Gamasutra - Q&A - Translating The Humor & Tone of Yakuza Games For The West

Gamasutra - Q&A: Translating the humor & tone of Yakuza games for the West https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/314068/QA_Translating_the_humor__tone_of_Yakuza...
SEARCH LOGIN GAME JOBS
UPDATES GO BLOGS CONTRACTORS NEWSLETTER GAME CAREER SEARC H GO

GUIDE
ALL CONSOLE/PC SMARTPHONE/TABLET INDEPENDENT VR/AR SOC IAL/ONLINE
Member Login
Email: Q&A: Translating the humor &
Password:
tone of Yakuza games for the
Forgot Password? Sign Up
West
February 5, 2018 | By Alex Wawro
PROGRAMMING February 5, 2018 | By Alex Wawro

Page 1 of 2 Next
2 comments
ART
Each of Sega's Yakuza games contains multitudes.
More: Console/PC, Design
AUDIO For example, Yakuza 0 (the series prequel released
outside of Japan early last year) sets itself up as a
DESIGN playable crime serial set in '80s Japan.
PRODUCTION But it can also be a cabaret management game, a

blind date sim, a 3D beat-'em-up, an emulator of old
BIZ/MARKETING Sega arcade classics, a rhythm game, a light-hearted
RPG about solving stranger's problems, a real estate
management game, and a surprisingly good place to
Latest Jobs
learn the basics of tabletop games like shogi and
View All RSS
mahjong.
1 de 11 06/09/2020 15:25
September 6, 2020 From a developer's perspective, the scope of such a

project seems daunting. From a player's
Visual Concepts
perspective, it can be overwhelming -- my partner
Camera Designer
and I recently completed Yakuza 0, and saw that
Remedy Entertainment
our 87 hours of combined play merited a
Senior Gameplay
"completion" score of roughly 33 percent.
Designer (World
Systems)
The hook that holds together all these disparate
Senior Gameplay
game design elements, that pulled us and scores of
Designer (Combat) Western players like us through the game, is the
writing. For all its focus on cold-hearted criminals
Senior Cinematic Scripter and petty evil, Yakuza 0 is a remarkably funny
game; it affords players the freedom to quickly
Hidden Path
jump from incredibly serious, macabre scenes (a
Entertainment
Senior Level Designer criminal is tortured in a warehouse) to (teach a shy
punk band to act like Cool Rude Dudes in public).
Embodied Inc.
Game Designer
That writing is translated and localized for the West by Atlus (alongside longtime series translator
Inbound) starting with Yakuza 0 and continuing on through Yakuza Kiwami (a remake of the original 2005
Latest Blogs game) and Yakuza 6. The localization of all three games has been overseen by Atlus' Scott Strichart, who
recently sat down to chat about the ins and outs of adapting these games' humor and gravity for Western
View All Post RSS
players.
September 6, 2020
It was an interesting conversation that went beyond the localization process (Atlus uses a
India bans further 118 translator/editor tag-team approach, rather than relying on translators alone) to touch on how, exactly,
Chinese mobile apps: A you translate humor, and how players in different regions can view a game or its characters completely
blow for players, but an
differently. What follows is a version of that conversation we've edited for clarity.
opportunity for
competing publishers
The Yakuza games have a winning sense of humor. How do you translate that
Are the 'store wars'
for a Western audience?
really upon us? [1]
Throwing Exceptions as Strichart: The humor of a Yakuza game is a fine line to walk. It's very clear when the developers want to
Expressions in Unity - be funny. It's very clear to us when the writing that exists in the game is supposed to be like, "ha ha
The C# 7 Way here's a joke." So we just want to make sure that if they intended for it to be funny, it also has to be
Democratizing PySpark funny to our audience. Whether or not that means changing the dialogue a little bit, changing the style in
for Mobile Game which it's delivered, making dialogue options a little bit more punchy, that kind of thing.
Publishing
We need to take Steam One of the perfect examples is, [in Yakuza 0] Majima encounters this...did you play the substory where he
wishlist quality more goes to infiltrate a cult? In that substory, one of the options he has is to crack a pun, in order to get this
seriously [2]
girl to snap out of her cult tendencies. So in Japanese, that pun is "futon ga futon da", which means "a
futon is a futon" or, "a futon flies." It's a pun on words. It's basically a "why did the chicken cross the
road" kind of joke.
2 de 11 06/09/2020 15:25
If we literally translated that, it wouldn't work. If we put in "why did the chicken cross the road?" it's not
Press Releases
much of a pun; it doesn't feel in line with Majima's character.
September 6, 2020
Games Press
GRAVEN, 3D Realms’
Spiritual Successor to
Hexen...
RIDE 4 für PlayStation 5

und Xbox Series X
angek ...
RIDE 4 ANNOUNCED FOR

PLAYSTATION 5 AND
XBOX
SERIES...
BGG Entertainment
Reveals
Remastered Edition for
...
MINIMALISTIC
ADVENTURE
ALT 254 RELEASES
TODAY ...
View All RSS
So that's where we had to come up with this pun that we ultimately went with, which was "how do you
About avoid dangerous cults? Practice safe sects!"
Editor-In-Chief:
Kris Graft Okay, let's drill into that localization process -- how, exactly, did you go from a
Editor:
flying futon joke to a safe sex joke?
Alex Wawro
Well it wasn't just me -- we have a team of translators and editors who approach these games. These
News Editor: games are massive; if they were left to just me, i'd be buried under each of these games for years! Most
Alissa McAloon
of these Yakuza games actually are on par or greater than your average JRPG, in terms of volume of text.
Contributors:
Chris Kerr How many lines of text were you working with in Yakuza 0?
Bryant Francis
Katherine Cross Yakuza 0 is 1.8 million JPC (Japanese characters), and the average JRPG is, I think, 1 million to 1.2. So
we were well above the average there.
Contact Gamasutra
So anyway, how our process works is, the scripts come in from Japan, and we divvy them up to certain
Report a Problem
translators and editors to make sure there's consistency among the sections that they're doing.
Submit News
3 de 11 06/09/2020 15:25
Comment Guidelines
So that particular pun was in a substory, for instance, so
the translation team who was on that was one of our
Blogging Guidelines outsourced translators, who was doing most of the "We just want to
Majima substories. Because they were familiar with
How We Work Majima as a character, they were familiar with the
make sure that if [the
Download Media Kit
substory content, and all that kind of stuff. devs] intended for it
These kinds of localization issues, we don't know about to be funny, it also
them until we hit them. We're doing it line by line, and
suddenly we're like "oh shit, here's a pun." And when you
has to be funny to
hit that, you have to take a step back and say okay, this our audience.
Gama Network isn't going to be a direct translation. We have to deal
with it -- sometimes that comes down to a discussion Whether or not that
If you enjoy reading this site,
amongst editors and translators, or sometimes a
you might also want to check
translator will flag it for the editor to say "I didn't know
means changing the
out these UBM Tech sites:
what to do with this, man. Let's talk about this." dialogue a little bit,
Game Career Guide
So when that gets to the editor, the editor's job might be changing the style in
to come up with a way to make that pun palatable to the
Indie Games
Western audience. That's generally the Atlus approach, is
which it's delivered,
we use editors to refine the translated English text to making dialogue
make sure it makes sense to Western players.
options a little bit
A lot of companies don't do it this way. And it's not right
or wrong, but a lot of companies dedicate a single
more punchy, that
translator who has the ability to translate Japanese to kind of thing."
English, and make it good English. Whereas we use a
method where the translators give an editor, not a literal
translation, but translated words off the page that don't
necessarily scream "this is great English." That allows an editor to come in and refine that text to make it
palatable to a Western audience, whether or not that editor even speaks Japanese.
I really enjoy that style, actually. Back when I was the first localization employee at Level-5, it was kind
of up to me to establish that style. I could have just thrown the work at a translation agency and let them
go, but I thought it was a good idea to give it a more personal touch.
So we brought in a translator and, you know, when an editor meets a translator and they learn their style
through working with them on a game or two, and you can almost feel their style through the text, you
develop this like, symbiotic relationship with that translator. And that's kind of how I felt about that
translator who was working on Attack of the Friday Monsters with me. It worked out really well.
So why do you think it's a good idea to use an editor/translator team, rather
4 de 11 06/09/2020 15:25
than just a single translator?

Well, it's not right or wrong. I think that both ways of doing localization have advantages and
disadvantages. The advantages of this method are that it's a little more collaborative.
A translator gets to talk to an editor, and if you hit a line you're gonna stumble on, you can actually get a
lot of insight into what that character is about, what they're saying, and kind of hash it out between you.
If the editor kind of strays too far, the translator can kind of rein them back in and say "well, it's a little
closer to the Japanese this way", and you end up refining a line to the point where it's a bit more
accurate, or more true to what a Japanese developer was trying to convey. And that's something you
can't get if you're just a single translator, a single mind trying to parse a game's text as best you can.
There's no dialogue.
The second advantage is that, when editors are working on something, and they have less or no Japanese
fluency -- I don't claim to have Japanese fluency -- we bring a creative writing aspect to these texts that
might otherwise be just a direct translation. And a direct translation, that's not a localization. Not if you
just translate something directly, that's often not enjoyable to read. It leaves humor behind, it ends up
dry, it ends up boring to read.
What do you lose by using this tag-team method? Besides the extra costs, of
course.
Here's the disadvantages: we're slower. When a game is translated, that's work that could be finalized,
but then it then goes to an editor, who is then tasked with finalizing it. We try to mitigate that by making
sure translators are going when editors roll onto a project, so you end up with this kind of lock-step
process. But at the end of the day, it is a bit slower than if a single mind just translated the text and
delivered it.
Is that why the Yakuza games seem to take a year or more, on average, to come
to the West?
No, that is not why! [Laughs] We are closing the gap. That is my directive from management: "close the
gap." Yakuza 5 was two years in the process, and that was because Sega literally closed their office up
here [in San Francisco] and the project sort of stumbled out the door. 0 came back into our hands, once
we'd established operation out of Atlus, and that took us, I want to say, a year and a half?
5 de 11 06/09/2020 15:25
Kiwami was a little bit less, a year and two months. And Yakuza 6 was....a year? A year and three
months? If you look at the past 6 months, where we've released essentially 3 titles, a Yakuza game every
6 months, no one else is accomplishing this. This is practically impossible. The fact that we're getting it
done, with the quality level tht we're held to for this series, is a marvel for my team. I'm nothing but
impressed with everyone's hard work on this.
Fair enough! What challenges have you faced along the way towards closing that
gap?
To go back to that other disadvantage, on the translator/editor route. It's consistency. The more people
you bring onto a team, the more people who touch it, the more likely you are to create inconsistencies.
Amongst terms, amongst the way characters talk, amongst spellings, all of that stuff has to be mitigated.
You have to have a strategy for that.
What I'm talking about is like, this person is capitalizing

the word patriarch. Or this person is using "jeez" with j
instead of "geez" with a g. And you end up with a
character that seems to speak in two different ways, or "The more people
worse, you end up with literally different interpretations
of a character. you bring onto a
6 de 11 06/09/2020 15:25
When we did Radiant Historia, I decided that a character

was going to have a little bit of a British lean in his voice.
team, the more
And I talked to the other editor about it, and even with people who touch it,
that understanding...we ended up with completely
different British leans! Because one of us understood the more likely you
cockney and one of us didn't.
are to create
And that's something that's now actually getting fixed. inconsistencies...You
And you can mitigate some of that in QA, but those little
miscommunications, if you don't have very strong have to have a
communication amongst your group, especially as it
grows beyond a couple editors and translators, these
strategy for that."
consistency problems balloon, and it has to be mitigated
by a producer and/or a consistency pass on the text.
What advice would you give others trying to do something similar with their
own games?
Focus on consistency and clarity. As a producer, I am the consistency pass. I am the voice on how
characters should sound. I'm very upfront with my teams; we have daily standing meetings about our
challenges that we're hitting, and we discuss these things upfront in terms-less meetings.
We try to frontload the localization as much as possible, with these meetings, with regular discussions to
hammer out the fine details. And at the end, you know text goes through a translator, it goes through an
editor, and then I act as a consistency pass.
With Yakuza 6, for instance, we rolled a new editor into writing the main story, and he didn't have a
strong grasp of Kiryu's character. Until probably, halfway through the game. So in going back through his
text, I end up tweaking probably 80 percent of the text. Because I'm a perfectionist. I shouldn't be doing
it that much, but I do. And I told him, you know, your Kiryu's way stronger in the latter half than in the
beginning. So I'm going to go back and kind of rewrite your beginning. And he was totally onboard with
that.
Do you have any sense of how Japanese players perceive

the Yakuza protagonists?
In Japanese, I feel like Kiryu is a little bit more of an avatar for the player. He uses a lot more ellipses
than we do in the English version, because we actually want our audience to identify with Kiryu as a
character. Whereas in Japanese, you might want to be like, I can put myself in Kiryu's shoes. I can be this
Japanese badass.
7 de 11 06/09/2020 15:25
It's a bigger leap to expect a Western audience to be like "ah, I can be this Japanese badass." So we give
Kiryu a little bit more of his own characterization, that is very much in line with the Japanese when they
do characterize him. So there's no gap there; it's just a matter of trying to bridge that gap Western
audiences might face in trying to fully identify with a Japanese character.
How do you decide when to write in an original response, one that's not in the
Japanese version?
When a Japanese person would know what he's thinking, because they're able to put himself in his shoes,
or they might have a better idea of what's going through Kiryu's head, that's when we bridge the gap.
When we decide okay, the player needs to understand a little bit more of what's going through Kiryu's
head, because this isn't an immediately known quantity to them.
And Japanese storytelling can be very subtle, at times. And we don't want to be blunt and hammer
players over the head with "hey this is what they're trying to say", but sometimes we do have to lead
them a bit. We have to look at the text and be like, this is clearly trying to convey this subtle aspect of
masculinity, or honor, because this is what these cultural signifiers mean. And then we have to present
something to the player that makes it clear hey, this is a Japanese concept of honor, so please
understand that through this thought process that Kiryu is having in the middle of it all.
What's a good example of that?
8 de 11 06/09/2020 15:25
So, Majima's whole transformation from Yakuza 0 to Yakuza Kiwami. Longtime Yakuza fans know Majima
is this class clown, kind of joker-esque personality. And when 0 [a prequel] came along, they decided to
completely flip the script on this character [and present him very differently]. So you might get the idea
that in playing through 0, Majima is going to be going kind of insane.
But that's not really the Japanese take on that. The whole point of 0 is not to show that he goes insane,
but to show that he makes a conscious choice to...let loose. And it is subtle in the game, even despite our
best efforts to be a bit more blunt about it, especially in the scenes with Nishitani [a loud, brash
character] where it's clear Majima is gaining insight into how someone like that would live.
We brought that out a little bit more, specifically asking the devs "did you mean to communicate this?"
Because even we were like, this is really, really subtle, guys. Were you trying to communicate a direct
kind of correlation between Nishitani and Majima? And they were like, "yes. If you feel like you can bring
that a little more obviously, without adjusting the text to the point that it doesn't make sense or it's not in
line with the original, then go for it." And we did! And it's still very subtle. People, at the end of the game,
they say well, Majima went insane. And it's like well, heh, let me show you the scenes where he didn't go
insane, where it's supposed to be clear he made a deliberate choice.
Page 1 of 2 Next
Tweet Like 134 Share 232
Related Jobs
Remedy Remedy Remedy

Entertainment — Entertainment — Entertainment —
Espoo, Finland Espoo, Finland Espoo, Finland
Visual Concepts —
[09.04.20] [09.04.20] [09.04.20]
Agoura Hills,
Senior Gameplay Senior Gameplay Senior Cinematic
California, United
Designer (World Designer (Combat) Scripter
States
Systems)
[09.04.20]
Camera Designer
[View All Jobs]
9 de 11 06/09/2020 15:25
Top Stories
Game Discoverability Nintendo eShop Blog: Dynamic map With profit and
Now: Are the 'store policy change gives elements in RTS revenue on the rise,
wars' really upon us? shoppers more time games CD Projekt heaps
to cancel pre-orders praise on The
Witcher 3
[Next News Story] [View All]
Comments
Ron Dippold 5 Feb 2018 at 10:46 am PST
Great interview, thanks.
I always appreciate the translator/editor setup for a much better read as long as you don't
go full Working Designs on it. The Yakuza games and XSeed's Trails translations are amazing
labors of love that read very well. When there's an 'issue' like the aniki thing I know it's
because you made a style decision that upset some purists, not because you don't know
what it means. Persona 5 had some glitches, but that may be the sheer amount of text and
outsourcing.
Login to Reply or Like 1
Boris Piker 6 Feb 2018 at 12:41 pm PST
nice read
Login to Reply or Like
10 de 11 06/09/2020 15:25
Discover More From Informa Tech Working With Us
Game Developers Contact us

Conference
About Us
Independent Games
Advertise
Festival
Gamasutra Jobs
Game Developers Choice

Follow Gamasutra On
Awards Social
GDC Vault
Omdia
Game Career Guide
Home Cookies
CCPA: Do not sell my personal info Privacy
Terms
Copyright © 2020 Informa PLC Informa UK Limited is a
company registered in England and Wales with company
number 1072954 whose registered office is 5 Howick Place,
London, SW1P 1WG.
11 de 11 06/09/2020 15:25

Gamasutra - Q&A - Translating The Humor & Tone of Yakuza Games For The West

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Gamasutra - Q&A - Translating The Humor & Tone of Yakuza Games For The West

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Gamasutra - Q&A: Translating the humor & tone of Yakuza games for the West https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/314068/QA_Translating_the_humor__tone_of_Yakuza...

SEARCH LOGIN GAME JOBS

UPDATES GO BLOGS CONTRACTORS NEWSLETTER GAME CAREER SEARC H GO

ALL CONSOLE/PC SMARTPHONE/TABLET INDEPENDENT VR/AR SOC IAL/ONLINE

PROGRAMMING February 5, 2018 | By Alex Wawro

PRODUCTION But it can also be a cabaret management game, a

September 6, 2020 From a developer's perspective, the scope of such a

RIDE 4 für PlayStation 5

RIDE 4 ANNOUNCED FOR

View All RSS

than just a single translator?

What I'm talking about is like, this person is capitalizing

When we did Radiant Historia, I decided that a character

Do you have any sense of how Japanese players perceive

What's a good example of that?

Tweet Like 134 Share 232

Remedy Remedy Remedy

[View All Jobs]

[Next News Story] [View All]

Ron Dippold 5 Feb 2018 at 10:46 am PST

Great interview, thanks.

Login to Reply or Like 1

Boris Piker 6 Feb 2018 at 12:41 pm PST

Login to Reply or Like

Discover More From Informa Tech Working With Us

Game Developers Contact us

Game Developers Choice

Game Career Guide

CCPA: Do not sell my personal info Privacy

You might also like