| stuff |
[Jul. 11th, 2009|08:23 pm] |
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| | suicidal | ] |
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| | Fact - Reborn | ] |
As far as I know, the ED6 translation isn't gonna go anywhere for quite a while. Don't bug me about it, bug floofy, and she opened a new site: http://www.swordbreaker.com/ed6/
I know as much as anybody. I spent enough months looking for a new hacker and flailing about on the script, so I'm done for now.
I've also given up fansubbing anime. Soul Eater was fun until I got the DMCA, everything else I did ended up failing due to lack of help from anyone else or the shitty fansub community as a whole.
My new project is Gundam Origin (http://eikouscans.wordpress.com/) and I probably won't be doing anything else for a while. My bank account is on empty, I have several hundred dollars in bills, no paycheck for a few weeks, and it seems like panic attacks are becoming a regular thing. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 11th, 2008|01:12 pm] |
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| |  complacent | ] |
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| | At The Drive In - Hourglass | ] |
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| randomness |
[Mar. 10th, 2008|08:21 am] |
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| |  tired | ] |
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| | Bad Religion - Lost Pilgrim | ] |
ED6 translation is chugging along (http://community.livejournal.com/ed6trans/). Within 4-6 weeks the prologue should finally be finished, then it just needs some QC and maybe we can release a teaser patch. I'm gonna make a preview video whenever the new text files get inserted.
School still sucks. I need a GPA above 3.0 to get into Nanza. Hopefully I can do it, but honestly, I'm not gonna waste every waking spare moment I have that isn't spent working and translating doing worthless homework. 50 trig problems every night? Uh, right. And what the fuck is up with these people in my theory class...
Work is... wow. We need some new part-timers that aren't friggin worthless. I have to work an extra shift just because the manager doesn't want to make the female part-timers do any real work. That's what I call good management. If I wasn't trying to friggin save money for Japan I'd quit.
Ah, well. Time to blast Mars Volta on the way to class... I'm trying to make a space landscape in photoshop. Will be sweet. o/ |
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| wtf |
[Mar. 2nd, 2008|12:24 am] |
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| |  exhausted | ] |
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| | Bad Religion - Punk Rock Song | ] |
;lkqnetl;ndvzjucbkldf
work and school sucks.
doing 200 lines a week of translation (which is already almost pushing it) I estimate it will take 3 years to finish.
ugh... |
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| ugh. |
[Dec. 9th, 2007|11:05 am] |
Okay. So I'm not a professional translator, and I don't pretend to be. I learned almost everything about Japanese on my own, through self-study, which is time-consuming and very difficult. I don't pretend to be a Japanese guru.
I haven't had the chance to take any college courses in Japanese yet. I'm still attending a community college (its cheap) until I can get a transfer degree, with which I'd like to study abroad.
I work part-time and attend school full time. I just got over the flu. Again. I'm terribly stressed over my grades and whether or not I'll be able to keep my job. My family doesn't help with my stress, rather, they do nothing but increase it. So I've started smoking again.
I'm horribly worried that I might flunk a class or two this semester. If that happens, I might be kicked out of my house. Again. Put that on top of the threat of losing my job within the month and you can see the position that I'm in. So I hope anyone reading will understand why I haven't exactly done any work on the translation in the past 4-5 months.
I apologize. When the SFC translation scene was still big, nobody was more annoying and upset than I when translations showed no or little progress over months and months.
This translation means more than just making a game into English. When you understand Japanese, you don't really give a shit about that. It's about finally going through with something to the end. Putting forward enough effort and sticking with what I started. It's a bit more personal to me.
Especially due to the whole recent fiasco invovling certain people who decided to stir up rediculous drama, I want to see this through. And now I'm late for work, because I had to get all of this out. I may write more later. |
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| テーマ |
[Jun. 30th, 2007|01:13 pm] |
FF7 is not fantasy. That much is obvious. FF7 is steampunk. The city of Midgar itself gives off a Roppongi/Shibuya-esque slum feel. With the big city Tokyo-style billboards and Japanese scribbled all over, assuming you're Japanese or are familiar with the culture, you can really get sucked in. Unfortunately, to an English speaker, it comes off as scribbles. Whee.
Midgar can be seen as an appropriation of what could happen when corporations are given too much power. Japan is hugely a consumer society, moreso than many other first world nations. The prospect of a single corporation rising to the top of the economic pyramid and controlling an entire city probably isn't entirely beyond their realm of possibility. The various culture references in the background only feed the sense of immersion that this city could possibly exist sometime in the near-future. But to gaijin, all that immersion is lost. All we see is fantasy.
There are a huge amount of issues touched on during the Shinra HQ scenes. Experiments on live animals, the devaluing of humans, the salaryman philosophy, greed (President Shinra has all the money in the world, but he still wants more - the Promised Land), retribution (Sephiroth's murder of Shinra), government expirements gone wrong (Jenova)... all this points towards Shinra as being the evil Big Brother. But much of this gets lost. I have no idea why. Maybe I was just blind to it when I was younger. Or, it could be the dialogue.
The dialogue in FF7 is strange. It's not quite speech, and not quite script, but some decent balance in between. It doesn't overuse dialogue markers, which is common for scripts, and gives them a more artistic feel. This can't be done in English. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 29th, 2007|04:05 am] |
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| | tired | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | 空の軌跡 the 3rd ミニOST - Cry For Me, Cry For You Opening Version | ] |
I didn't actually realize it before, but FF7's localization is a travesty. I've never seen a more racist depiction of a stereotype in a videogame before. For some reason, Barett needs to say "Yo" once every 30 seconds in FF7USA (hereafter referred to as 7us). His dialogue is filled with *&^%, or as I like to call it, "retardmarks", which either meant the translator was too fucking lazy to come up with a decent swear or it was meant to appear more risque than it actually is. The only time Barett swears in 7i (FF7 International) to the point of actually needing to bring attention to it is after Sector 7 gets destroyed and he believes Marlene (マリン) died. Then, all he says is こんちくしょう! three times. I will admit its difficult to determine in Japanese when swearing is appropriate, since their swears aren't as harsh as in English... But I guarunfuckingtee you "*&%^" is never appropriate. Adding in swears, not to mention ones you censor yourself is just retarded.
Speaking of retarded, that's what the editor must have been. It seems half the translations in 7us make perfect sense, and the other half were translated totally out of context and never fixed. I'm assuming two different people did it and they never bothered to sync up the script.
Not only that, but character's personalities were COMPLETELY changed. Tifa and Jessie are very affeminate, Aeris is NOT an airHEAD, and Barett isn't ghetto. Red XIII's intelligence is conveyed through his speech very well. In fact, the only one who really speaks with any sort of special inflection would be Wedge. He talks with っす, which I've seen localized into "dude" (a la Disgaia) for a surferboy type of speech, but I think if you're going that route "man" would a) be more accurate (more people talk like that) and b) doesn't sound dumb; I've also seen it as "yo" (still probably better than 'dude').
Some stuff:
Shinra (神羅): The first character (shin) deals with 'god', and the second is used in 'splendor', and also the native writing of 'Rome'. This carries several implications that don't get carried over with a direct... well, romanization.
Mako/Makou (魔晄) 'ma' is generally associated with evil and magic, and the second character 'kou' is an alternate kanji for use with 'akiraka', meaning 'obvious' (the common kanji 明 is associated with 'bright' as well). From this we can derive a meaning that is obvious to anyone who has played FF7... Men from Soldier are infused with Makou energy, and their eyes emit a glow. As Shinga says, "Who would trust a product with the name makou?"
Anyway, once you take into account all the meanings of these obviously thoughtfully-concieved names, a new level of understanding opens up.
Some other stuff that is missed in 7us:
男男男 (Otoko otoko otoko, Men Men Men) is the name of the Gym in Wall Market. Cloud doesn't know at first that the woman you talk to is a man. In fact, his speech is pretty proper and affeminate, but the bodybuilders call him 'aniki' (a term used in gangs and the like by underlings, it literally means older brother, but its usually translated as "big bro"... In the west we just say boss. Does nobody know this?). Anyway, the dialogue goes, "Are you..." "THE beautiful bro?" which makes no sense. One of the bodybuilders says 'kawaii aniki', which I suppose they decided to translate as 'beautiful bro', except the underling doesn't say anything like that in 7us... so when Aeris re-mentions that phrase, it's because she's surprised that the woman you're talking to is a male. As I mentioned, he speaks affeminately in Japanese. In 7us, he speaks more or less masculine. Granted, there are no dialogue markers in English like in Japanese, but the graphics aren't good enough to show detail, so in this case you're relying on his speech to tell you what sex he is. The fact that the 'aniki' is not really female is just something else that gets lost in this poor translation. Anyway, when Aeris says 'beautiful bro', its the first time you see it--but the way it's used implies that its some kind of street alias that Aeris has heard before (making the player confused in the process), which is not the case. It's not a huge deal, but it makes an extremely simple situation unnecessarily complicated just because two lines of dialogue don't sync up. Which is why I believe multiple people worked on the translation and one worked out of context and one just doesn't know what the fuck he was doing.
And there's so much more... |
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