How would you fix the Suikoden series?

A place to post news and also give your ideas about the future of the Suikoden series.
Please justify all speculations with reasons why you think such an event could happen.
Antimatzist
Posts: 2770
Joined: Sat Apr 19, 2008 9:48 am
Location: Germany, yeah baby
Contact:

Re: How would you fix the Suikoden series?

Post by Antimatzist »

Neither II nor III have good translations, but considering that II's translation was done by a team with little information on what's actually going on in a very short timefram (Jeremy Blaustein, the head translator of the game, is still to this day angry about how it went down), it can be accepted. Especially considering that the PSX era was full of badly translated games and proper localization only started to become a focus of the developers.

Suikoden III, on the other hand, should have been handed way better. Instead, it's full of inconsistencies and I'd also argue that it's not better written (at least it uses less exclamation marks).

But a full retranslation of all games, sorting out all inconsistencies, would be something I'd love to see. They gradually got better with IV, though.
Heptade
Posts: 34
Joined: Thu Sep 29, 2016 10:57 am

Re: How would you fix the Suikoden series?

Post by Heptade »

Raww Le Klueze wrote:
Heptade wrote: The translation of S3 does have its issues and is by no means perfect, but to say that it is worse than S2's is just false.
Basically your whole argument is S3 has better syntax so it's translation must be better even though the English version doesn't actually reflect what the Japanese version said. Yeah, okay, whatever. All you're saying is that S3 English is better written but that has nothing to do with the quality of the actual translation of Japanese to English.
It's not just better syntax, it's better writing in every conceivable way. Better choice of words, better consistency within itself (nothing like Jowy/Joei or Gorudo/Gordeau), no untranslated parts, fewer incomprehensible dialogues (what does "forging an State with you" mean, anyway?), etc. I have taken a few Japanese lessons, and, even though I am still at beginner level and very far from fluent in the language, there are a few places in S2 where I could guess exactly what was written in the original version. That is not a good thing. A literal, word-for-word translation with no regard for language-exclusive expressions is a terrible translation. A good translation doesn't look like a translation and finds ways to adapt itself to another language, while retaining the meaning of the original work. S3 didn't do that very well either, and was full of mistakes ("It's been a while Sana, or should I say [Flame Champion]" was pretty confusing), but compared to the trainwreck that was S2's localisation, that below-average translation effort ALMOST seemed acceptable.

Both need a fix, though. We are very far from Charles Baudelaire's French translations of Edgar Allan Poe's works (I'm reading that right now, and it is amazing French-language prose and poetry by any standard).
Post Reply