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Atlus we need to talk about the Persona 5 localization...

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D

Deleted member 17706

Unconfirmed Member
SeppOCE said:
Makes me cringe when I hear it every time. If it's meant to be adapted in English why do they insist on carrying over things like that? I don't know anyone who speaks English and uses honourifics irl.
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I can sort of see an argument for it when the setting is so culturally Japanese, but as someone who has worked in localization, I can't say it's an approach I would ever recommend. There are so many other ways to convey the different levels of respect associated with the honorifics than by forcing them into your dialogue.
 
D

duckroll

Member
I think honorifics is really just a matter of taste. I don't like using them in English because it sticks out, but it sticking out can also be a feature for someone else. Either way, when writing dialogue in English for characters who are clearly Japanese speaking Japanese, I don't think there are any right or wrong rules with attaching stuff like accents, different spellings/pronunciations, or honorifics.

What does stick out is when sentences are just badly written.
 
V

Vanadium

Member
Killer Queen said:
Underappreciated post
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Currently this nice things why we be having cannot.

But seriously on localization, you really can't win one way or another. Plenty of western titles aren't well translated into Japanese either. I think overall the criticism is constructive and there are certainly plenty of challenges in localizing something so huge and specifically Japanese as a game like this but if you want it right, just buy the Japanese version. That's what I did.

For me what really matters are the details not just in the language but something like the lines of fair adjustment machines in the subway or how you can get a job at a Ministop or 7/11 type convenience store that everybody will know anywhere in Japan, you know karaage and amerikandoggu will always be right by the cash register. Those details would be trivial to most global or western players, but those are the details of daily life in Japan that really make the game feel full. Cherry picking at the localization in a game this big is kind of low hanging fruit.

For me it's like being pissed a movie didn't do the same things as a book you may have liked. If you want good 唐揚 げ then don't go to McDonalds and then get mad because the chicken nuggets are soggy. Just go pick up the real thing.
 
V

Vincent Alexander

Member
duckroll said:
I think honorifics is really just a matter of taste. I don't like using them in English because it sticks out, but it sticking out can also be a feature for someone else. Either way, when writing dialogue in English for characters who are clearly Japanese speaking Japanese, I don't think there are any right or wrong rules with attaching stuff like accents, different spellings/pronunciations, or honorifics.

What does stick out is when sentences are just badly written.
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Agreed. Honestly, I hardly even notice the honorifics...but a poorly written sentence sticks out like a sore thumb every time.
 
B

Betty

Banned
I think the localisation is one of the best, I don't know how they get suck good performances out of characters.

Persona 3-4-5 have all been golden.
 
H

Hylian7

Member
Okay, I don't want to accidentally run across spoilers looking this up, so someone answer me this:

Second dungeon:
There's the part where Ann is modeling and the protagonist and Ryuji are sitting there, and then eventually Yuskue brings up about Ann modelling nude, and they think he's perving on her, but the line he says after that was something like "I'm not intereted in her because she is the opposite sex." I interpreted this to mean Yusukue is gay, am I wrong here? That line read really weird to me.
 
H

Holundrian

Unconfirmed Member
Hylian7 said:
Okay, I don't want to accidentally run across spoilers looking this up, so someone answer me this:

Second dungeon:
There's the part where Ann is modeling and the protagonist and Ryuji are sitting there, and then eventually Yuskue brings up about Ann modelling nude, and they think he's perving on her, but the line he says after that was something like "I'm not intereted in her because she is the opposite sex." I interpreted this to mean Yusukue is gay, am I wrong here? That line read really weird to me.
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I don't remember the exact Japanese line but I'm fairly sure that the context was more that he's not interested in her nude for sexual reason but for artistic reasons.
 
T

tansuikabutsu

Neo Member
TheBryanJZX90 said:
Japanese is not some magical unicorn language. Japan was not the first and only country to invent changing your speech patterns based upon who you are talking to and your level of familiarity with them. That is absolutely something a proper localization will already be doing, because that is a part of how normal people speak in English. Leaving the honorifics in is really just a bit of fanservice to the Japan-obsessive crowd that likes to feel smart when they remember the difference between -kun and -senpai.
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Here's the thing - I use honorifics when speaking English with my Japanese colleagues. I often even use them when speaking with other English native speakers when we discuss Japanese friends. I think almost every foreigner who works in Japan does the same. It sounds super weird *not* to do that.

Honorifics are a strange case because they're lying somewhere that's not easily defined between the linguist and the extra-linguistic. Let me ask you this - are you mad when an English language depiction of German people speaking uses "Herr"? Or "Monsieur" and "Madame" for French? It's not really all that different, except it's much more prevalent (to the point it's all but required) in Japanese speech, plus the fact that it comes after the name which is strange to English-speakers' ears.

Honorifics, at least when used in a contemporary Japanese setting, is as much a cultural thing as ramen and onigiri are, except that they're also a little more linguistically complicated than simple nouns. If there are pros and cons about turning the latter into hamburgers and doughnuts, I think -san and -chan aren't such a clear cut case either.
 
L

lvl99 Pixel

Member
playing with the Japanese audio, some parts are straight up not subtitled like the news segments. Thankfully my roommate was here to translate all of it.
 
T

TatteredHat

Member
Hylian7 said:
Okay, I don't want to accidentally run across spoilers looking this up, so someone answer me this:

Second dungeon:
There's the part where Ann is modeling and the protagonist and Ryuji are sitting there, and then eventually Yuskue brings up about Ann modelling nude, and they think he's perving on her, but the line he says after that was something like "I'm not intereted in her because she is the opposite sex." I interpreted this to mean Yusukue is gay, am I wrong here? That line read really weird to me.
Click to expand...

No, he's saying that he's interested in her modelling nude not because he's attracted to her but because of his artistic inspirations.
 
Q

Quasar

Member
TheBryanJZX90 said:
Woah wait wait are you saying it's terrible if a game, after being translated into English, doesn't have -chans and -sans and -senpais and goddamn -tans left in as-is?
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If it's a game set in Japan and with Japanese people? Yeah I am.

Of course if given the choice I'd always choose subs anyway as I always do with other media (be it animation or life action TV or film). And I frequently get grumpy when people excise honorifics from subs.
 
C

Cleve

Member
Hylian7 said:
Okay, I don't want to accidentally run across spoilers looking this up, so someone answer me this:

Second dungeon:
There's the part where Ann is modeling and the protagonist and Ryuji are sitting there, and then eventually Yuskue brings up about Ann modelling nude, and they think he's perving on her, but the line he says after that was something like "I'm not intereted in her because she is the opposite sex." I interpreted this to mean Yusukue is gay, am I wrong here? That line read really weird to me.
Click to expand...

It was very poorly phrased, but I interpreted it as
"I'm not interested in (painting) her for sexual reasons", I don't think of it as an admission of anything else.
 
K

Kain

Member
I don't see the problem with honorifics, for some reason they work for me in the Persona series.

10 hours in and I still haven't encountered anything weird btw. Yet.
 
S

Sölf

Member
I am not sure if people are just exeggerating or if it is because I am German and english is my second language. For me, the translation (after roughly 30 hours of playtime) doesn't seem worse than P3 or P4. I do play with japanese voices, but considering how good the P3 and P4 voice acting was, I would probably also have no problem there. Especially with the added honorifics.
 
M

mdubs

Banned
In about 35 hours I've only had 2 or 3 lines (the Morgana one, and Ann's "are you a bad person as the rumour says") really catch my attention as bad. I'm happy with it overall considering the sheer amount of text in this game
 
A

Aarglefarg

Member
It's unclear what people are saying is wrong with the pronunciation of Sakamoto, since some people have said different things. Does it emphasise Ka or Mo too much? Or is nothing emphasised?
 
F

FluxWaveZ

Member
Cleve said:
It was very poorly phrased, but I interpreted it as
"I'm not interested in (painting) her for sexual reasons", I don't think of it as an admission of anything else.
Click to expand...

I thought Yusuke's passage there was perfectly phrased there. I don't remember exactly what it was, but I at least immediately knew what he was saying when he said it.
 
F

ffvorax

Member
As a non english I find the translation ok, probably who is mother language find it more frequently errors...

That said, I'm loving the real world references like when you rental the dvd of "x files" (I don't remember the name in the game), even the things they say when you see it on the tv are reference to real episodes of the series! (as a fan I recognized them!)

I love these kind of things! :)
 
H

HowZatOZ

Banned
Honestly, from the screenshots I've seen of the written dialogue it sounds fine as an Australian English speaker. It may be because we here in Australia say weird shit but it reads like normal English bar some older ways of saying words and a few hiccups in grammar. Nothing terrible that would suck you out of the game, and in fact is kind of nice to see proper English.
 
T

TheBryanJZX90

Member
tansuikabutsu said:
Here's the thing - I use honorifics when speaking English with my Japanese colleagues. I often even use them when speaking with other English native speakers when we discuss Japanese friends. I think almost every foreigner who works in Japan does the same. It sounds super weird *not* to do that.

Honorifics are a strange case because they're lying somewhere that's not easily defined between the linguist and the extra-linguistic. Let me ask you this - are you mad when an English language depiction of German people speaking uses "Herr"? Or "Monsieur" and "Madame" for French? It's not really all that different, except it's much more prevalent (to the point it's all but required) in Japanese speech, plus the fact that it comes after the name which is strange to English-speakers' ears.

Honorifics, at least when used in a contemporary Japanese setting, is as much a cultural thing as ramen and onigiri are, except that they're also a little more linguistically complicated than simple nouns. If there are pros and cons about turning the latter into hamburgers and doughnuts, I think -san and -chan aren't such a clear cut case either.
Click to expand...

Hmm interesting thought with the Japanese colleagues. I did the same (though not all the time), but I'm​ not really convinced that means honorifics should be left as-is in a translated creative work. For me at least, when speaking English in a mixed Japanese and English business environment, I was always conscious of the effort my colleagues were putting out to communicate in their second language, and I'm always conscious of the Japanese grammatical and cultural rules of the environment and did my best to match my speech to it. The conversation ends up being more like speaking Japanese using English words than speaking English, in a way. Or like choosing a sentence in Japanese, then doing a quick translation into English. It comes out differently than what I would say if I was speaking to a native English speaker.


So, if the story of Persona was the story of an American working in Japan but speaking English, then yeah I would leave in honorifics. But that is a different context and a different set of concerns than that experienced by a group of Japanese high school students talking to each other.
 
H

Hypron

Member
Aarglefarg said:
It's unclear what people are saying is wrong with the pronunciation of Sakamoto, since some people have said different things. Does it emphasise Ka or Mo too much? Or is nothing emphasised?
Click to expand...

I think it just sounds like an English speaker reading the name like an English one and making 0 effort to try to get it right. Compare this and the first recording here.

If I were to try to explain the differences (my Japanese is pretty bad so someone else is free to correct me), the "o"s are pronounced with a very heavy English (as in, from an English speaker, not from a person from England) accent.

Also, another reason might be that Japanese doesn't have a stress accent like English - you don't stress specific parts of words. Instead, they have a pitch accent - the pitch changes between low and high between moras depending on the word.

Now, pronouncing foreign names perfectly can be hard and might even interrupt the flow of the sentence (I use the English pronunciation of my name when talking to people in English for example, since it just sounds plain weird to have guttural "r"s in an English sentence), so I'm not sure if it would have sounded much better even if they had made a better pronunciation effort.
 
E

encephalon

Member
To me, honorifics often feel as if they're an extension of names and are hardly there at all. That's not to say that there aren't times when they're meaningful and can't offer a nuances not present in English where they aren't translated. But most of the time including them in English seems to draw extra attention to them, where they would otherwise just flow with the Japanese.
 
A

Aarglefarg

Member
Hypron said:
I think it just sounds like an English speaker reading the name like an English one and making 0 effort to try to get it right. Compare this and the first recording here.

If I were to try to explain the differences (my Japanese is pretty bad so someone else is free to correct me), the "o"s are pronounced with a very heavy English (as in, from an English speaker, not from a person from England) accent.

Also, another reason might be that Japanese doesn't have a stress accent like English - you don't stress specific parts of words. Instead, they have a pitch accent - the pitch changes between low and high between moras depending on the word.

Now, pronouncing foreign names perfectly can be hard and might even interrupt the flow of the sentence (I use the English pronunciation of my name when talking to people in English for example, since it just sounds plain weird to have guttural "r"s in an English sentence), so I'm not sure if it would have sounded much better even if they had made a better pronunciation effort.
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Thank you very much. :)
 
P

Prismo

Neo Member
Altairax15 said:
playing with the Japanese audio, some parts are straight up not subtitled like the news segments. Thankfully my roommate was here to translate all of it.
Click to expand...

Hang on, what? How prevalent is this, been sitting on the game since release but was definitely planning on the jp voice track, should I not?
 
Rabid Dwarf 76

Rabid Dwarf 76

Member
Altairax15 said:
playing with the Japanese audio, some parts are straight up not subtitled like the news segments. Thankfully my roommate was here to translate all of it.
Click to expand...
Yeah. Same with watching DVDs. I can follow along a little bit but my Japanese isn't that great. My wife is usually on hand to explain what I didn't get. Really wish there were subs for ever line of dialogue.
 
Rabid Dwarf 76

Rabid Dwarf 76

Member
Prismo said:
Hang on, what? How prevalent is this, been sitting on the game since release but was definitely planning on the jp voice track, should I not?
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You don't miss that much but it is annoying. Make sure you you turn on subs in the options before starting with Japanese audio cause the default setting is unsubbed. I didn't understand the intro because of that.
 
L

Lunar15

Member
The awkward translation was extremely noticeable at the beginning, but everything's been really great since. The main cast's script feels pretty natural, if not more natural than P4's script. It's only when it's dealing with more formal dialogue, like politicians, news reports, and Igor that a more direct translation begins to sound wonky.
 
T

TheEndOfItAll

Neo Member
I think the examples presented here sound a lot worse outside of the context of the game. Now that I've seen some of them in game, they don't seem as bad.
 
M

Marmaladefire

Member
Lunar15 said:
The awkward translation was extremely noticeable at the beginning, but everything's been really great since. The main cast's script feels pretty natural, if not more natural than P4's script. It's only when it's dealing with more formal dialogue, like politicians, news reports, Igor, that a more direct translation begins to sound wonky.
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And that's when the dialogue is at it's best. I've seen people super salty over Ann's use of super salty and Ryuji saying "get rekt" and all but..That's who these characters are. That's what it translates to. Your weeb S Link has to be maxed out for you to defend a lot of the Formal/ Velvet Room/ "Authority" vs "Public"/"Child' and "Adult" oriented dialogue.
 
R

Rarius

Member
Still better than P3's, which turned P2, and by extension P1 into video games in-universe through the name of the MMO... despite characters from those games appearing in-universe through text.

I just recently realized how friggin weird that is.
 
M

Mupod

Member
31GhostsIV said:
I'm 23 hours in and the only part that's bothered me is the use of the 'word' prolly.
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hah, my sentiments exactly.

some of the out of context screenshots in here seemed bad but in the actual game I haven't had any problems with the dialogue. Except that. I was expecting some DUWANG tier translation problems but it's been just fine.

I'm currently in the middle of July in-game using Japanese voices.
 
P

PshycoNinja

Member
The localization is bothersome, but not unbearable. The feeling I get is that either localization ran out of time or the loc testers didn't get enough time.

Either way, the localization isn't bad. It just isn't as stellar as Atlus's previous Persona works.
 
A

Aeana

Member
Rarius said:
Still better than P3's, which turned P2, and by extension P1 into video games in-universe through the name of the MMO... despite characters from those games appearing in-universe through text.

I just recently realized how friggin weird that is.
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This didn't happen. Innocent Sin Online in P3 is just a fun reference. It doesn't mean Innocent Sin is suddenly an MMO. There are actual in-game references to Persona 1 and 2 characters and entities, like Nanjo Group.
 
F

Fjordson

Member
I continue to see some really clunky lines the more I play, but I will say that the English cast is absolutely stellar. One of the best dubs I've heard in recent memory.
 
R

Rarius

Member
Aeana said:
This didn't happen. Innocent Sin Online in P3 is just a fun reference. It doesn't mean Innocent Sin is suddenly an MMO. There are actual in-game references to Persona 1 and 2 characters and entities, like Nanjo Group.
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...Which is why it's weird. The S-Link is completely fabricated for the Western release, it's a generic MMO in Japanese, in English, both the name of the game and the girl's character name is changed to something from Persona 2, she calls herself Maya. While the game still has direct references to 1 and 2 translated perfectly fine.
 
D

Dio

Banned
https://twitter.com/ritobito/status/851514016409276417

lZiIqh9.jpg
 
L

Lumpy Onion

Member
Saw the enemy called "Silky" last night and wondered if they just saw the dress and thought that made sense. Pretty sure it's supposed to be "Selkie", but maybe it's a play on words. And I dunno if I like seeing "Pan" when people are talking about bread.

Overall it isn't too bad though. Dub is nice.
 
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