guy's line so that he jokes about the mayor being a lush? And if you're Working Designs, is it really such a big step to go from doing that to making a crack about Euro-Disneyland or whatever? The temptation is definitely there.

...But you do run the risk of alienating people who don't think your jokes are funny. It also is a misrepresentation of the original. In my opinion, people who think that a translation should use the exact same grammar and vocabulary as the original without exception are missing the point. However, there definitely comes a point you have to say "Is this The Legend of Xanadu in English, or is this SamIAm's original story that's heavily based on The Legend of Xanadu?". That's the kind of barrier I don't want to breach.

What I ultimately hope is that even if my translation isn't "snappy" at every turn like the script to a good Disney movie, it will still have an overall tone of simplistic charm, with just a little of its own personality. That's one thing I do think the Japanese original has, and is something that's really enjoyable in old games in general.

That's why I'm not planning on adding jokes or otherwise heavily spicing up my translation. I am taking liberties where necessary to make sure everyone sounds like they're speaking real English, and I'm also trying to mix in a nice variety of English idioms in appropriate places. Where the original does something well, I do whatever it takes to make sure the English is doing the same thing equally well. Beyond that, though, aside from a little nip-and-tuck here and there to make everything fit nicely into text boxes, I'm not really planning on changing anything. I hope it works.

When I'm in a later stage of editing, I'm going to be dealing with challenges like "Does this king really sound enough like a king?" and tweaking things to make sure each important character has his or her own "voice". That's a topic for another day, I guess. Anyway, I am going to try hard to make this good. Bear with me while I think out loud. It helps me organize my thoughts.

[NightWolve]

The more I do this kind of thing, the more I understand why Working Designs took the approach they did and sprinkled in lots of jokes. It's kind of an obvious move, really. As the translator, you desperately want the script to sound nice, have a good flow, and maybe even be a little memorable, but there's a limitation even in the original writing that makes this difficult.

...

To an extent, you're kind of stuck, and this is when a little voice reminds you that if you just salt the lines with a little sarcasm or exaggeration or some other kind of joke, it will make it a bit more fun to read and memorable.

And if you're Working Designs, is it really such a big step to go from doing that to making a crack about Euro-Disneyland or whatever? The temptation is definitely there.

[Black Tiger]

I don't think that translations should strive for being the closest a different language can be to identical. It should be balanced so that it feels as natural to the target language as the original was, assuming the source material was solid itself. But I don't think that something like Magic Knight Rayearth should have a guy going into detail about how much he enjoys the sensation of "pooping" his pants or jokes about condoms. Too often, the WD games with the most out of place references also have inconsistent dialogue which betrays the established personalities of the characters. In a fantasy game that isn't overtly wacky, a non-jokey serious character randomly delivering a wacky line as though a completely different person is speaking, using humor they shouldn't even understand and referencing specific things from our real world, totally breaks the game and disconnects you from who you thought they were. If Han Solo in the Force Awakens sees Leia for the first time in years and has the appropriate reaction, but then makes a joke about the song "Friday", then acts normal for 20 minutes until, in the middle of an action scene, exclaims "this woulda beeen WAY easier if I had mah Heelies!®", fans would be pissed.

[jtucci31]

Thanks for that write-up Sam, that was a whole new perspective I hadn't even thought of in relation to this project. I never thought of dialogue like this in terms of " rhythm" but looking back you make complete sense. You and elmer are obviously spending lots of time in this project, but it's also nice to know the care that's going into it. I'm still anxiously awaiting this and checking these threads nonstop.

[seieienbu]

I'm of the opinion that dialogue should make sense regardless of when it was written.  Ideally, it shouldn't be full of pop culture references that date the thing and make it difficult to understand the "jokes."  I recently played through Popful Mail with my girlfriend who is a bit too young to have ever seen Dragnet (I only saw it as reruns on Nick at Night as a young kid) so I told her what the cops lines about "Just the facts, ma'am" were referring toward.  Jokes are fine but referential humor generally falls flat with me.  Lunar's reference to Bill Clinton makes little sense contextually and less sense when you play it today and see it merely as a relic of the age acting as a timestamp.  I feel that timeless humor works much better than something that only works due to current trends.

I'd hope that toilet humor is left out as well.

[SignOfZeta]

If I had to translate that much text and it was that boring and utilitarian, sure, I'd put jokes in there. Japanese people speak differently than us, write differently, etc. Their language in general is...maybe not limiting exactly, but it's extremely normal for people to use what are, by American standards, a lot of really uninspired vocabulary, too-the-point sentence structure, etc. Like a cop on the witness stand, he just reads exactly what his captain told him to say and there's no point in pumping him for anything else. Very boring. 

For example, when you kill a boss in a Japanese video game. What does he say...in virtually every single f*cking game? Something like なんで。。。ばかよ！！！ in nearly every JRPG I've cleared in the original language. I think Dracula says it too. Bosses, to a man, never seem to see their end coming, and always have a hard time believing it when it does. You'd get sick of writing that over and over again in English because in the English speaking world it's highly encouraged to use as much variety in your speech as possible.

The problem with Working Desgins was that their "humor" was for shit. An unfunny joke is less funny than just not having a joke in the first place. Jokes about TV shows and American presidents should be ruled out on subject matter alone when the setting is not a Leno monologue or your a$$hole uncle that thinks he's hilarious at Thanksgiving dinner.

[SamIAm]

If I had to translate that much text and it was that boring and utilitarian, sure, I'd put jokes in there. Japanese people speak differently than us, write differently, etc. Their language in general is...maybe not limiting exactly, but it's extremely normal for people to use what are, by American standards, a lot of really uninspired vocabulary, too-the-point sentence structure, etc. Like a cop on the witness stand, he just reads exactly what his captain told him to say and there's no point in pumping him for anything else. Very boring. 

There's a lot we could pick apart there, but I'll just say that the Xanadus don't suffer very badly at all compared to other RPGs of the time in terms of that kind of thing. The main cast and the important side-characters do a lot of interesting stuff together.

Old-school RPG dialogue tends to be short due to space limitations and expository due to the need to fit into the game structure. You can't really have text boxes popping up in the middle of a dungeon so that your two characters can have some witty back and forth about whether they'd give a guy a foot massage. If you've got a town full of people, you need to have the mayor or whoever tell the player where the next dungeon is and why he should go there, and you need to have all the other people who the player doesn't have to talk to say things that aren't particularly important. Any other kind of development needs to be shoehorned in carefully and discretely, or you risk ruining the pacing and turning your so-called game into a drawn-out melodramatic slideshow. Frankly, I think this is a trap that modern JRPGs have fallen into. Limitations have a funny way of making things cooler.

One thing Japanese does have that English doesn't which helps enliven short little RPG lines quite a lot is dialects and modes of speech that are easy to represent in written form. Without actually adding any whole extra words, it's easy to see if a character is a kooky old man, an air-headed teenage girl, a swashbuckling pirate, a "friend of Dorothy", a hardened boss, a polite servant, and more. In Japanese, it's all a matter of tweaking a few syllables.

In English, if you try to phonetically represent different styles of speaking, you quickly start toeing the line of annoying the reader. Chrono Cross's auto-dialect system was very ambitious, but it also gave us lines like "What'z zis? Non apologiez for bumping into moi? Ooh la lah, don't you know any mannerz?" To quote the blog where I found a screenshot of that line:

To repeat myself, dialect is hard to write properly. It is definitely not to be treated like some kind of textual garnish that you add by shoving your script into the Oi-Mate-O-Matic. Otherwise, you wind up with a big pile of what Chrono Cross is serving: Characters that are hard to relate to because their shitty “French” accents (or shitty Australian accents, or inexplicable dialogue quirks, or whatever) ping against your forehead like tiny pebbles.

For example, when you kill a boss in a Japanese video game. What does he say...in virtually every single f*cking game? Something like なんで。。。ばかよ！！！ in nearly every JRPG I've cleared in the original language. I think Dracula says it too. Bosses, to a man, never seem to see their end coming, and always have a hard time believing it when it does. You'd get sick of writing that over and over again in English because in the English speaking world it's highly encouraged to use as much variety in your speech as possible.

If terms of being an overly-used set phrase for that kind of occasion, the English equivalent of ばかな would have to be "Noooooo!!!!" By itself, it's mostly just an expletive.

It's definitely a thing in Japanese writing for the bad guy to have a death monologue featuring "For someone as strong as me to have lost to a puny little weakling like you...it doesn't make any sense!"

None of those in Xanadu I so far!

And yeah, keeping the language varied is just par for the course when you're doing translation into English. I frequently do text searches on my whole translation just to make sure I'm not over-using certain words and phrases.

The problem with Working Desgins was that their "humor" was for shit. An unfunny joke is less funny than just not having a joke in the first place. Jokes about TV shows and American presidents should be ruled out on subject matter alone when the setting is not a Leno monologue or your a$$hole uncle that thinks he's hilarious at Thanksgiving dinner.

OK, but people might think my humor is shit, too. They might prefer to keep the tone of the original, utilitarian lines about the weather and all. Again, I do find a charming simplicity in these old RPGs. "It's dangerous to go alone! Take this!" spells adventure for me. Adding a little dry sarcasm or whatever would tarnish the innocence of it.

My final thoughts on adding humor to the Xanadus is that I just might do it on occasion, but it would have to be things so slight and subtle that nobody would be able to guess that it wasn't in the original script.

[SamIAm]

Chapter 4 proofreading is done.

I had some unexpected free time and managed to get the first ~15% of Chapter 5 done. It would be great to get it finished off in December, but no bets on that one.

When this chapter is more like 50% finished, I'll be roughly halfway through the entire game. Of course, that's just making up the first draft, but that is one great big heavy step.

[SamIAm]

Chapter 5 is 50% done, and therefore the first draft of the entire game is 50% done.

Whenever it is that I do cross the finish line, I'm going to have to treat myself to something nice.

[esteban]

I am crying. The progress has been wonderful.