Adventures in Badly-Translated Japanese Video Games
By Dr. Eleanor Vance | Published on January 01, 0001
Demian Smith had the (mis)fortune to get a job working as a translator on the very first Yakuza game for the PS2. If you haven’t played it, know that for a game set in Japan and called Yakuza, it wasn’t that Japanese. Instead, h25 com สล็อต Sega decided that, to try and sell the brawler to the Western market, it would thoroughly localise the title, bringing in big-name voice actors like Michael Madsen, Rachael Leigh Cook and Mark Hamill (though only later, once the initial voice work done in Japan was deemed “unsuitable”). The publisher also figured it would be a good idea to, when localising the dialogue, try and make things a little less “alien” to Western minds, who were brought up thinking mobsters were Italians in black cars, not Japanese guys with amazing tattoos. I recall one meeting concerning how to translate terms used in the hierarchy, like oyabun, wakaishu, chinpira, etc. Personally, I wanted to keep it all in Japanese, but SEGA insisted that it all had to be in English. I first I suggested, half jokingly, we use the mafia equivalents. They actually considered it for a while… Luckily, that got vetoed, and a straight-up translation of the ranks, like brother for aniki and henchman for kobun, was used. The end product, in my opinion, was generic and less authentic. So Smith,
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