YIKES. OOF. CRINGE. ZOINKS.
For too long we’ve had to put up with out-of-touch companies hiring cheap, WOKE translators that insert random crap into their translations.
Honestly, there’s no better way for a Japanese company to piss off its fans than to hire self-loathing translators / localizers who absolutely despise Japanese media in all shapes and forms, especially the source material that they are being paid to translate into another language.
As someone who cannot speak Japanese, it has become a recurring disappointment to come across games I wish to play, only to discover that their translations are completely botched or entirely subverted to push the agenda of the translators themselves.
It’s a problem that’s all to common, especially in the so called current year, honestly a legitimate localized release of a Japanese video game or anime is honestly a pipedream at this point as official localizers continue to push their own agendas into their work and freely abstract away from the source material because they deem it controversial or “problematic”.
A “hitlist” to name and shame would start with the likes of Katrina Leonoudakis, this pile of goddamn shit is among the worst that localization has to offer, rather than actually doing her job Katrina instead disregards the source material and goes off on her own path because she wishes to inject the anime and games that she translates with “quirky” and off script translations instead of the “bland and dull” text of the source material.
This slag worked on the re-release of Persona 4 Golden and Persona 3 Portable, so rest assured that SEGA, ATLUS and the whole Persona franchise has gone completely to shit because of these vermin. I guess that explains why Persona 3 Reload is pushing pride flags now.
Corporations hire cancer such as Katrina and then wonder why they end up losing a considerable amount of money simply due to consumer boycotting that have idea are taking place, they do not quality control their translators, of whom established individuals wouldn’t simply add unnecessary garbage into their own work to try and be funny or to circumvent problematic themes that they do not agree with personally.
These assholes spit in the face of actual fans and laugh, they genuinely do laugh as they abstract and articulately destroy the source material, which is where we get into our topics of today which is the HD Remastered release of Baten Kaitos 1 & 2 released on the Nintendo Switch.
Baten Kaitos 1 & 2 HD Remaster is a modernized rendition of the original JRPGs Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean and Baten Kaitos Origins which originally released during the early to mid 2000’s on the Nintendo GameCube.
There’s nothing better than reliving the past, especially if that past now has a sharpened HD quality to it, unless of course the modernized release suffers from localizer intervention which unfortunately the HD Remaster collection does.
Bless your soul Scratch Point Z.
This is another instance of a localizer subverting away from the source material because to them it’s deemed problematic and therefore should be removed, such as this line from the original that might be considered sexist and misogynistic.
To become the perfect wife you must listen and obey your husband’s every whim, unless you take a look at the original Japanese release.
So allegedly the original release was poorly translated from the get go, which is just adding salt in the wounds when you compare the above to how the very same scene and text is presented in the HD Remaster.
“Oof”, “yikes” and most certainly “cringe”, it seems some unhappy sap of shit decided to interject their own thoughts on the matter of this particular sentence, rather than actually retranslating the original text to be more accurate, they instead copied the incorrect translated original verbatim only to add in “yikes” lingo on the end as if to say that this particular piece of text is indeed problematic.
So a localizer decided to interject their own thoughts on an incorrect translation because the sentence is problematic and sexist, rather than actually doing their job and localizing the product.
Merely changing but a few words can make all the difference in meaning, which is why translations being accurate are entirely important to present the story and context as intended, or rather it’s just an easy opportunity for outsourced “translators” to do a bit of copy pasting as they farm some easy dollars for doing fuck all of a job.
