Nintendo Translator On Miyamoto, Mr. Resetti

Posted by simoniker on Monday October 13, 2003 @02:57AM from the don-resetti-upset-at-lack-of-mention dept.

Thanks to Game Informer for their interview with Nintendo Of America translator/localizer, Bill Trinen. He discusses being Shigeru Miyamoto's translator for American trade shows, as well as localizing many of Nintendo's top titles, and says a major challenge is that "...up until recently, there hasn't been a whole lot of continuity... I think originally on the NES [Zelda] Ganon's name was spelled with two N's. We've actually been going back and trying to solidify and define all the terminology and the names of all the franchises." He also discusses Mr.Resetti, the mole who chides you when you reset without saving in Animal Crossing, saying: "...in Japanese Resetti had this very, very gruff Osaka accent and [the translator] took that and... as he was writing it he was saying the lines out loud in the thickest Bronx accent you could think of."

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Re:Narrow vocabulary for a translator... by AndyBusch · 2003-10-13 04:31 · Score: 2, Insightful

He also said stuff was simply "funny" a lot. But bear in mind that speaking vocabularies and styles can be dramatically different than written vocabularies. I've always been impressed by how clean and funny the Nintendo translations are.

Compare that to other games, where they pretty clearly got a Japanese speaker who knows English rather than an English speaker who knows Japanese, and you get things like in Final Fantasy 7 when a certain four letter profanity has an apostrophe in it, as though it was a contraction.