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Nintendo Translator On Miyamoto, Mr. Resetti
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."
My nomination would be Metal Gear. "The truck have started to move!" "I feel asleep!" See this link for more fun dialogue.
It's a TRS-80, as in TRASH 80
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.
Maybe engrish video games are just english people who have bad grammar. From the interview:
"I had never met Mr. Miyamoto before so we go down to San Jose on a Monday and I meet him, and the speech is on Wednesday night and I was really nervous meeting him, and he was really nervous because he had his first speech in front of a large US audience and we go the night of the speech and rehearse and people had been standing in line for a very long time to get into this arena in San Jose to hear him speak and we're trying to sneak in these back doors and there's a line of people waiting to get in, and we get back stage and we're all nervous and the thing filled up almost instantaneously will about 3000 plus people and it was standing room only and he was really worried because he had to go out and speak in English at first without me, and I felt really uncomfortable because I was just this translator guy and he's going to go out and speak in English and then he's going to introduce me, and I'm like, "I shouldn't be introduced by Shigeru Miyamoto!"
Holy run-on batman!
There are a handful of other companies that do this as well, and many more or less contract out the localization (for better or worse) to companies that normally do English-language games.
I noticed once that Namco, for instance, was hiring people for translation/localization work in California.
I've never really understood why people would go through the trouble of localization for a major market without bothering to actually get people from that market that speak the language as their native language to do the translation. The only real reason to do it would be due to cost concerns, and at that point you usually get what you pay for.
-PainKilleR-[CE]