I’m playing Final Fantasy 7 in English and Japanese at the same time. I’m noticing a lot of little differences. This is part two of what is now, officially, a series.
Last time, we got through just two lines of dialogue. We get through a lot more in this one.
You’ll see some discrepancies. Barret talks differently in the Japanese version, where he’s more Solid Snake than Mr T. Cloud has a catchphrase that doesn’t consistently translate over. And in at least one relevant moment, a line of Japanese text just doesn’t make it into the English version.
The primary reason I spent a whole 10 minutes poring over just one line of dialogue in the first episode was to illustrate just how terse Japanese is — a lot of nuance fits into very few characters. Translators of these old-time text-only Japanese role-playing games had to make every English letter count to fit dialogue into the tiny text boxes. What I’m doing with this series isn’t criticising or even smack-talking the original translation. No, I totally applaud the efforts of the translator who crunched under a horrifying deadline to get Final Fantasy 7 finished. Heck, thanks to that translator, I got to play the game in 1997. These videos, then, exist to look at the meaning that couldn’t make it into the little text boxes. Though uh, yeah, in this episode, we do find a text box the translator forgot to translate.
As the video disclaims in its early seconds: Warning: Some of the Japanese you may learn in this video might never be useful to you.
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