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I have experience in this. I translated exclusive Japanese-only content for a game for the PSP from Japanese into English (fan translation, not professional). At the time, I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. It was just myself and a python hacker who was extracting the script, and I was essentially handed the entire script within a Google Sheets document. Given how context-heavy Japanese is, it was nearly impossible to translate exactly what was going on as the Google Sheets only contained the additional content and not the full game script. Even if I did have the game script, there are still certain contextual things which are only realized when seeing what was happening to the characters on the screen. I ended up watching an entire "Let's Play" of the series in order to get the gist of the story, get the character names correct, and see how the original translators localized everything. I took cues from their localization and did the best take I could at the time in order to translate it while balancing heavy workloads at school. I'm both somewhat proud of the translation and somewhat disappointed in it. I feel as if I could do a much better job if I had more free time to update it, but localization is kinda like an art. Very few people will translate the same content the same way - even the same person might translate the same lines differently at different points in time. I do something completely different these days and don't get to utilize my Japanese nearly as much, but I'd definitely be up for another game translation again. While you may be bound by certain external forces (pre-localized content you need to mesh with, author's wishes, censorship, etc), there is still a lot of freedom and liberty in localizing. After all, it's your job to retell this story as best you can to your target audience, and it requires both knowing the source material's culture, as well as your own. In fact, it probably requires knowing your target culture even more so, and it's this type of creative challenge that really got me excited back in the day. |