an interesting article on localising Hollow Knight into Japanese—and specifically, how translator Ryu Ito negotiated the dev edict that every word had to be translated to JP, with no English words or straight katakana conversion
icymi, this is the 4th feature in a series on JP game localisation that kicked off on 4gamer last month:
Lovemoo on Meditteranean Inferno
Yosei Muto on Strange Horticulture (part 1) (part 2)
Like GSK mentioned, there's some really interesting musings in this article on what constitutes natural-sounding Japanese writing in games in situations like localization and why that request from the Hollow Knight devs was tougher to swallow than it might appear on the surface. Japanese not only has a very healthy amount of foreign loan words in its vocabulary, but written English in particular has obviously been a facet of Japanese computing and games since their very inception for various technical and circumstantial reasons. As a result, it's not uncommon for western devs to want to over-localize their games into Japanese and, indeed, translate more words into ostensibly native terms than is typically necessary or aesthetically desirable. If you dig around on Legends of Localization, you'll find that this tends to occur most with the UI (eg: transcribing "score" as 「スコア」 in katakana or even 「得点」instead of just leaving in English as is), but it can happen with most any part of the text.
As Ito-san goes into the article, it's not that there isn't a time and a place for full-on Japanese text in games that scrub out katakana and English text entirely, but it very much so depends on the setting and context. Going to that sort of trouble makes a lot more sense for a game like, say, Ghost of Tsushima, where that level of linguistic cohesion absolutely helps maintain immersion for Japanese players. But, like he writes, for a game like Hollow Knight whose aesthetic and narrative frame of reference isn't particularly based in Japan or Asia, it makes less sense just by virtue of how the language and culture here has developed, so I'm glad that he was ultimately able to somewhat talk that team down. Definitely one of those requests where their heart was in the right place, but unless you're genuinely bilingual and understand the implications, not one of those hoops you should ask your game translators to go through. Just about everybody working in J>E eventually has to field that sort of feedback from clients whose English fluency, even if proficient, is often more academic than practical, so I totally sympathize with his position and am relieved that it ultimately worked out in this case.
Mando @MrMandolino 17 hr ago
are there official translations of these articles available? i'd like to send it to the author of Mediterranea Inferno edit: eyeguys follows them so i'll assume he already knows hah
no, and 4gamer as an outlet has a (largely unrequited) policy of trying to license their content for publication in other languages, hence why I rarely go over their stuff in great detail