Now that we've all cooled down... (SPOILERS), It's time to whine about the translation. Options

[Rhiannon]

I usually don't complain about translations, because I have nothing worthwhile to complain about. In this situation, I do. And I know I'm not the only one who was disappointed in Yggdra Union's translation. There were countless typos scattered throughout (often in very noticeable places. YGGDRAR ANYONE?), and a lot of stupid decisions. I want to complain mostly about the decisions.

First of all, the stupid switching of Ankh and Ankh Cannon that they aren't even consistent with. Roswell just calls them Ankhs until a certain point, where everyone suddenly decides to call them Ankh Cannons. The Ankh Cannon is Eudy's invention. Something with both Ankhs and a little bit of improvement courtesy of her knowledge of cannons, thus Ankh Cannon. But no, now Eudy's invention is just an Ankh, and the objects that were fought over in Verlaine Hills are now Ankh Cannons. Does this make even the slightest bit of sense? Because I'm not seeing it.

Second of all, the event banner things. In the Japanese version, we had some text in English and some text in Japanese. In about only half of the cases, what they said was basically the same thing. In the English version, we only get English text. We only get what they translated the Japanese as. Any English text, no matter what it says in comparison to the Japanese, was simply removed. Here's one example that just sounds silly:


The kanji was translated correctly, yeah, sure, that's nice. But in the English version, we miss half of what these banners say. That's stupid. You may think "oh, well it's not a big deal anyway right," but you're wrong. There is one (probably more, actually) case where you actually completely miss out on something important to the story because of this. I'll get to that later, though.

This change also makes some scenes seem so heartless and cold. An example of that would be in BF42. When Kylier sacrifices herself to destroy the Ankh Cannon (Oh, sorry, I meant Ankh). In the Japanese version, it said "Death in exchange for hope." That's actually a reference to Riviera, by the way. In the English version, all we get is "SACRIFICE"... It might just be me, but it feels like it's depreciating Kylier's actions. Making it seem like it was all for nothing. Considering the gameplay part before that, you also need something to show you that it is meant to be a situation where everyone is losing hope. We don't have that in the English version. How cold.

And now, the example I mentioned earlier about how you completely miss some of the story.


... See what I mean? It's no wonder people who only played the English version tend to think that Nessiah will just reincarnate again. They're victims of a poor decision.

The chage of Make Doll to Doll Craft was pretty stupid. Make Doll doesn't sound pretty, but at least it made sense grammatically. If they wanted to make it sound pretty so badly, they should have made it Craft Doll or something. You know, something that makes sense.

It would also have been nice for them to translate certain things how they did in Riviera, to keep all of the references in (Mizer/Mizel, Kylier/Kirie, Kokorinut/Applecot, etc.).

[P.P.A.]