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croptoptuxI'm only 60% sure I did this speech on Tumblr before, and it's not archived on my regular blog, so I should probably type it up before Discord decides to deep six chat logs.
One of the fandoms that I've been most fervent about lately is the Trails series of video games. In order not to confuse it with hiking, I'll likely be using the tag "kiseki series" instead. Each of these video games is a turn-based JRPG with the text volume of a visual novel. For numbers' sake, the average word count on these games is in the ballpark of 1.6 million Japanese characters (moji), with the shortest game being Trails of Cold Steel II at 1,186,534 characters for the base story, and the longest being Trails of Cold Steel IV with 2,541,725. The average paperback novel has 1500 to 2000 moji per page. 1.6 million moji turns into about 1100 pages of script. These games want you to do every side quest, talk to every NPC, and smell every rose. They go out of their way to really make the world feel lived in.
The problem is that this series has been through at least three sets of hands. XSeed handled games 1-3, 6 and 7; a fan group handled games 4-5, who then had the fortune of their translation being purchased by NISA, who have since released an edited version of games 4-5, as well as games 8-13. GungHo Online Entertainment has taken the reboot of the first game, but that hasn't come out yet, so I can't bash them for glossary violations prematurely (I can feel it coming. They already messed up Schera's moniker, 銀閃, in their marketing materials).
I'm quite peeved with NISA at the moment. While they may have acquired the series bible from XSeed by poaching all their vendors, they have made some really dumb decisions. Some of this stuff is unfortunately grandfathered in. I will still complain about it.
Today's lecture focuses on the color blue. The three blues in question are 青蒼碧. This website (JP) has a nice breakdown of their usages in modern Japanese, but they don't quite apply here. The very first issue with ao is that it's not actually "blue". These all have both blue and green use cases. 青 is the blue of the sky on a sunny day, and the green of new vegetation (and a certain black coat on a horse). 蒼 is a pale color, for ether, grey-blue or green, like a rough sea in winter. 碧 is a crystalline color like jade.
Each one of these characters has a restricted use case. 青 is the default version of blue in OUR universe IRL so it doesn't come up readily in the script as a stand alone color (thanks, Trails in the Database~!). It's more part of set phrases. I find it very fitting that the default version of blue in the Trails universe is actually something else, 蒼. 蒼 is also used in the precious stone utilized as a manageable resource, 蒼耀石 sapphirl (used for water magic). The problem arises when people start using 蒼 in their epitaphs.
The Gralsritter introduced in Trails to Azure has had his title revised at least twice. The Geofront translation used "Blue Testament", and the NISA translation, I believe, used "Azure Testament". Neither of these is correct. They need to pull a better crayon color out of the box. Honestly, I'd be perfectly content to see 蒼 as "Cerulean" or "Sapphire". It's mentioned this knight of the church got his title from their squadron leader. The squadron leader wrote a whole heist novella as church propaganda, where her self-insert OC is code named "Carnelia". Carnelia is conveniently the same word as the crystal resource imbued with fire, 紅耀石, so giving him a bejeweled title would make sense.
On the other hand, the Azure Knight, and Abyss/Diva come up in game 6, which happens contemporaneously with game 4, in a different country country. The woman whose title is the Azure Abyss (a witch) is hiding in plain sight, and uses the Azure Diva persona (an opera singer) as one of her many cover identities. It is thanks to her meddling that another character awakens a copyright-friendly Gundam--the blue one, no less. Having a consistency through all of those would make perfect sense. Since the localization teams did try to make each of the Deus-Excellon have a nice Latin-derived crayon color--Vermilion, Palatinate, Argent, Auric, Ebon--I'd argue for "Cerulean" is more fitting here.
Tangentially: I don't like "Valimar, the Ashen Knight". The color "grey" in Japanese. 灰色, is literally "ash"+"color", so this reads overly literal to me. There has to be better a better crayon color for it. "Cinereous" may be more apt. Yes, I've clearly thought about this too much.
Something I'm hoping gets slightly amended in the forthcoming Trails in the Sky remake is the nomenclature around the Tetracyclic Towers. In the first round, I'm not sure that Falcom was intending for the Trails universe to be as expansive as it is, so they probably didn't name the towers after the different resource crystals on purpose, but the XSeed localization team decided to hyper correct. In order of appearance, we had the:
For a game series where consistency between entries is more dire than any other franchise I've encountered, this kind of oversight really makes me disappointed.
One of the fandoms that I've been most fervent about lately is the Trails series of video games. In order not to confuse it with hiking, I'll likely be using the tag "kiseki series" instead. Each of these video games is a turn-based JRPG with the text volume of a visual novel. For numbers' sake, the average word count on these games is in the ballpark of 1.6 million Japanese characters (moji), with the shortest game being Trails of Cold Steel II at 1,186,534 characters for the base story, and the longest being Trails of Cold Steel IV with 2,541,725. The average paperback novel has 1500 to 2000 moji per page. 1.6 million moji turns into about 1100 pages of script. These games want you to do every side quest, talk to every NPC, and smell every rose. They go out of their way to really make the world feel lived in.
The problem is that this series has been through at least three sets of hands. XSeed handled games 1-3, 6 and 7; a fan group handled games 4-5, who then had the fortune of their translation being purchased by NISA, who have since released an edited version of games 4-5, as well as games 8-13. GungHo Online Entertainment has taken the reboot of the first game, but that hasn't come out yet, so I can't bash them for glossary violations prematurely (I can feel it coming. They already messed up Schera's moniker, 銀閃, in their marketing materials).
I'm quite peeved with NISA at the moment. While they may have acquired the series bible from XSeed by poaching all their vendors, they have made some really dumb decisions. Some of this stuff is unfortunately grandfathered in. I will still complain about it.
Today's lecture focuses on the color blue. The three blues in question are 青蒼碧. This website (JP) has a nice breakdown of their usages in modern Japanese, but they don't quite apply here. The very first issue with ao is that it's not actually "blue". These all have both blue and green use cases. 青 is the blue of the sky on a sunny day, and the green of new vegetation (and a certain black coat on a horse). 蒼 is a pale color, for ether, grey-blue or green, like a rough sea in winter. 碧 is a crystalline color like jade.
Each one of these characters has a restricted use case. 青 is the default version of blue in OUR universe IRL so it doesn't come up readily in the script as a stand alone color (thanks, Trails in the Database~!). It's more part of set phrases. I find it very fitting that the default version of blue in the Trails universe is actually something else, 蒼. 蒼 is also used in the precious stone utilized as a manageable resource, 蒼耀石 sapphirl (used for water magic). The problem arises when people start using 蒼 in their epitaphs.
- 蒼の聖典 The Blue Testament
- 蒼の深淵 The Azure Abyss
- 蒼の騎神 The Azure Knight
- 蒼の歌姫 The Azure Diva
The Gralsritter introduced in Trails to Azure has had his title revised at least twice. The Geofront translation used "Blue Testament", and the NISA translation, I believe, used "Azure Testament". Neither of these is correct. They need to pull a better crayon color out of the box. Honestly, I'd be perfectly content to see 蒼 as "Cerulean" or "Sapphire". It's mentioned this knight of the church got his title from their squadron leader. The squadron leader wrote a whole heist novella as church propaganda, where her self-insert OC is code named "Carnelia". Carnelia is conveniently the same word as the crystal resource imbued with fire, 紅耀石, so giving him a bejeweled title would make sense.
On the other hand, the Azure Knight, and Abyss/Diva come up in game 6, which happens contemporaneously with game 4, in a different country country. The woman whose title is the Azure Abyss (a witch) is hiding in plain sight, and uses the Azure Diva persona (an opera singer) as one of her many cover identities. It is thanks to her meddling that another character awakens a copyright-friendly Gundam--the blue one, no less. Having a consistency through all of those would make perfect sense. Since the localization teams did try to make each of the Deus-Excellon have a nice Latin-derived crayon color--Vermilion, Palatinate, Argent, Auric, Ebon--I'd argue for "Cerulean" is more fitting here.
Tangentially: I don't like "Valimar, the Ashen Knight". The color "grey" in Japanese. 灰色, is literally "ash"+"color", so this reads overly literal to me. There has to be better a better crayon color for it. "Cinereous" may be more apt. Yes, I've clearly thought about this too much.
Something I'm hoping gets slightly amended in the forthcoming Trails in the Sky remake is the nomenclature around the Tetracyclic Towers. In the first round, I'm not sure that Falcom was intending for the Trails universe to be as expansive as it is, so they probably didn't name the towers after the different resource crystals on purpose, but the XSeed localization team decided to hyper correct. In order of appearance, we had the:
- Esmelas Tower 翡翠の塔
- Amberl Tower 琥珀の塔
- Sapphirl Tower 紺碧の塔
- Carnelia Tower 紅蓮の塔
- 琥耀石 amberl
- 蒼耀石 sapphirl
- 紅耀石 carnelia
- 翠耀石 esmelas
For a game series where consistency between entries is more dire than any other franchise I've encountered, this kind of oversight really makes me disappointed.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-01 08:39 pm (UTC)Ashen as a colour always sounded a bit off, like ashen grey I would say is a colour, but I would not use ashen by itself.
I've been following Hatsuu (I think they lead the localization for XSeed) for a long time on twitter. I remember NISA taking over was quite a shock.
Also kinda worried how the *new* translation will go. Especially since you said they are heading 'literal'. But yeah TITS1 was so charming! And how so many people like Estelle was obviously influenced by their work on the first one. Like would we get 'ultraviolence' if they're going to have every single teehee said instead? (idk if Estelle says teehee, but there were so many in Cold Steel 3, from the change in charge.)
Just makes one wonder if they're trying to pander to the loudmouths who hate on the official english translation as 'fanfiction' 😔
no subject
Date: 2025-05-01 11:18 pm (UTC)I can't say for sure how XSeed did things, but I suspect that they either had greater QA or more extensive manual labor go into that script.
The way localization works nowadays is trying to remove as much of the human element of communication as possible from the task. With the propagation of machine translation, it allows companies to not only save significant labor costs, but also cut down on the number of laborers in the first place by treating the Translation step of a workflow as not nearly as business critical is it is, in theory, so the later steps can work on the quality assurance part of editing. But the fundamental flaw in this methodology is the underlying theory of the case revolves around translation as a decryption exercise, not a creative writing exercise. Every linguist I've ever spoken with has told me a shitty base translation cannot be salvaged with mere editing.
The XSeed translation takes a TON of liberties. Estelle actually has a "dattebayo" (あ、あんですって～！？ back trans. "Wha'd you say?!") and that got completely edited out in English.
"Time for ultra violence" is entirely ad libbed.
Olivier's offhand reference to a Heimdallr cat named "Mr. Tiddles" is something that got thrown in as a one-off joke, and had to get reconciled later in Cold Steel 1. It's a small miracle they were able to make that work in the first place. If you go back into the script, the cat's name is just ボス "Boss".
And we all know about the "this chest is empty" messages.
The people screaming about "literal" translation are the same schmucks who have the audacity to tell language industry professionals how to do their jobs just because they got baby's first 100 on their hiragana test. They drive me crazy. I'm not going to go "in this essay I will..." but I absolutely can. I have dedicated over a decade of my life trying to level grind this skill just so I can make more informed commentary. I have so many feelings about translation and I'm always happy to share. 😊
In general, I don't consider most criticism credible if the critic can't provide reasonable defense for it. What's wrong? On what technicality do you believe it is wrong? What is your proposed replacement? If a commentator cannot answer those three questions, their two cents is just clout seeking behavior.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-03 06:04 pm (UTC)Yep I follow well quite a few people from tumblr to twitter who learned Japanese, and so I know all about the perils of machine translation. You always hear it's more of an art than a science, and I agree.
Also it's the BS problem, it takes 10x effort to quash misinformation than to spread it. So when someone pastes a single line and the machine takes a wild interpretation, it spreads. (I looked it up it's Brandolini's law)
Like in my main fandom : Owari no Seraph/Serpah of the End. It has owari in it, so a lot of the time stuff becomes final in MTL. So there has been panics over "the manga is ending?!111" even though it's obviously the machine not linking the right parts together when the author makes posts with the title in it on twitter. (and anyone that does know the language has pretty much left since the grass is much greener everywhere else)
(-_-);; Yeah those people drive me crazy too. The dumb mob mentality doesn't help either, and how they pile on if someone tips their boat or they decide to go on the attack.
Like obviously if every language was 1:1 we would have easy translations already everywhere, not just in video games.