Translation Failures

by Andy Church 

As a student of Japanese with some proficiency, I am in the perhaps uncommon situation of being able to play and understand both Japanese and English games. I purchased Final Fantasy VII about a month after its release in Japan, and (with some help from a dictionary, admittedly) thoroughly enjoyed it. After having heard that some changes and additions had been incorporated into the North American release, I was of course interested to see what they were.

What I was not prepared for was the absolutely horrid quality of the translation.

It does not even take a student of Japanese to find the more glaring errors. Things like "Off course! / No, way!" for the Battle Arena menu, or the "Initial equiping" descriptions of weapons like Cloud's Buster Sword. How could anyone in the fantasy world possibly misspell Tolkien's "mithril"? And I suspect many people were confused by quotes like "[The Temple] is way down south. It's right on the other side between this town and the inland sea." My brother had to ask me what it meant--and I could only answer because I knew from playing the Japanese version. I won't even go into the numerous instances of unnatural English, bad translations of original Japanese dialogue, or multiple occurrences of "#&*$@!" (just how do you pronounce that, anyway?) I saw while watching my brother play.

I frankly cannot believe that Square and Sony released a product of this low caliber. Any other company I can imagine would be profoundly embarrassed at the multitude of grammar and spelling errors, not to mention the often awkward sentences and unnatural dialogue. Yet, on the contrary, Sony is promoting Final Fantasy VII as one of their flagship products.

Am I the only one who places any importance on the quality of the text in an RPG? Is this an idiosyncrasy unique to me? Or, perhaps, has the North American role-playing market simply become too used to broken, second-rate translations to care anymore? This latter, if it is the case, would sadden me greatly. English speakers should not have to settle for a low-quality translation of a game written in another language. I do not place blame on Square for designing their RPGs for a Japanese audience; after all, they are based in Japan, and Ted Woolsey proved with his translation of Final Fantasy VI (North America's FFIII) that it is possible to translate a Japanese game into at least coherent English. (I have not seen FFVI Japanese, and can't comment on the quality of the translation itself.) What I do blame Square for is releasing a product which could hardly be called "finished."

To those who would say "If you see a problem, why don't you do something about it instead of complaining": I would gladly do something--if I could. Although I would be beyond pleased to be given an opportunity to help Square with translation, I am hardly in a position to grant myself that opportunity. As a simple university student, I can only try to bring attention to the problem so that those who are in a position to do something about it can.