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[Altor]

I'm really disappointed that Nintendo takes so long to push out translated versions of their games.  It seems like they're sitting on a gold mine - hundreds of games available exclusively in Japanese... when the NDS system is so hot, you'd think they'd want to release as much software in as many regions as possible!

I've worked on translation teams before - it's really not that much work.  You need three guys to do a decent translation - Person one knows the original language very well but doesn't know the destination language very well - he is an assistant to person 2.  Person two knows both languages as well as possible and gets help where necessary from persons 1 and 3.  Person 3 knows only the destination language, and helps to proofread things to make sure they make sense.

In short, person 1 ensures the "spirit" of the storytelling remains intact, person 2 ensures the general content remais intact, person 3 ensures that what's published doesn't contain typos, peculiar dialect, regionally offensive things, bad grammar, or lacks punctuation.

With a company the size of Nintendo, who is taking in money right now hand over fist thanks to sound planning, you'd think they could spare $20 an hour or something for 3 people and a group of testers.  Seriously, every game would take a week at the outside to translate and a month to thouroughly test/check.  There's hardly even any dialogue to be re-recorded for many of these games.

Last I looked, the NDS software library consists of only 120 or so games in all languages, with twice that number only being localized in one region.  I've never tried playing an untranslated game before, but I'm starting to consider it.  There are a ton of (J)-only games I'd like to get my hands on.

The only possible reason I can come up with is that it might be a matter of wanting to prevent market saturation.  Too many games released all at once means fewer sales per game (since the average person only has so much to spend on entertainment every month), something that surely wouldn't appeal too well to the actual developers.  But when there are no games at all released for weeks at a stretch, you'd think they'd be willing to consider doing one a month or something, at least.

[Wishmaster]

I remembered reading an article on translating Lunar: Silver Star Story for the PSX to English, where Claire Danes was one of the voice actresses. And the American release date was constantly pushed back.

It's very different translating something with alot of facts, like an annual report, to translating something with alot of emotions involved, like a story book. It's even more difficult translating poetry, as the beauty of the language is lost when porting from one language to the other.

Most RPG games falls into second and third category. As much as the original feelings have to be retained, to make your eyes wet with tears when the heroine died.. for example. Plus Japanese and Chinese often have those phrases where, a four-words phrase needs an entire paragraph to describe in English.

Japanese also takes less amounts of words to explain the same thing. Thus they have bits and bytes constrains.

Translating from French, Italian, Swedish, German to English are 10x easier than translating Japanese or Chinese to English.

That's why they took so long. Be patient, it's worth it.

I don't understand why the DS Browser took so long though.

[ZzzZilla]

It's very different translating something with alot of facts, like an annual report, to translating something with alot of emotions involved, like a story book. It's even more difficult translating poetry, as the beauty of the language is lost when porting from one language to the other.

Most RPG games falls into second and third category. As much as the original feelings have to be retained, to make your eyes wet with tears when the heroine died.. for example. Plus Japanese and Chinese often have those phrases where, a four-words phrase needs an entire paragraph to describe in English.

Couldn't agree with you more. I shudder at the thought of the amount of work that goes into translating games like Xenogears for the PSX.

[ImmortalNinja]

I dont think its Nintendo that translate all the games but rather the individual companies that make them, no?
Almost all Nintendo games get translated.

Whether or not a game gets translated is usually a marketing call based on whether or not they think the game will sell well or not and whether or not its worth the risk to go into production.
If they are a small Japan only company they also need to find a publisher in the overseas country and may also need to sort out licensing issues.

And then when that gets given the green light they might sit on it to release it at a more favourable time.

So theres a lot more to localising a game then jsut translating the text!!

KK

[Altor]

I know it's not Nintendo doing the actual work, but they're the big boss and they can say... "soo... feel like translating that hacker game?" *cocks gun*

Ok, it's not that simple.  But I really wish something could be done to speed up the process a bit.  There are SO many gamest that have gone months/years untranslated.  It's not like they're even making a risk doing the translation - the vast majority of their customers do not speak Japanese!

[ImmortalNinja]

meh, I think its a sad truth that even though there are a load of great Japanese games out there like Cooking Mama and Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! Japanese marketing firms probably think they wont sell enough to go through the whole process of localising and finding distributiom channels over seas.
Their marketing figures probably show that action games and licenses sell the most and far out games wont make it. We might know the truth but being a company concerned about money they have a lot to think about.....

Especially when Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! didnt even do that well in Japan.
However I guess things are changing. I think a few years ago we wouldnt have seen the likes of Trauma Centre and Phoenix Wright in english, so thats a good sign. (But even they didnt do that great overseas...)

Finally, unless you think about making a game global from the start, sometimes it can be a very big hassle to change the code for localization as the Japanese language system and European are quite different. (I know this from experience as I've had to edit the string engine for some mobile phone games from English to Chinese, if it was done at the time of orginal devlopment it would have taken no more than a day, as it stood it took me three, and this was for a relatively small game....but maybe thats a reflection on my programming skills.....)

So in the end I agree with you its darn annoying that games being localised is a long process, but I dont see why Ninetendo would bother urging companies to do so but there is hope and the trend is more games are being translated (relatively) faster....

KK

[Altor]

Phoenix Wright is one of the most sought-after games there are in North America.  Didn't they just start remanufacturing the game because of all the international demand for it?

[Robotochan]

ImmortalNinja: Cooking Mama is being translated  

I would like to see that hacker game ASAP though  :lol:

[Haoie]

I can imagine a SNES style IPS translation patch for NDS roms is pretty near impossible to do well.

[ImmortalNinja]

Heh, Phoenix Wright only got release here in the UK not so long ago.
I think there was high demand for it because like Castlevania only a very limited number of copies were initially produced.
And am I missing something? What Hacker game?

In some ways I have doubts about getting Cooking Mama translated. Lets face it I really dont think its going to be a high hitting seller (lets hope I'm wrong) compared to say the A-list titles. If it does badly it might reinforce that games arent worth translating.....

KK

[Scor]

Heh, Phoenix Wright only got release here in the UK not so long ago.
I think there was high demand for it because like Castlevania only a very limited number of copies were initially produced.
And am I missing something? What Hacker game?
KK

Phoenix wright was English when it was released in Japan (you could choose "English" and have the same thing we have).
I'm getting my Japanese (and thus English) version sometime soon .

[Altor]

The hacker game is 502 or something like that.  Or 498.  Around the 500 area, anyway...

It's supposedly a game in the style of Uplink: Hacker Elite or something, which I thought was a very original idea for a game.