airco · @airco_ki
24th Aug 2014 from TwitLonger
On Clannad and bad official translations
It was announced last night that Sekai Project would be bringing Clannad to Steam in English - I think that game's a pile of shit, but hey, that's pretty neat! It was also announced that they'd be basing their translation on the old Doki fan translation - that's also a pile of shit, which is significantly less neat. Why? If "Doki" isn't enough of red flag, have some samples of its translation: https://twitter.com/koestl/status/503410243293179905
If you're a native English speaker, odds are that you don't understand why those translations are bad unless you just take my word for it that they totally are. And that brings me to another problem: people who don't understand the source language (i.e. the people most interested in this game) depend on the translation for more than just understanding the story. A reader's ability to sympathize with characters, understand their motives, and laugh at the damn jokes depends solely on the ability of the translator to convey the story. If a translation fucks the delivery of a line up, the impact of that line is greatly weakened, which can make the story itself weaker as a whole if the scene is in any way important. If the translation gets the meaning of that line wrong entirely, it's even worse - on top of the delivery being ruined, but the reader is left with incorrect information that he or she will be unable to connect with the preceding or succeeding lines. In other words, the line just doesn't make sense. Maybe it doesn't stop the reader from being able to understand the gist of a story, but stories are more than just their gist - if they weren't, we'd just read their Wikipedia summaries instead.
What I find the most depressing about all this is not the lack of people who care - again, they don't know the source language, so I don't expect them to know better - but the fact that people are defending these translations. Take the reddit comment in https://twitter.com/highimpactsex/status/503511702487699457. He calls everything I just wrote "elitism" and argues that it's not necessary in respect to running a business. There's some truth to that - translating is kind of elitist by nature since it consists of people who know something the masses don't to provide something for them. But the way he adds "casuals" into the equation is pretty shortsighted. Casual visual novel readers probably aren't huge sticklers for translation quality, and that's fine. But they won't be able to tell the difference between a poorly translated story and a bad one, meaning a bad translation will make them think the story itself is bad. So let's think: if visual novels are being put on Steam to increase the chances of expanding the VN audience in the West, what effect will a badly translated one (especially for a VN as famous as Clannad!) have on the Western perception of the medium? If someone who's never played a visual novel before decides to pick up Clannad and is left with an unintelligible mess of a story, do you think that person will be likely to play any others? Will he look at the rest of Sekai Project's works on Steam, notice Sakura Spirit at the top of the list, and think visual novels are something worth buying more of?