#videogame localization

[metale--deidara]

I made that post about Tobias the Fox and his issues with languages that aren't his own and the one he gets off to. And I hate to be proven right again and again.

It's pretty sad both as someone who used to be a very big fan of the game that also happens to be a translator, interpreter and localizer, how many languages that aren't english are seen as "second class languages" and "languages of the poor", even if they're spoken by a great chunk of the Earth's population. Is easy to see, with examples like this, why the director of Emilia Pérez said what he said.

Is also pretty tiring seeing "woke" usamericans trying to defend their idol of the day by using the shortcomings and bigotry of their culture as a justification of why a game dev or an artist may have the bigoted beliefs they have, how it's not their fault (infantilization to an extent), and going as far as to attack those fighting for their right to enjoy media.

I repeat what I said in that post: People from Italy, Chile, Brazil, Germany, Morocco, China, Indonesia, etc. have the right to enjoy media in their language and shouldn't fell subjugated, in the year 2026, of learning a language that in many cases differs vastly from their own or rely on fantranslations, which as much as I'm for the practice, most of the time is an amateur unpaid job that doesn't get appreciated or properly credited in most cases.

And the case of Undertale/Deltarune is not the case of say Horsey Game or any other similar small indie developments that probably can't afford an official localization. Tobias the Fox is rich, he could clearly hire localizers and linguists to help him supervise the job.

[metale--deidara]

The day Tobias the Fox learns that the puns and the slang of Undertale have already lost their meaning or their humor because it's been a DECADE since his game releases, and that they'll get more and more outdated as time passes because languages EVOLVE and culture EVOLVES; and they ADAPT to society and its speakers, his brain will explode.

Outside of academic language and linguistic rules, there is not such thing as "perfect language" and "perfect idioms". Even those rules and vocabulary have to change over the years because, again, LANGUAGES EVOLVE! They CHANGE! And that's happened since language as a concept has been invented!

Tobias the Fox doesn't translate his videogames to other languages except japanese (and that's because he wants his game to sell on Nintendo hardware) because of wanting a "perfect translation" or because "it's too much text that could lose it's meaning," it's because he's either lazy, greedy or has some form of internalized bigotry that he doesn't want to acknowledge or introspect on.

A person from Chile, from Italy, from Germany, from South Africa, from Morocco, from China... should be able to play the game without having to rely on fantranslations or with learning another language that in many cases differs so much from their native one.

Maybe this is controversial to say on the "pissing on the poor" and "usamerica is the only country on earth" website. But as a translator and localizer I find this situation and many more like this one pathetic and incompetent. It's 2026, if adaptability controls are being normalized in videogames, localizing them should be as well.