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Earthbound's original translator discusses project difficulties, little input from Itoi
A portion of a Wired interview with translator, Marcus Lindblom...
Wired: Could you talk about some of the difficulties you had in localizing EarthBound?
Lindblom: The biggest challenge we had in a lot of ways was how to handle the cultural references.
The thing that’s really weird about Earthbound is that I was trying to translate someone’s view of what the U.S. is like from the outside — someone who, obviously, isn’t American. I had to take an outsider’s view of the U.S. and turn it into something everybody here would play and understand. That was one of the more difficult things to do.
The other thing we did try to do — and we weren’t always 100 percent successful — was tone down a lot of the references to intellectual property. I didn’t really do anything with the music. The music was actually already pretty much done. But when it came to visual or textual references, we did definitely look at it and say “Okay, the artwork on the truck looks a little bit too much like the Coca-Cola logo, we need to change that.”
Then we had to take out the red crosses on the hospitals because we knew that was sort of questionable even at that time. They could come and say, you know, because there’s the actual organization The Red Cross who uses that as their symbol.
Wired: Did you ever have to consult with Mr. Itoi and ask if it was OK to change something?
Lindblom: No, actually, I never did. It was nice because it was a very accepting environment. The thing that did influence me to a degree was that I lived in Japan for four years in the late 80s. So I was really comfortable with and aware of a lot of things in Japanese culture. I had a goal of keeping as many things in as I could but there was not much time to get all the nuances. But even in Japanese, some of those subtleties were really hard to explain to other Japanese people. Because it was very intricately written in some ways.
But I think Itoi probably told the guys I worked with that if we had a choice between things, then just make it interesting.
Wired: So Mr. Itoi wasn’t really involved in the localization.
Lindblom: Nope. You know what, I never actually met him. Now he may have talked to Dan Owsen before I started on the translation work but I never did talk to Itoi myself.
Full interview here
Wired: Could you talk about some of the difficulties you had in localizing EarthBound?
Lindblom: The biggest challenge we had in a lot of ways was how to handle the cultural references.
The thing that’s really weird about Earthbound is that I was trying to translate someone’s view of what the U.S. is like from the outside — someone who, obviously, isn’t American. I had to take an outsider’s view of the U.S. and turn it into something everybody here would play and understand. That was one of the more difficult things to do.
The other thing we did try to do — and we weren’t always 100 percent successful — was tone down a lot of the references to intellectual property. I didn’t really do anything with the music. The music was actually already pretty much done. But when it came to visual or textual references, we did definitely look at it and say “Okay, the artwork on the truck looks a little bit too much like the Coca-Cola logo, we need to change that.”
Then we had to take out the red crosses on the hospitals because we knew that was sort of questionable even at that time. They could come and say, you know, because there’s the actual organization The Red Cross who uses that as their symbol.
Wired: Did you ever have to consult with Mr. Itoi and ask if it was OK to change something?
Lindblom: No, actually, I never did. It was nice because it was a very accepting environment. The thing that did influence me to a degree was that I lived in Japan for four years in the late 80s. So I was really comfortable with and aware of a lot of things in Japanese culture. I had a goal of keeping as many things in as I could but there was not much time to get all the nuances. But even in Japanese, some of those subtleties were really hard to explain to other Japanese people. Because it was very intricately written in some ways.
But I think Itoi probably told the guys I worked with that if we had a choice between things, then just make it interesting.
Wired: So Mr. Itoi wasn’t really involved in the localization.
Lindblom: Nope. You know what, I never actually met him. Now he may have talked to Dan Owsen before I started on the translation work but I never did talk to Itoi myself.