/vr/ - Retro Games

Meh. Whichever.

Aeris makes as much sense as Sephiros.

>>8110034
This. It literally does not matter. Japanese does not have inherent transliterations, and it's completely up to interpretation. The argument over this is autistic.

Just learned that the retranslation is made by an EOP and a N2-kun.

Lol at their lives. Why is it always people of inadequate skill who attempt to retranslate stuff?

>>8110026
see filename

Isn't Aeris the name of the greek goddess of concord? Like, the opposite of Eris, goddess of discord? As in A(nti)Eris?

Aeris is the original, and is closest to the Japanese Aerisu.
Fuck Aerith and the rest of the Compendium of FFVII shit.

>>8110094
Same as Eas being the closest to Japanese Aasu, right?

>>8110089
Eris is the goddess of strife, and you know Cloud’s last name.

>>8110097
No, don't be silly
There's an Aeris in Aerisu. There's not even an E in Aasu.

>>8110083
HAHAHA HOLY FUCKING SHIT

I don't think most people understand how incompetent you have to be to fail the N1. It's an embarrassment. I have to echo the same question: who are these people who have such misplaced confidence? It think this might be a coping mechanism for them. This is the paradigm the constant call for "more literal translations" has given us, and why I made sure I never, ever had to read another English translation ever again.

>>8110105
Aasu = Earth.

>>8110106
Here's an example from an old thread. Pretty well explained by the poster, actually.

>>8110116
"Gomen, Aerisu. Shou ga nai."

>>8110109
literally nothing alike

>>8110082
The second 't' in Barret is really hair-splitting in particular.

>>8110156
And yet that's how Japanese transliteration works.

>>8110161
Doesn't seem to work very well considering how much autistic bickering there is from nerds who are unhappy with the way things are.

>>8110116
Took me a while to remember this scene in English, but that's INCREDIBLY hilarious. These sorts of mistakes are some of my favorites. The original translation completely ignores context clues, so much so that you really have to wonder what conditions were like for the guys who worked on this game in '97. To purport to be doing a retranslation and not fix this is incredibly telling. The fact that they are even LOOKING at the original script while doing this is telling.

>>8110165
The only reason it doesn't work well is because fans of Japanese media fetishize the culture to such a degree that they all want to pretend they are experts at the language. And what better way to do that than to argue about insignificant, arbitrary name changes?

>>8110175
I agree 100%. They should have left it as Aeris in Western media instead of making name changes.

>>8110175
>you really have to wonder what conditions were like for the guys who worked on this game in '97

Maybe they didn't even have the actual game? For a famous game like FF7, you can probably look up the story behind the translation.

>>8110094
Japanese love to transliterate "su" as "th" in a lot of things, but honestly people who don't know english really shouldn't be the ones with the final say on what the correct english is. If you give them that control, your end result is retards arguing over whether Mazinger Z's tornado move should be called "Rust Hurricane" (obviously the correct choice) or "Lust Hurricane" (BECAUSE THE ORIGINAL DEVS SAID SO, OKAY?).

>>8110228
>the story behind the translation
it was in house. that's why there are so many oddities
not that i care. i really like some of them, like Helletic Hojo vs Heretic Hojo. i don't know what helletic means, but it's a great word to describe the boss

i won't lie, it amuses me that people squabble so much over aeris/aerith but just accept even more obvious square mistranslations like rydia (lydia) and kain (cain)

>>8110082
correct, but since the names have etymologies from religion and mythology, i feel like the best translation will stay as true to the etymology as possible

>>8110089
p sure tifa and aerith's names are from tifereth, the 6th sephiroth on the kabbalah tree of life

>>8110094
it's エアリス (earisu)

>>8110156
when "earth" (in english) is written in katakana it's rendered as アース (aasu)

>eops complaining about other eops’ translations
As usual.

don't care, her name is Ares

>cait sith

Who cares? He's going no matter WHAT you say.

>>8110967
Why not replace him with Reeve? Making a donut steel character seems absurd.

>>8110967
lol this is autistic as hell
yeah cait sith is silly and unrealistic but so is... well, everything about this game
cloud's sword probably weighs more than cloud does

what about Tseng? They changed it from Tson but that's not Japanese. What the fuck was his name meant to be? How the fuck do you even pronounce Tseng?

>>8111082
his name is cantonese chinese, it's 曾 (zeng)
the katakana ツォン (tson) was the closest approximation to the cantonese
tseng was just the romanization they went with

>>8110026
Phonetics implies Aeris was the original spelling, and not Aerith.
Same thing with Sephiroth; it's Sephiros in their respective country but the phonetic translation makes it TH.

>>8111234
sephiroth (sefirot) is what the 10 elements of the kabbalah tree of life are called

>>8110026
cait sith is not purnouced "kate sith" its "ket shee"
and her fucking name is AeriS

>>8111082
same as shang tsung, but seng.

>>8110083
To be fair N2 is still really good, more than enough to translate some baby game like FF.

>>8111241
ok, cool, but that isn't what the comment was about.

>>8111285
If one is an exceptionally decent N2 who has been exposed to plenty of source language texts (books, games) and has lived among Japanese people long enough to pick up and distinguish between subtle context clues and speech patterns, sure, maybe it is. But that's a big "if." The N2 still tests nothing but carefully curated Japanese. Hell, the same could be said for N1. I wouldn't trust 90% of N2s to translate an instructional pamphlet, let a lone a piece of creative fiction.

HAIL AERIS
HAIL DISCORDIA

>>8110268
Part of the reason the oddities work so well is because

A) the games already inherently have oddities (ex: characters with normal names like Rufus alongside not real but plausible names like Tifa, and totally fantastical shit like Sephiroth)

B) A lot of the real words are randomly assigned anyway. There's nothing about Hojo's transformation that justifies calling him "heretic" anything. It's just a word that has evil undertones the Japanese writers probably liked but the actual meaning of the word is irrelevant so bastardizing it doesn't do any actual harm to whether or not the game is understandable.

>>8111320
no offense but you realise most translators have never lived in japan, right?

>>8112017
engrish has blessed us with many things.
for instance, i don't think a single metroid player prefers Barrier Suit over Varia Suit

>>8112063
It definitely can help add mythos to what was otherwise a purely utilitarian description.

>>8110083
>Why is it always people of inadequate skill who attempt to retranslate stuff?
Because people of adequate skill just play the original.

>>8110175
>The original translation completely ignores context clues, so much so that you really have to wonder what conditions were like for the guys who worked on this game in '97.

Woolsey talked about how when he translated FF6, he played through the game once and then translated the script afterward, having to rely on his memory of what the context of anything actually was and just plain guessing at the context of lines he didn't remember/hadn't encountered. He said that when he played the translated game afterwards he facepalmed at several scenes he had mistranslated due to having guessed the context wrong.

FF7 was most likely done the same way.

Cloud is actually called Crowd. Just a little mistake they made.

>>8112032
You don't have to live in Japan to understand characterization and convey it well.

The most accurate way to convey Aerith's personality to an Amerifat is to make her a snarky queer egirl, but we're not ready to have that conversation because of politics.

>>8110116
Writer of that post here.

On a second pass, the line I suggested sounds a bit dire. She could also say something like “Oh, Cloud, don’t bother with him!” like as a kind of annoyed dismissal of Reno (whom she considers to just be a minor nuisance, hence the subtle humor). But the tone is difficult to convey. The gist of what I said is still right.

>>8112606
if you apply the L/Rs thing to everyone Barret is actually Ballet
and you should be sus if any character is called Rori...

>>8113171
you mean japanese doesn't have an R/L discrepancy? what a stunning observation, i'm sure we all learned something new just now

>>8112668
i got my N4 in 2019 but my country isn't having another JLPT until 2022 at the earliest, it's frustrating because i know i can get the N3 by now

>>8112668
You were right initially: it's more a firm command than a flippant dig at Reno. "Cloud, don't get involved with him!"

The original translator saw the line in a bubble and thought it meant "Don't worry about it/mind it!" which is a possible interpretation when the context is removed. If one had to place it into a hypothetical context, because it remains a firm command, he could have imagined this being used in a scene where Aeris was trying to motivate Cloud after a mistake he made, hence, "Don't let it get to you!"

>>8112623
>snarky queer egirl
I get all those except queer. Where does that come in to play in the original text?

>>8112668
The "dont let it get to you" isn't contextually without merit either. Shady looking guy darkening the doorway, the only apparent exit, and just leering is an implied threat just through body language. That could easily "get" to someone.

>>8113580
Ehh, I can see an argument being made for it, but it's clearly meant to be "don't get involved with him." Cloud starts walking toward Reno, Aeris notices Cloud is walking toward a man she has dealt with in the past whom she views with suspicion. It's just a case of not playing through the scene while translating and the two phrases both being acceptable translations out of context.

>>8113590
My interpretation was she was alerting Cloud to The fact that in spite of the attitude Reno doesn't need to be confronted. As in "Don't let it get to you (I know him/he does this all the time)."

>>8113612
I would be more convinced if the line was "don't let him get to you." As is, it looks more like (as I said above) a line that was assumed by the translator to be in the context of Aeris trying to cheer Cloud up/motivate him with some urgency.

>>8113197
Don’t bother with the jlpt. All a scam.

>>8113723
>>8113197
Not a scam if you want to be recognized professionally in any way. But you're half right: don't bother with the JLPT until N2, because that's the absolute lowest level that anyone will care about you receiving a certificate for.

As autistic as this guy is he's the only one who bothered to correct the incorrect music cues in the PC version so for that, he's got my respect.

>>8113171
>>8113197
I like to tell people that if you're not sure whether the Japanese is grasping at L or R, you're better off guessing L most of the time. Most pro translators seem to understand this, but this also tends to lead to the goofiest mistakes if left unchecked. "Meliadoul" from FFT should be "Méliador," neither version picked up on this.

>>8113360
>>8113580
>>8113631
Yeah, it was pretty understandable that the game's official translator goofed it, as it kind of requires a visual cue to get fully. On a more meta level, 構う probably wouldn't be the verb used there if the writer had actually meant "don't let Reno intimidate/goad you on a personal level," as 構う doesn't really carry that kind of charge. If you did want to say something like that, you could say: 挑発されちゃダメ, paying special attention to the passive inflection (され) as well. But this is veering more into factpinion territory.

>>8110026

>Aerith's surname comes from French singer Serge Gainsbourg

Oh that guy who sang songs about fucking his daughter... with his daughter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzYnJO6RAnA

>>8114159
>On a more meta level, 構う probably wouldn't be the verb used there if the writer had actually meant "don't let Reno intimidate/goad you on a personal level," as 構う doesn't really carry that kind of charge.
That's a great point too: it's just a weird thing to say once you know the context, and defending it once you do know kind of forces you to do backflips in logic. Not that anyone here is doing that; seems like there's a general consensus it's a dumb translation.

>>8114159
What fucks with translators is that the Japanese writers often will toss in orphaned references to things that don't have any in-context reason to be a reference. Like they'll start naming things after biblical characters or invoke classic literature but it's all in name only. There's no actual connection to the reference beyond plucking a name or word out and applying it to something completely different. Meaning that a translator has to not only transliterate the kana EXACTLY as intended to even have a chance at recognizing the reference, they have to also be an expert at random trivia to make the connection in the first place.

>>8114203
Definitely annoying, but I think the issue points to the conclusion that, as a translator of any kind of fiction, one should probably have a decent grasp of the literary canon. I realize how difficult finding the time to do that is, though.

>>8110026
There are both Russian and JAV models that look more like Tifa than the garbage we were given in the FF7 remake.

>>8114203
This is an issue with western stuff too. Shit like The Simpsons is incredibly painful for foreigners to translate without fucking anything up because of all the random pop culture references everywhere.

>>8114232
I don't believe you. I think you need to show evidence.

>>8112668
One can always refine their English phrasing, sure. That's not the real issue, the existing mistranslation is.

I'm just saying this cause often you see EOPs defend terrible mistranslations by saying a more-or-less literal corrent translation included with the post sounds stiff or something, when in reality it's there for explanatory purposes.

>>8112668
One can always refine their English phrasing, sure. That's not the real issue, the existing mistranslation is.

I'm just saying this cause often you see EOPs defend terrible mistranslations by saying a more-or-less literal correct translation included with the post sounds stiff or something, when in reality it's there for explanatory purposes.

>>8110106
>I don't think most people understand how incompetent you have to be to fail the N1

no, anon. most people don't understand this because most don't care. even fewer people are impressed by your pathetic weeb humble brag

>>8110967
>late in development
>when he appears as early as the first disc
>no logical reason to join the party
>he tells you he's joining no matter what...then you check his equipment and has Manipulate materia slotted in

what a brainlet lmao

>>8116282
You're in a thread about translation, retard. What's with all the people on this board coping so hard about not knowing Japanese that they have to come into threads and act like anyone gives a shit what they have to say? Or are you just always the same guy? Either way, seethe, dilate, etc.

>>8110026
I like Aeris but I guess they're both correct

>>8114189
Dangerously based.

>>8113569
I think what is meant here is that Aeris conforms to a certain character typology that would see its most immediate contemporary anglophone equivalent in a posited "snarky queer egirl" archetype. Actually being queer or an egirl isn't necessarily required to fulfill the conditions of the type in question.

>>8112063
>>8112078
There was a brief period where English players called the Morph Ball the "Maru Mari" as that was the name chosen in the NES manual. We'd have a very different world if Samus Aran went around in her Barrier Suit and used her iconic Round Ball power.

>>8112017
>It's just a word that has evil undertones the Japanese writers probably liked but the actual meaning of the word is irrelevant
Pour one out for my boy, scrapped level from Sonic 2 named Genocide City

>>8110026
The Retranslation Green Goblin/DLPB translation of Final Fantasy VII is notorious for being liberal and interpretative in its translation. It's to the point I think the original official translation is more faithful to the Japanese original than it is. Many people have discussed this here and can go through the examples more in depth than my memory allows at this point. I specifically remember it being contradictory, because it completely redoes the tone of Barret's dialogue, for instance, while still being very interpretative with the tone of other character's dialogue. (perhaps Cait Sith?) I don't think the notion Barrett's dialogue is more faithful to the original Japanese holds water because tone was considered there, too. Part of a translation is not just literally translating words but also appropriately communicating the tone taking into consideration the different language and culture you are interpreting it into. Making Barrett speak like an American Black person/Mr. T was appropriate.

More importantly it's not a serious translation that consults the Japanese original anyway. It uses the English translation as a base and makes adjustments. The original Japanese text was consulted, but a thorough translation would translate *from* it, like Tomato did with Mother 3 for instance. We'll never get this for Final Fantasy VII. The most serious people that care about accuracy truly are better off learning Japanese.

Also, the Steam translation is just the original English translation with some typo/grammar fixes and tweaks.

>>8117090
If you want an idea about what the original Japanese was like, the "found in translation" series for Final Fantasy VII does a good job at this.

I believe this is it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCeN2KjRHZk&list=PLsiJPoHlPqEEA07AKMQ2Hm2oRLiGkR_uJ&ab_channel=Kotaku

It turns out a lot more was lost in translation than most who even know that the original translation was flawed and made changes would first assume.

>>8113809
where were they? I only ever played the PC port (the first PC port) so never had the PSX one for comparison.

>>8117013
yeah. clearly I'm the one "seething" here.

>>8110175
>The only reason it doesn't work well is because fans of Japanese media fetishize the culture to such a degree that they all want to pretend they are experts at the language. And what better way to do that than to argue about insignificant, arbitrary name changes?

if we compare this to how wy8ne know their English education works in Japan, this makes sense.

>>8117061
Ah. Though technically, Aeris is a subversion. She and Tifa have the opposite personalities their character archetypes would lead the player to assume, with Tifa being the shy romantic and Aeris being streetwise and a little manipulative. Not what you'd expect from characters who are nominally a barehanded and a white mage. The entire game is built this way, in fact, always setting up traditional RPG cliches only to pull the rug out from under you once you've already settled into your assumptions. Cloud being an insecure dweeb who was one of the faceless mooks you'd spent the whole game beating up is the most famous example but one of my favorite moments of deliberate misdirection is when Cait Sith "dies" in the Temple of the Ancients and just shows up again with a new body. In a spiritual callback to games like FFIV, it implies that your characters aren't in any actual danger.

Unfortunately most of this flew over the heads of people who started with FFVII. Playing through the first six games, though, really hammers home how tactful VII was as screwing with you.

>>8117065
Being the old bastard I am, I will still once in a while revert to calling Bowser and Peach "King Koopa" and "Princess Toadstool."

>>8110026
It'll always be Aeris to me.

>>8117409
I still call him "Koopa". "Bowser" never felt right to me.

>>8110083
>Why is it always people of inadequate skill who attempt to retranslate stuff?
In my case it's because the official translation was so bad that even I could notice all sorts of glaring issues.

A big issue I have with most retranslations is that instead of focusing on the handful of lines that really were botched and don't make any sense at all, they instead focus on things that are more or less conveying the same thing but just not how THEY want it to be conveyed. It turns it into a vanity project rather than anything especially useful.

>>8110026
>most changes are optional
>except this one, for no reason
death to modders

If it were up to me I'd fuck with everyone by spelling it "Aerith" but having the actors pronounce it "Aeris" with the flimsy justification that the name is nebulously foreign.