Topic: The Do-It-Yourself Corner
Translation is not an easy business.
I've seen people on the Internet who seem convinced that there is a magic bullet, an almighty program capable of taking a game and rendering it into perfectly legible, natural English. I've seen people who seem to think that there is an infallible, one-for-one conversion between every word in Japanese and every word in English, and think that the humble "kuso"-which literally means "fecal matter" but can be considered a catch-all for any four-letter word from "darn" on up-must always, always be considered to mean the s-word. I've seen people who swear by translations that are full of untranslated words that are pure gibberish to English speakers and insist that any work that leaves out these precious honorifics and distinctly Japanese quirks of speech is inferior. And perhaps most maddening of all, I've encountered people who seem to regard translation from Japanese to English as a simple cryptogram game, that the entirety of the language can be rendered into perfectly comprehensible English by simple letter substitution. (All the previous ones can be attributed to pure ignorance, but that last one is bred of an annoying, arrogant assumption that all languages are ultimately related to or derived from English, or that English is the only "real" language and that all others are merely games derived by foriegn people to frustrate Westerners.)
Thank God none of the people following my work are like that. ^_^
So. Since you all seem to be sane, sensible people, or perhaps I'm just viewing my blog through rose-colored glasses (is that why the background looks purple to me? Just kidding there), I thought I'd share some pointers in case one of my readers has some obscure Japanese or otherwise foriegn-language title that nobody thought to release in their native tongue. I have only one request of my readers:
If that game is ever released in English or whatever language you speak, make sure you buy the legit version. The retrogaming features on the Nintendo Revolution have me excited: with games from every Nintendo platform as well as Sega and TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine titles slated to be represented, a whole lot of great, overlooked titles may very well be released on our shores. Like Mother 1 (a.k.a. Earthbound Zero), Castlevania: Rondo of Blood or Starfox 2, which was never officially released anywhere (find the full beta ROM and AGTP's translation patch; you'll forget Adventures and Assault ever happened!).
...Crimony. I've spent so much time on the setup that if I keep going, I won't have anything left to post about. Consider this a "to be continued" on the topic of Do-It-Yourself fan translations: I'll start off with the basics tomorrow!
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