Sunday, 21 February 2016

Talking Final Fantasy XII's Localisation

In 2015 John Learned of USGamer did a fantastic interview of the translators and voice actors involved in localising Final Fantasy XII. It's great read, but more than that, it's a rare insight into the localisation process. This post collects four interesting points that I gleaned from the interviews, as well as some of my own personal comments.

1) FFXII Was Localised By A Tiny Team
Final Fantasy XII's volume of text matched, if not exceeded, the previous games in the series. Anyone who has played the game will be aware of the massive amount of NPC dialogue that stacks on top of the lengthy core story-related writing. The entity of the game's translation was handled by two people, Alexander O. Smith and Joe Reeder. They took turns translating the voiced scenes, and rewrite each other's translation to ensure the game's writing tone remained consistent. However, over time, each translator got a better handle on certain characters, which led to them handling the scenes that heavily involved these characters.  For non-voiced text, it was much simpler; they divvied it up so that the entirety of text for location in the game was translated by the same person. And in the end, everything was overlooked by the game's localisation editor, Morgan Rushton.

Comment
Before reading the interview, I presumed that a much bigger translation staff translated the game. However, after learning how the translators had to reread each other's work for the sake of consistency, I can see how a big team could end up being more hassle. One sign of a well-written translation is that it flows smoothly, never hinting to the reader that the text was created from a foreign source text. JRPGs are long, text-heavy experiences that often span over forty hours. Over time, the player reads so much dialogue from certain characters that they become intimately acquainted with their speech patterns. Multiple translators handling a game's translation could lead to the character having an inconsistent style of speech, which would jarring for the player i.e. the game would have a poor translation. In the case of Final Fantasy XII, I am somewhat surprised that the translators chose to translate the cutscenes in tandem. If one of them handled all the core character interactions, and another handled all the NPC dialogue, it would eliminate the need for the two translators to maintain a certain style between them (aside from a common adherence to a predetermined style for the game world). However, given that the two Smith and Reeder and two heavyweights of the localisation field, it was a matter of professional pride for them to be both involved in the important story dialogue. Alternatively, it could be posited two translators working in tandem increases the potential diversity and creativity of the game's text.



2) Voice Acting Is A Big Complication
Final Fantasy X was the first game to feature voice-acting, and it appeared again in Final Fantasy XII as approximately nine percent of the game's entire text. Translating Japanese characters into English is relatively straightforward, but supplementing these lines with voice-acting adds a wide range of complications. First, in the case of Final Fantasy XII, the the mouth moments (lip flap) of characters in cutscenes was animated with the Japanese script in mind, and couldn't be reanimated. This meant the translators had to watch the game's cutscenes and think up English words that would fit the Japanese mouth movements. Second, a single translator can translate the dialogue of a limitless number of characters, but giving these characters voices demands a massive increase in labour. First, each character typically its own voice-actor, so in addition to hiring these people, there also has to be someone to cast and direct them. The role of the director was particularly important for Final Fantasy XII because all the voice-acting was recorded individually as opposed to in tandem with the entire voice cast. A further wrinkle is that for younger characters, hiring minors to do voiceover work is more expensive because of the time it takes to make them familiar with the intricacies of the videogame voice-acting process, as well the stipulations of the Screen Writers Guild, such as the need to pay for a tutor for the child voice actor. As a result, adult women are often employed to do the voices of younger characters. However, in the case of Final Fantasy XII, Square-Enix stumped up the money for a child actor to voice the part of Larsa.

Comment
I had never considered the idea of having to translate Japanese into English in a way that ensures the English matches the mouth movements of the Japanese text. I can not fathom how frustrating it must be to have a good translation in place, but have to alter it to make the text better match lip flaps. I imagine that the ability to come up with such dialogue demands a certain kind of skill and creativity that can only be developed with experience doing such work. Interestingly, for Final Fantasy XIII, the animators made an effort to reanimate the characters' lip flap for the game's foreign release. However, this may no longer be a matter of concern for neither the game's translator nor its animator. The increasing march of technology coupled with widespread use of certain game engines means that that lip-syncing can now be more easily addressed. For example, Unreal Engine 4 games (such as Destiny and Fallout 4) used a technology made for the engine known as FaceFX, which can "generate lip-synchronisation and speech gesture data automatically from pre-recorded audio." That said, no matter how much technology progresses, adding voice-acting to a game will likely remain an expensive endeavour due to the amount of work demanded by the process. Think of the time and money spent on employing a caster, a performance director, and the voice-actors themselves on top of also renting a recording studio. Games are made on budgets, so I wonder how tempting it must be to limit the voice-acting so that money can be allocated to other parts of the game such as QA which may see a greater return for the amount of spent. When games such as Persona 4 lack voice-acting for a major scenes, I find it jarring but I can at least now sympathetically understand why this happens.










3) FFXII Used Interesting Accents
Anyone who has played even just a small portion of the English version of Final Fantasy XII will likely have been struck by the heavy use of regional accents. This contrasts the Japanese version of the game, in which all the characters speak in "unaccented, standard Japanese." However, the translators felt that it would be strange if all the characters spoke with the same English accent given how the game features a variety of regions and cultures. Speaking specifically, the viera were given Icelandic accents to give them an unfamiliar quality, and the people of Bhujerba were given a Sri Lankan accent on account of these two places having colonial roots. The translators also mention that they followed the accent scheme of the Star Wars by giving the imperials a British accent and the rebels an American-English accent. In addition, the translators inserted a sense of Victorian-era English throughout the game. This is best seen in the bestiary text, which in the Japanese read like a "dry high school Biology textbook."

Comment
Many JRPGs use a single accent (often American) when adding voices to characters, and I don't think Final Fantasy XII would have been overly handicapped if it had followed this tradition. However, by bucking this trends it makes the game all the more immersive and unique because it strengthens the diverse feeling of the game's world in a way rarely seen in other games. However, given the extremely creative use of Sri Lankan and Icelandic accents, it disappointed me that the translators took the uninspired decision to give the imperials (antagonists) British accents and the rebels (protagonists) American accents. This is a tired trope. It made me roll my eyes even when it popped up in the Killzone games (first-person shooters in which the narrative is not the primary draw). I expected more of a story-focused game like Final Fantasy XII. One accent-related matter that I am not sure how I feel about is the decision to layer a lot of the game's text with a coating of Victorian-style English. It certainly adds character, but can occasionally be a little too verbose. Judge for yourself from the example below...

Original JapaneseGame's TranslationLiteral Translation
丸い体が特徴のコッカトリス。

砂漠などの乾燥地帯に生息し、転がるようにして移動する。

主食は小型動物や昆虫などで、口内に分泌される粘着性の唾液で動きを止めて捕食する。

体の内部には特殊な浮袋があり、これは体表面積の比率を大きくすることで上昇気流に上手く乗り、

空中に浮かびながら獲物を探すために用いられる。
Lo, the mighty cockatrice, proud-feathered sphere, known as much for its ill humor as its dire rotundity.

The great naturalist Merlose once remarked:

'...live they in the sands and other arid climes, whereabouts they moveth in a rolling fashion most peculiar.

Subsist they principally on small creatures and vermin, for the incapacitation of which they disgorge a sticky saliva, thence devouring captured morsels only when appetite moves them.'

Swollen sacs containing airs are found under the surface of the skin, and when inflated, these lifting the creature upon drafts unseen, whence to espy suitable prey.
Cockatrice, known for its circular body.

They lives in deserts and other dry areas, and roll themselves from place to place.

Their diet primarily consists of insects and small creatures, which they first incapacitate via an orally secreted viscous liquid and then feed on

They have a unique inner air sack, which greatly expands their body's surface area and lets them ride wind currents, which they use to hunt for their prey while floating in the air.


4) Immersion Is Treated Differently In Japan
According to the translators, Japanese gamers do not bat an eyelid when a game's sense of immersion is broken for the purpose of delivering game-related information whereas in the West full immersion is given greater priority. In the case of Final Fantasy XII, the translators cited the following specific in example.
"So in one place in Rabanastre where the player, as Vaan, encounters a chocobo vendor, the Japanese had the vendor explain to the player that the big yellow birds he saw behind him were chocobos, and that they could be ridden. If we're in character as Vaan, of course, this is very immersion-breaking, as a street-wise orphan would certainly know what a chocobo was. So, the English version has the vendor lamenting that some guy rode off on one of his chocobos the other day without paying. It's the same information as the Japanese provides (the birds are called chocobos, you can ride them, and you have to pay for the privilege), but couched very differently."
Comment
I like this change, and respect the overall commitment to the immersion in the game world. As a person from the West, I agree that I dislike having something incongruous break my immersion, and I think this a commonly held view among developers in the West. For example, at the start of Halo 3, a character approaches Master Chief to checks his vitals. Part of this process involves being asked to look up, thus prompting the player pushes the right analog stick up (or down). This is a non-immersion breaking way of checking whether the player wants to play with inverted controls. Perhaps if Halo 3 was made in Japan, there would just be a direct question or a menu prompt! In the West, Metal Gear Solid is well known for the way it nonchalantly breaks the fourth-wall by having characters directing explain game controls. I wonder if Japanese players of the Metal Gear Solid series pay this no mind when it crops up in their version of the game.

0 comments:

Post a Comment