Many European language versions of anime and games are being localized not by translating the original Japanese, but the English.
Lots of translators also seem to use Google or DeepL, which makes the issue even worse.
The English language version often don’t even translate, they write their own version, calling it “creative liberty”. This leads to a completely different version than what was intended, with others, such as the German or Spanish version, being even further from the original.
That’s why claims of people of having “learnt Japanese from anime” are dubious in the best of cases.
Source: Am Japanese, working in game translation in Tokyo. I’m also trilingual, which makes it even worse to watch this. Ignorance is bliss.
Shout out to Banjo Kazooie, an older platformer from the Nintendo 64 game era, where the antagonist always speaks in silly rhymes. So the translators needed to translate and also make it rhyme while also keeping the context and humor intact. They took creative freedom of course because there simply isn’t a good match but it actually enhances the game in a way. So if you played the game in French before and now switch to English you’ll get a fresh set of jokes and rhymes.
Many European language versions of anime and games are being localized not by translating the original Japanese, but the English.
Lots of translators also seem to use Google or DeepL, which makes the issue even worse.
The English language version often don’t even translate, they write their own version, calling it “creative liberty”. This leads to a completely different version than what was intended, with others, such as the German or Spanish version, being even further from the original.
That’s why claims of people of having “learnt Japanese from anime” are dubious in the best of cases.
Source: Am Japanese, working in game translation in Tokyo. I’m also trilingual, which makes it even worse to watch this. Ignorance is bliss.
Shout out to Banjo Kazooie, an older platformer from the Nintendo 64 game era, where the antagonist always speaks in silly rhymes. So the translators needed to translate and also make it rhyme while also keeping the context and humor intact. They took creative freedom of course because there simply isn’t a good match but it actually enhances the game in a way. So if you played the game in French before and now switch to English you’ll get a fresh set of jokes and rhymes.
The flip side of this is the Samurai Pizza Cats, where they completely rewrote the dialogue to make the English version way more entertaining.