This is an edited version of a blog post that originally appeared on 08/20/2006.
SegaGaga translation is coming along well. We’re currently handling the items, meaning the supplies that your character uses in the RPG portions. Some of them also work in the business sim parts too, though, and those are more difficult to handle.
I remember reading a Sony technical writer’s account of getting some VCR maintenance instructions into readable English. He had received a useless Japanese translation, filled with esoteric statements that convey nothing within the English language’s concrete epistemology. He wanted to do his job well, so he threw away the translation, took the VCR apart himself, and wrote the instructions from what he learned by disassembling and reassembling the machine.
That’s sometimes the sort of process that makes a translation great rather than tepid. You need to play it, even if you can’t dissect the programming code. That statement may seem obvious, but the play experience serves two purposes: (1) to understand the mechanics of the game, and (2) to get a feel for the game’s total personality. You’ll need to support that personality with your language choices.
In SegaGaga, I got as far as the end of the first R&D area. The business sim picked up thereafter, and I couldn’t work through that. I got through the RPG section well enough, because my experience with RPGs made the game intuitive. I talked to people, won random encounters, fought a few mid-bosses, had to search the environment for items, and so on. SegaGaga shouldn’t cause much trouble for a genre veteran.
The business sim part is trickier. I don’t know many precedents outside of maybe some niche markets. I’ll probably have to break down soon and plow through with an FAQ.
A lot of the item names are really entertaining (not to ignore the descriptions), and I hope we can fit all of them in. We’re much more limited with our space here, though. We have exactly eight characters to use for each item name, and maybe fewer in some cases. That hasn’t caused much trouble so far. I’ve had to draft our translations on graph paper to make sure I don’t overstep the number of allowable characters.
At the very least, the item names need to distinguish each item from the others, even if they only vary in one or two characters. When you can’t have coherent content, you can at least strive for coherent form.
As an example… two of the healing items are named Unker and Unker Star. (These are parodies of the real-life Yunker energy products in Japan.) The first name fits well enough, since U-N-K-E-R needs only five characters. “Unker Star” obviously won’t. You can write that as U-N-K-E-R-S-T-R, which contains technically correct information, or you can write U-N-K-E-R-+, which more readily communicates the relationship that this item has to the Unker item. Players can tell the relationship between the items at a glance. I’m compiling a translation FAQ document to distribute with the patch, so I can note where certain sacrifices were made in accuracy for accessibility’s sake.
Some of the items are pretty neat. For example:
(1) One of the weapons is a Spiritual Stick. In eight characters, it is a ZenStick. The item description reads, “The rod which a bonze uses to hit your shoulder during zazen meditation. A long, large wooden stick with the words ‘Infusing Spirit’ written on it. Very painful.”
This is the sort of thing that will justify a translation FAQ. This stick is instrumental in zazen meditation lore. Zen adepts will practice zazen meditation, and the bonze will hit them with the stick at unexpected moments. The experience is recorded as valuable, because the pain calls the adept to attention… which is one of the purposes of zazen meditation.
(2) A Hand-Knit Sweater. The item description reads, “A sweater knitted by a girlfriend. Every man’s dream. It garners defensive power from the feminine spirit infused within.”
(3) Armadillo Armor. The item description reads, “Fake armor. When you wear it, people avoid coming near you so no one will think they’re your friends. Maximum defense power.”
Apparently, the game uses the Japanese word for “dream” to refer to MP in the RPG segments. I could simply replace all references to “dream” with “MP,” but then some of the fun is lost. Some of the item descriptions pun off the word “dream.”
Take the Homo Ludens item as an example. It restores a slight amount of MP. The item description uses the “dream” idea cleverly, though. It reads: “A technical book. Recovers Dream. It’s not too realistic to dream, though, so it only recovers a little.”
That’s the sort of idiosyncratic humor that really makes SegaGaga what it is. I hope our character limitations don’t force us to sacrifice too much of its personality.
Something’s been brought to my attention in the introduction that merits consideration. When Sega’s CEO, Hitomajiri, explains the status of the videogame industry to the hero, he says: “The truth is that players have drifted away from videogames because of stagnation in the industry. We just haven’t seen the sort of revolutionary games that we once saw. To make the situation worse, corporate giants in the game industry insist on outdoing each other, so they release console hardware that isn’t compatible with their competitors’ hardware.”
That last sentence might strike some folks as a little weird. After all, we’re living in a real-world environment wherein console hardware has never been compatible with other companies’ hardware.
Why would Hitomajiri describe market competition as a problem?
We’re still talking about this, so the question’s out in the open. We might have to revise the translation if nothing seems satisfactory. We want to get this right.
Right now, I’m interpreting Hitomajiri’s statement in light of Japan’s technological history. I think that SegaGaga implies that corporate competition could also exist without hardware incompatibility. Japan saw a lot of success with the MSX computers, and those are neat because no single manufacturer owned “the MSX brand computer.” Some have said that the acronym stood for “Machines with Software eXchangeability,” which is a pretty good description.
MSX was a system standard that industrial competitors could make parts for. Competition still existed; Panasonic and Sony could still compete to produce the best 3.5″ floppy drive. The consumer would truly reap the benefits because he wouldn’t have to reconfigure the rest of his set-up for one addition. A Sony floppy drive would still work with a Panasonic motherboard.
I guess it’s similar to the current state of PCs, only the MSX system started out as a generally accepted standard, whereas the current non-Mac PC system started out as an “IBM-Compatible.” We’ve dropped the brand ownership of design, but we still have the general interchangeability.
And that’s really the question we’re dealing with: is Hitomajiri saying that the big name companies make hardware incompatible with their competitors’ software? Or is he saying that big name companies won’t make hardware according to an accepted industry standard?