Ni no Kuni

[takenoko]

At a glance review

So if you've been listening to me for a while, you know that I love Ghibli, but feel like the linguist inside of me gets punched when dealing with the localizations.

Ni no Kuni is a very pretty game that I have been hyped on for quite a while. But the English subtitles sucks.

Ni no Kuni supports subtitles for English, Spanish, French, and some other languages. It's interesting because you can only choose once before install. If you want to change it, you have to uninstall it, and reinstall it.

The problem is that you can change the audio in-game. However, the English subtitles will remain the same no matter what. That means you're essentially getting dubtitles. The subtitles can only say what the dubbed English says.

The biggest apparent problem is the arbitrary change of one of the characters. In Japanese he's Mark. I guess that wasn't English sounding enough, so his name is Philip. So every time you hear "Mark" you see "Phil" or "Philip" :/ Pretty dumb.

There's also the little changes too. It's not exactly a faithful translation. There's one point where Philip calls Oliver a "dumb-dumb" when there's nothing like that in the original Japanese. I guess the translator thought Phil needed to be more of an asshole or something. Then there's another line where Mark says "Tomorrow? The day after that?" where Phil says "Tomorrow? Next year?" I guess the American version is a lot more exasperated than his Japanese counter part.

I'm sure there's a bunch of other stuff I can nitpick, but that's not really the point. Would it have been that hard to have included English subtitles that matched the Japanese? At this point, saying that the game offers Japanese with English subtitles is sort of false advertising. You can hear the Japanese, but you're not getting the authentic experience because your experience is completely filtered through the subtitles. They really should have included a second English subtitle track and split off the Japanese audio option if they were going to do it this way.

And you can't really turn the subtitle track off either, so you're just kind of stuck with it. If this is something that would bother you, I can't really say that I can recommend the game. The Japanese audio track is a nice bonus, but they don't support it, which is too bad.

Edited:
"I'll bet that tattletale goes straight to her olds!"

What is bunting?

"had my butties back home doing all kinds of espionage"

"I who travell betweene Worlds seeking Maysterie over the Noble Art of Magicke DO SOLEMNLY SWEARE to abide by the THREE RULES inscribed herein, and TO STRIVE AT ALL TIMES to be worthy of the name "WISEARD.""

Because bad spelling is kewl.

[Revorse]

That was something I had wondered about your translating.
So in your everyday endeavors if you see something subtitled, do you listen and think about how you would have translated/localized it?

Also is the games story up to quality with Ghibli films?

[takenoko]

Oh yeah, constantly. Got to have that reflection and constant change to grow and evolve. If I see someone translate something in a way that impresses me, I try to incorporate it into my own translations.

Like if I did Ni no Kuni's translation, it probably wouldn't have been very far from the what the current subtitles are. Just slice off the excess embellishment and change Philip back to Mark. I don't know if I'd keep Shizuku as the name since its meaning wouldn't mean anything to non-Japanese speakers. In that sense Drippy seems like a change made in the service of providing meaning to the audience. It's not totally arbitrary like Mark to Philip.

I've only played like 5-10 minutes in, so I'm still in the town wandering around. I think in the Japanese track I hear a guy talking about how there's a lot of women in town in the background. You should ask Luna, she's played a lot farther in than I have.

[Revorse]

That's so fucking cool. It makes me really want to get into translating and learning Japanese.
I'm gonna have to wait till next month to pick up the game, so I've been asking around about it. And I've been hearing mostly good things. And while I've heard the English dub is good, I've read to stick with the Japanese voices because it really brings out a Ghibli feel. Although I've never had a huge problem with the English dubs of those films, so I might have to end up doing a two playthrough kinda thing.

[Lunagel]

For the most part, it's a fairly accurate translation, but there seems to be a lot of over-embellishments to the characters' speaking patterns and phrases. In particular with Oliver, they constantly put the phrase 'Jeepers!' in there even when the Japanese was something very simple like 'Eh?!'

A lot of the translation choices seem to take a distinctly 1960s turn of phrase, such as 'jeepers' and 'starey mary' which I can kiiiind of see, given Motorville's general period, but they still throw me off.

As takenoko said, if I was doing translation, I would remove a lot of the extra fluff and especially keep the Japanese names. It really makes no sense to have 'Mark' become 'Phil', they're both English names, what was wrong with Mark? Also, the Goronell Kingdom somehow became Ding Dong Dell. WTF. That removes any sense of majesty and just makes it a nursery rhyme.

I do like the game itself. It's kind of Tales meets FF meets Pokemon, and the animation is really gorgeous, but every time they speak I have to stop myself from throwing the controller at the screen. If you don't understand Japanese then you might have a better time with it than me.

[takenoko]

I think that shooting for 60s lingo would be going over the mark. Part of the reason most of Ghibli's movies appear in what appears to be a quiet town in Europe is because they're supposed to have a timeless quality to them. Using very exact language is sort of the translator's hand forming boundaries around the time period and going "Nope, you are exactly here in time."

The difference to me is that in the timeless version, one could imagine visiting such a town nowadays. Just a little place somewhere that time has forgotten. That's why I'm not really a fan of the over embellishment in the translations that I've seen so far. It really changes the characters and settings in subtle ways.

[dancercotillion]

So are you going to write the people responsible a letter and let them know how disappointed you are with their product? No one will ever know if you don't, and things will never change. A lot of companies operate under the assumption that for every one person who took the time to make contact, there's a hundred more who feel the same but didn't say anything.

[Badtz]

In defense of the whole Mark/Phillip thing.. if you go to the garage in Motorville where he's building the car, the sign above it says "Phillip's Garage". I kind of doubt that they went through and translated all the signs into english for the localization, since Motorville is clearly supposed to be a town in the United States. It's also kind of weird to think that a little kid would have his own garage with his name on it and everything. So, I think the original idea was that Mark's father is named Phillip and it's his garage, or something like that. But when localizing the game, it's possible that they thought there would be some confusion over naming the character Mark but having a big sign reading "Phillip's Garage" over the place you're supposed to look for him. So, they changed his name to Phillip. I might be wrong, but that was what I thought when I was playing it.

Other than that, yes, the dubtitles are a disappointment, but it's not all bad. Little things like Oliver saying "jeepers" and stuff are not that crazy, since he is a little kid living in the 1950's. I'm not really a fan of the whole Scottish slang thing going on with Drippy, but you get used to it. Honestly, it took so long for this game to get localized, imagine how much longer it would have taken if they produced an entire second translation just for the Japanese audio.

[FaeQueenCory]

I agree... I usually hate the disney dubs of Ghibli stuff... I think only a couple of them can I actually watch dubbed....
Like the horrible additions of Castle in the Sky in the dub... when you watch it with the subtitles on in newer (Disney) dvds... they're really just closed captions for the dub...
(Had to go and find one of the old fox(?) dvds to get a legitimate subtitle for that one...)
I'm sad to hear that Ni no Kuni got the disneydubbing.... (mind you I'm not talking about the VA... just the script writing)
I'm just curious if it was Disney's game division that translated it.

[Dengar]

I'm going to have to say this though:

Doesn't this happen with ALL games that have dual audio? I've never seen a dual audio game that doesn't have dubtitles.

[Lunagel]

In defense of the whole Mark/Phillip thing.. if you go to the garage in Motorville where he's building the car, the sign above it says "Phillip's Garage". I kind of doubt that they went through and translated all the signs into english for the localization, since Motorville is clearly supposed to be a town in the United States.

All the signs are the same in the JP version but yeah they clearly made a mistake with Philip's garage.

Other than that, yes, the dubtitles are a disappointment, but it's not all bad. Little things like Oliver saying "jeepers" and stuff are not that crazy, since he is a little kid living in the 1950's. I'm not really a fan of the whole Scottish slang thing going on with Drippy, but you get used to it. Honestly, it took so long for this game to get localized, imagine how much longer it would have taken if they produced an entire second translation just for the Japanese audio.

That's the thing though, they never say he's in the 1950s. The clothing is definitely around that era but once you give something a time period, you have to stick to it. Who is to say he's not from an alternative reality? I wouldn't mind it so much if it wasn't thrown in arbitrarily every time Oliver shows some kind of surprise. If he said the same word in Japanese every time it would make sense, but they're just shoving it in there.

[Yoshimoon]

I wanted to get one of my friends who had only watched all of the Ghibli films in English to appreciate the original Japanese dialogue, only to learn that the subs were simply dubtitles. It's a shame that happened with this game as well. When I watch any Ghibli films, I do my best to listen to get the real meaning as much as possible.

Does the Japanese dialogue use a lot of honorifics? How are those handled?

[Badtz]

All the signs are the same in the JP version but yeah they clearly made a mistake with Philip's garage.

Like I say, I may be totally wrong but I can't help but think that was the reasoning for the name change.

That's the thing though, they never say he's in the 1950s. The clothing is definitely around that era but once you give something a time period, you have to stick to it. Who is to say he's not from an alternative reality? I wouldn't mind it so much if it wasn't thrown in arbitrarily every time Oliver shows some kind of surprise. If he said the same word in Japanese every time it would make sense, but they're just shoving it in there.

You're absolutely right. I mean, I wish they hadn't done it, but at least it's not totally out of left field, like he's running around saying something like "bazinga".. it at least fits if you want to mentally place the game in that time period.

I'm trying not to let the dubtitles bother me, but the whole thing does seem weird. Why keep the Japanese name of the game, "Ni No Kuni", but then do everything you can to remove the Japanese from the localization? Why not just call the game "Another World"?

Just doing a little googling, it appears the localization was headed up by Richard Honeywood, who used to be the head of localization for Square Enix.

[archer9234]

Another sub issue. I'll pass. I'll never buy anything like this again. After those horrible yugioh subbed dvd sets they tried to pass off. That was the worst attempted dubtitling I've ever seen. There was freaking empty areas of non translated dialog in them.

[Dengar]

^Usually it's the other way around. With dubbers having this strange idea that if no one is talking there's something wrong.