Do You Need to Be a Gamer to Translate Video Game Copy?

For a seamlessly endless time in history, most video games would only be released in either English or Japanese. This brought about a slight problem for the industry: gamers from all around the world wanted to play their favourite games in their own language too and were pretty adamant about it! Thus, the need to appeal to a Western audience suddenly earned the top spot in most game developers’ agendas.

This escalating demand led to the creation of thousands of video game dubs and game translations. However, the major cultural gap between the Western and Eastern societies made it clear that game developers had to do far more than just translation if their goal was to see foreign gamers fall in love with their games – they had to adapt them to the target culture. A notable video game example that has been localized through and through is no other than Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

The original version of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, the much-loved prequel spin-off of the Ace Attorney series, was rife with historical references from Japanese history and culture. This posed a major challenge for game translators, since transforming those references for English-speaking audiences would require tremendous market research, extensive game localization expertise, and plenty of good ol’ creativity.

Nevertheless, the English version was perfectly adapted for the US locale and ultimately attained widespread acclaim amongst its target demographic. To understand what made this game such a cultural phenomenon, consider this example from the game’s dialogue:

In the Japanese version, Sholmes is guessing he’ll probably have rice curry for lunch. But, as most gamers from the US would know, rice curry is unique to Japanese cuisine. Therefore, the localizers had to find a way to “adapt” the dish to the Western mindset. How did they end up choosing Indian curry instead?

Turns out it was the British that brought Indian curry to Japan, back in the 19th century. The dish was adapted into the Japanese signature dish it is today only a few decades later, following its adoption by the Japanese army and navy in the 20th century.

Ultimately, Japanese players reading that line will automatically assume that it’s a reference to a non-Japanese dish, which, in their mind, will be “Indian”. On the other hand, it’d be near impossible for an English-speaking gamer who doesn’t know the cultural context to grasp why Sholmes, an established Englishman, would suddenly start ruminating about rice curry (since the game’s English version is US-based). Hence, for clarity’s sake, the game translators chose to refer to the original Indian curry, rather than the rice curry mentioned in the game’s Japanese version.

This sample perfectly captures how a video game translator can localize a game with intent, while retaining both the story and character’s originality. As the Localization Director at Capcom, Janet Hsu, very well puts it, behind every localization choice hides intent, need, and expectation… the locale’s cultural and linguistic expectation, of course.

We have spoken about the Russian localization blunders of Cyberpunk in a previous article; we will not reiterate them. What we want to highlight in this article is why it went wrong. Was it perhaps because the translator was not a gamer?