duckroll said:
Matsuno's games generally have very normal dialogue as far as language level goes. There's no specific attempt to make the text sound olden or classical. Sometimes he uses more traditional/classical language when a ritual is being performed (like the wedding at the start of FFXII), or when there is a third party narrator who isn't an actual speaking character in the story. Otherwise it's just normal Japanese.
This is a good point; almost all of the language in the original FFT, VS, and FF12 is standard modern-ish Japanese, though people tend to be on the polite side, and women's speech is a shade more elegant and classy than people use nowadays.
For the Delita line in question, the Japanese text is literally "I'm sorry, but blame yourself or god" without any suggestion of high speech.
But would someone
say that in English? That particular line has probably become too famous for its own good, but in general the literal translations of the PSX game don't sound as natural and as colorful as the ones in WotL, even if they deviate from what was literally said in the original.
But I got the impression when playing these games that it wouldn't have been realistic for Matsuno to go for genuine old speech; in many cases Japanese was far too fragmented, dialect-wise, even 150 years ago for someone today to even be able to understand it. It's really only since WWII and the
hyojungo movement, which created a common language based on educated Tokyo speakers, that it's been possible to write something that any Japanese speaker can understand.
Had there been an intelligible-to-today's-speakers old-ish speech style that fit the game's world available, I think Matsuno would have gone for it.
I also think that the Japanese language suffers from people being unable to disassociate dialects of it from their real-world locations: we can listen to FF12's British/American split for Archadia/Dalmasca, and even listen to Halim Ondore speak with an Indian accent, and not be wrenched out of the game's milieu and into our own world. Japanese games rarely even try to do anything like this despite the wonderful variety of dialects that exist. Game producers are limited to boring NHK-television
hyojungo (standard language) plus a few selected stereotypes that are almost obnoxious when adhered to slavishly (dirty Kanto dialect for rambunctious boys, Kyushu dialect for men of power and learning; Osakan only for merchants and comedians; that kind of thing).
I'm hoping that Japanese culture can evolve out of being stuck "inside itself", so to speak, in this way.
So when translating these scripts, I see no problem in enhancing them so that they measure up to what original English literature would sound like if in a similar setting. Just because Japanese stereotypes/language tropes haven't opened up doesn't mean that English translators have to limit themselves.
I'm a professional translator, and I feel like my best translations are done for native English readers who don't have the hangups about colorful language or language that deviates from the original literally but gets the sense spot-on.
But this is really an argument for another thread -- just let me close by admitting my bias as an unabashed fan of the new AOS/Joseph Reeder style. I just love it too much.
The FFT PSP localization definitely tries way too hard.
It may be trying too hard, but the PS version
isn't trying at all.
Or it's "trying", but in another sense of the word "trying".
^_^;
