AtlusAram
01-13-2010, 12:26 PM
http://www.atlus.com/res/strangejourney_logo_transparent_550.png
Use Your Allusion
by Nich Maragos, Lead Editor
Quick language lesson time, everyone: the Japanese written language has not one but three character sets. (If you’re nodding impatiently here, you can just skip to the next paragraph.) Kanji are used as the building blocks of words, while hiragana are used to conjugate or clarify, as well as for the connective tissue in sentences. Think of kanji as a vocabulary and hiragana as an alphabet and you’re not far off. The third character set, katakana, mirrors hiragana in every way except its function: it’s used to denote loan words from other languages. Japanese has a lot of these, not all of them from English: “anime,” for instance, is a loan word that’s been shortened from “animation,” but it’s also common to refer to a part-time job as an “arubaito” from the German word arbeit, or work.
So when we at Atlus are translating a game and the translators see kanji and hiragana, they know what it means, because it’s part of their everyday vocabulary. But when katakana pops up, things get slightly trickier, because that means the word is a reference to something outside of Japanese, and figuring out just what that is isn’t always as easy as you think.
http://www.atlus.com/res/smtsj_useyourallusion_04.bmp
As a game that takes place in a near-future “real world,” Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey provided plenty of these situations. To start with, the premise of the game calls for a sizable crew hailing from a multitude of nations who have banded together to investigate the Schwarzwelt. All of these crewmen’s names were written in katakana, which meant it was up to us to figure out which nations they were meant to be representing and how their names would be rendered in their native orthography. This is complicated by the fact that the katakana alphabet doesn’t map perfectly with any other; you have to be familiar with both Japanese and Spanish to make the connection that what’s literally translated as “Himenesu” (and in fact was thus translated, briefly, on the official Japanese website) is meant to be read as the Spanish surname Jimenez.
http://www.atlus.com/res/smtsj_useyourallusion_03.bmp
This process was repeated for every member of the crew. Some of them were easy, like translating “Uiliamuzu” as “Williams.” (If that doesn’t look easy to you, you’ll have to take my word for it that it practically suggests itself as an interpretation. Try saying it out loud quickly.) Some of them were more ambiguous. Due to certain well-known idiosyncracies of Japanese, “Terii” could have been either Terry or Telly, which are both common names, and “Makurein” could have been McClain, MacClane, MacLaine, or any of several other Scottish surnames. And some of them were just baffling: “Kiima” didn’t readily suggest itself as a name of any nationality we were familiar with, and the character was so minor that there were no other identifying traits to provide a clue.
In Keema’s case, we simply made a judgement call as to how to render it in English and moved on. But in other cases, some detective work and knowledge of things outside the game came in handy. For instance, keenly aware of director Eiji Ishida’s enthusiasm for Western media, we went with McClane (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0095016/) in the above case of “Makurein.” And when it came time to figure out what “Verunu” was meant to represent, our initial guess was a Germanic Werne—until we realized that the other AI in the game, Arthur, was an allusion to Arthur C. Clarke, father of HAL… which meant that this AI was probably an homage to Jules Verne, author of Journey to the Center of the Earth.
http://www.atlus.com/res/smtsj_useyourallusion_02.bmp
Another major source of katakana shenanigans in the game was, as is typical of Shin Megami Tensei games, the demonary. With over 300 demons in the game, there were an ample number who have never before appeared in an American release. For a lot of these, we used J.A. Coleman’s The Dictionary of Mythology, an excellent volume for its sheer breadth and inclusiveness of world myth. Here’s how the process went, using the demon “Sukuugusuroo” as an example. It’s commonly referred to by SMT import devotees online as “Skeugslou,” but neither Internet searches nor Coleman’s book turned up any real-world results by that name, so we went digging.
We would first sound out the katakana for a likely-sounding beginning; “sc” or “sk” seemed likely. (The “u” in the Japanese “su” is almost silent.) This meant only about five pages of Coleman’s book to pore through, which is less than it seems, especially since most of the entries couldn’t possibly fit the Japanese pronunciation. There were other handy clues as well: we had a visual depiction of the demon to match against Coleman’s description, and we also had the demon’s Compendium description to give us a country of origin. This narrowed down the search by quite a bit, and it only took a few minutes before we hit upon the Swedish wood spirit Skogsra.
http://www.atlus.com/res/smtsj_useyourallusion_names_01.bmp
Wrestling with katakana loan words and references is a process that can last throughout production as a series of small epiphanies hits the translators and editors. It wasn’t until a week or so into the project, for instance, that it dawned on us that all the sectors of the Schwarzwelt were named after constellations—and the above-mentioned realization about “Werne” vs. “Verne” didn’t come until the second-to-last day that it was possible to change anything! (Depending on how many files need to be altered to accommodate these little breakthroughs, they can be accompanied by either a “Eureka!” or a “Dammit!”)
Hopefully, knowing all this will bring you greater enjoyment of your “televi game” once it’s released in March.
-Nich Maragos, Lead Editor
Use Your Allusion
by Nich Maragos, Lead Editor
Quick language lesson time, everyone: the Japanese written language has not one but three character sets. (If you’re nodding impatiently here, you can just skip to the next paragraph.) Kanji are used as the building blocks of words, while hiragana are used to conjugate or clarify, as well as for the connective tissue in sentences. Think of kanji as a vocabulary and hiragana as an alphabet and you’re not far off. The third character set, katakana, mirrors hiragana in every way except its function: it’s used to denote loan words from other languages. Japanese has a lot of these, not all of them from English: “anime,” for instance, is a loan word that’s been shortened from “animation,” but it’s also common to refer to a part-time job as an “arubaito” from the German word arbeit, or work.
So when we at Atlus are translating a game and the translators see kanji and hiragana, they know what it means, because it’s part of their everyday vocabulary. But when katakana pops up, things get slightly trickier, because that means the word is a reference to something outside of Japanese, and figuring out just what that is isn’t always as easy as you think.
http://www.atlus.com/res/smtsj_useyourallusion_04.bmp
As a game that takes place in a near-future “real world,” Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey provided plenty of these situations. To start with, the premise of the game calls for a sizable crew hailing from a multitude of nations who have banded together to investigate the Schwarzwelt. All of these crewmen’s names were written in katakana, which meant it was up to us to figure out which nations they were meant to be representing and how their names would be rendered in their native orthography. This is complicated by the fact that the katakana alphabet doesn’t map perfectly with any other; you have to be familiar with both Japanese and Spanish to make the connection that what’s literally translated as “Himenesu” (and in fact was thus translated, briefly, on the official Japanese website) is meant to be read as the Spanish surname Jimenez.
http://www.atlus.com/res/smtsj_useyourallusion_03.bmp
This process was repeated for every member of the crew. Some of them were easy, like translating “Uiliamuzu” as “Williams.” (If that doesn’t look easy to you, you’ll have to take my word for it that it practically suggests itself as an interpretation. Try saying it out loud quickly.) Some of them were more ambiguous. Due to certain well-known idiosyncracies of Japanese, “Terii” could have been either Terry or Telly, which are both common names, and “Makurein” could have been McClain, MacClane, MacLaine, or any of several other Scottish surnames. And some of them were just baffling: “Kiima” didn’t readily suggest itself as a name of any nationality we were familiar with, and the character was so minor that there were no other identifying traits to provide a clue.
In Keema’s case, we simply made a judgement call as to how to render it in English and moved on. But in other cases, some detective work and knowledge of things outside the game came in handy. For instance, keenly aware of director Eiji Ishida’s enthusiasm for Western media, we went with McClane (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0095016/) in the above case of “Makurein.” And when it came time to figure out what “Verunu” was meant to represent, our initial guess was a Germanic Werne—until we realized that the other AI in the game, Arthur, was an allusion to Arthur C. Clarke, father of HAL… which meant that this AI was probably an homage to Jules Verne, author of Journey to the Center of the Earth.
http://www.atlus.com/res/smtsj_useyourallusion_02.bmp
Another major source of katakana shenanigans in the game was, as is typical of Shin Megami Tensei games, the demonary. With over 300 demons in the game, there were an ample number who have never before appeared in an American release. For a lot of these, we used J.A. Coleman’s The Dictionary of Mythology, an excellent volume for its sheer breadth and inclusiveness of world myth. Here’s how the process went, using the demon “Sukuugusuroo” as an example. It’s commonly referred to by SMT import devotees online as “Skeugslou,” but neither Internet searches nor Coleman’s book turned up any real-world results by that name, so we went digging.
We would first sound out the katakana for a likely-sounding beginning; “sc” or “sk” seemed likely. (The “u” in the Japanese “su” is almost silent.) This meant only about five pages of Coleman’s book to pore through, which is less than it seems, especially since most of the entries couldn’t possibly fit the Japanese pronunciation. There were other handy clues as well: we had a visual depiction of the demon to match against Coleman’s description, and we also had the demon’s Compendium description to give us a country of origin. This narrowed down the search by quite a bit, and it only took a few minutes before we hit upon the Swedish wood spirit Skogsra.
http://www.atlus.com/res/smtsj_useyourallusion_names_01.bmp
Wrestling with katakana loan words and references is a process that can last throughout production as a series of small epiphanies hits the translators and editors. It wasn’t until a week or so into the project, for instance, that it dawned on us that all the sectors of the Schwarzwelt were named after constellations—and the above-mentioned realization about “Werne” vs. “Verne” didn’t come until the second-to-last day that it was possible to change anything! (Depending on how many files need to be altered to accommodate these little breakthroughs, they can be accompanied by either a “Eureka!” or a “Dammit!”)
Hopefully, knowing all this will bring you greater enjoyment of your “televi game” once it’s released in March.
-Nich Maragos, Lead Editor