Sunday, August 27, 2017

Let's Talk Designs! +Otome Game Translations

Hello! Welcome back to another post! With this post I'll be talking about English translated otome games. Though it's not necessarily what you think. (Unless you do know, then congrats to you.) The thing that actually made me want to talk about this was because of two things. The first thing being that the new R18 otome game came out on Steam this week called "Les Fleursword", which is only $1.99. But I've read reviews on it and saw how people felt about the poor English translation of it, since it is originally a Chinese otome. The second reason was because I found a poll about this on twitter. It asked how people felt about an otome game if it was like that. So that is why I decided to make a post about it! Though besides those two reasons onto why. Then I'll also say that it's not uncommon to see these things in the otome fandom, that fans talk about. But let's get started! 

I honestly actually don't really see a lot of people who don't really care about poor translation or anything of the sort. I guess the people who just tend to not like it seem more vocal. Though I do like to say there are two ways to make/have a poor translation. The first way I'd like to point out is probably the most common one, or I guess the one you end up reading/seeing the most of. The one is just words not being in the right order or typos or grammar or just things like that. I don't think I really need to go into a lot of detail on this one, but this is the one people probably see and talk about a lot. The other one I'm going to talk about is something I feel you can only see/read about if you are in that or a certain fandom. Though who knows. Even if you aren't you could see it probably.

This next one doesn't have anything to really do with grammar or anything like that. But it's more like how the company is translating it. By this I mean them translating a person (or people) wrongly. This mostly happens mangas and/or light novels that get an English translation. I haven't really seen this one when it comes to games, though please do tell me if there are some games like this. What I mean though by this is that the Japanese manga/light novel could have the character(s) like how they always are (or super close to it (but of course somethings like this are an exception)), but when a translation company gets the licences to translate it then they translate that character wrongly. They do that since sometimes they think that is better to address them like that to the western, so we understand it better. (Or along those lines.) I don't really understand how doing that is better or anything though. That is technically called censoring, and miss use of the rights given to you.

It is also disrespect to the original person of it. Also to completely throw of a character on what the fandom is used to or know of is also bad. It's also bad for the new fans who might read those first, if the game is in Japanese and they don't know Japanese, or that language. So they will be introduced to that character differently and wrongly. Not only that but if there are different people working on their own story for that game (so they all have the same origin but different projects to write about) then it would make sense for certain characters to not always be connected to the other stories. But they would still make that same character or characters at the same in those other ones, so we can be 'reminded'/'familiar' with them. Honestly when it comes to poor translating this is the only one I care about. I don't even care about the first one. This is the one I care most about, since it enrages me so. I also meant to do a post about this one in particular, so I might make a full post just about this, but...

We'll see! But I'll end this post for now. I feel like I could still talk about it a lot, so I might make a part two. Though please comment down your opinions down below! Or else talk to you guys later!

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