The First Few Lines Of Final Fantasy 7 Are A Little Different In Japanese

5 responses to “The First Few Lines Of Final Fantasy 7 Are A Little Different In Japanese”

1. 

   dogman

   August 2, 2017 at 4:05 pm

   You can loot those corpses?! I checked everywhere in FFVII for items and gil but for some reason it never struck me to check those bodies…

   Reply
2. 

   arnna

   August 2, 2017 at 4:16 pm

   These articles are annoying. Give us a transcript of the video or tell us in the title it’s a video article

   Reply
3. 

   rethilgore

   August 2, 2017 at 5:53 pm

   anyone able to write an article about this one for those of us with restricted connections? 🙂

   Reply
   1. 

      germinalconsequence

      August 2, 2017 at 7:36 pm

      Basically it says that translations are hard and you’re rarely ever going to have an English translation that matches the original characterisations and script. This is especially so with Asiatic languages because they can use a few characters to describe tone and concepts while we need several words and text boxes only have a certain amount of space. The other common problem that translators face with Japanese in particular is that certain subtleties in how you write a word can dramatically change a character’s attitude (eg. Using “Ore” instead of “Watashi”, “Anta” instead of “Anata” to create the feeling of a brash youth) and this is difficult to translate into English.

      Combined together it all ends up changing the way characters can come across. Barret feels a little more friendlier in the English version because he uses “Newcomer” while in Japanese he’s just referring to Cloud as an impersonal “New guy”. Cloud also loses a little of his original youthful cheek in the English version when he’s telling everyone to “not bother telling him their name because they’ll never see each other after the mission anyway” because of the subtleties in spelling I mentioned previously.

      It also serves as a bit of a lesson about what some Japanese words mean but the main gist is about the nuances that translators have to deal with and why we often end up with a translation that can differ greatly from the original script.

      Reply
      1. 

         rethilgore

         August 3, 2017 at 11:18 am

         wow, didn’t expect anyone to type anything up! Thanks a million 🙂 was an interesting read indeed.

         Reply