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Aksys discusses the challenges of localizing visual novels
A portion of a GamerTell interview with Aksys Editor and Translator Ben Bateman and Nobara Nakayama...
GamerTell: With so much text, I’d imagine translating 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward was more like translating a book rather than a game. What kind of challenges come from such intensive projects and does it influence the way you tackle the translation/localization process?
Bateman: The biggest challenge is keeping everything straight, especially with something like 999 or VLR that has branching paths. When Sigma and Alice exchange a few lines here, has he learned about her past yet? Even if they don’t explicitly mention it, that knowledge could affect their word choice, or their attitudes. Fortunately, most of the broad logic has already been dealt with by the development team, who would have struggled with the same thing, but there will still be plenty of times where specific word choice in English will need to reflect whether a character knows something or not, and that means we have to trace their path backward a bit, which can get tricky.
VLR has a large, interesting cast, and their characters make up a good chunk of why people want to read the story—or at least they should. For projects like this, before I start editing I write up a document that lays out some characterization details for each person. In VLR, for instance, for each character I solicited character descriptions from our translators (since they’d played the game and I couldn’t), and then wrote up my own thoughts on characterization, agenda, secrets, and who I imagined them sounding/acting like in my head. Dio, for instance, I described as “Asshole version of Ben Browder, a bro,” while I imagined K as a cross between Grissom from CSI and a sort of zen C-3P0.
For 999, I’m not gonna lie: I was in a huge hurry and pretty much did everything on the fly. Exhilarating! The challenge was getting everything done on time. Other challenges kind of had to take a back seat.
Nakayama: (Spoiler alert) For a title like this where narrative is such a key element to the actual gameplay, the challenge is your battle against time. [Kotako] Uchikoshi’s writing has so many twists and turns, you pretty much need to know the stories in and out. So the challenge is to find a way to play the whole game, understand how everything works, and then tackle localization.
For 999, I played a good chunk of it before I started to localize and the process was very smooth. But I remember the moment I finished the game I was more than half way through translating, and I saw the big ending about door 9. The plot was a Japanese pun! I remember the minute I saw that I thought FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF and I got up, looked at Ben, and said, “Uh oh…”
Ben’s eyes grew wide and I remember saying, “We have to talk.” And we halted localization and had to put our brains together to make it work. After we figured it out, we contacted Uchikoshi immediately and had to discuss how to go about it.
Because of the pun ending, we had to look throughout the whole game to make sure it all made sense.
For VLR, the challenge was to be able to catch the little hints the game gave where it had the characters coming in and out of a different time zone. Since that plot is revealed towards the end of the game, we had to make sure we caught those subtle hints.
Full interview here
GamerTell: With so much text, I’d imagine translating 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward was more like translating a book rather than a game. What kind of challenges come from such intensive projects and does it influence the way you tackle the translation/localization process?
Bateman: The biggest challenge is keeping everything straight, especially with something like 999 or VLR that has branching paths. When Sigma and Alice exchange a few lines here, has he learned about her past yet? Even if they don’t explicitly mention it, that knowledge could affect their word choice, or their attitudes. Fortunately, most of the broad logic has already been dealt with by the development team, who would have struggled with the same thing, but there will still be plenty of times where specific word choice in English will need to reflect whether a character knows something or not, and that means we have to trace their path backward a bit, which can get tricky.
VLR has a large, interesting cast, and their characters make up a good chunk of why people want to read the story—or at least they should. For projects like this, before I start editing I write up a document that lays out some characterization details for each person. In VLR, for instance, for each character I solicited character descriptions from our translators (since they’d played the game and I couldn’t), and then wrote up my own thoughts on characterization, agenda, secrets, and who I imagined them sounding/acting like in my head. Dio, for instance, I described as “Asshole version of Ben Browder, a bro,” while I imagined K as a cross between Grissom from CSI and a sort of zen C-3P0.
For 999, I’m not gonna lie: I was in a huge hurry and pretty much did everything on the fly. Exhilarating! The challenge was getting everything done on time. Other challenges kind of had to take a back seat.
Nakayama: (Spoiler alert) For a title like this where narrative is such a key element to the actual gameplay, the challenge is your battle against time. [Kotako] Uchikoshi’s writing has so many twists and turns, you pretty much need to know the stories in and out. So the challenge is to find a way to play the whole game, understand how everything works, and then tackle localization.
For 999, I played a good chunk of it before I started to localize and the process was very smooth. But I remember the moment I finished the game I was more than half way through translating, and I saw the big ending about door 9. The plot was a Japanese pun! I remember the minute I saw that I thought FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF and I got up, looked at Ben, and said, “Uh oh…”
Ben’s eyes grew wide and I remember saying, “We have to talk.” And we halted localization and had to put our brains together to make it work. After we figured it out, we contacted Uchikoshi immediately and had to discuss how to go about it.
Because of the pun ending, we had to look throughout the whole game to make sure it all made sense.
For VLR, the challenge was to be able to catch the little hints the game gave where it had the characters coming in and out of a different time zone. Since that plot is revealed towards the end of the game, we had to make sure we caught those subtle hints.