Lost in translation

[RCBH928]

Honestly I had no way to make this topic have an interesting title
its just a simple question

Why do some Japanese developers release Japanese only games?
I understand that American games not released there maybe because they don't care,
but when Japan releases a Japanese only game they release a game for 1 country. When America makes American releases they are basically making world wide game that is excluding ONLY Japan.

Do they not want to make money? Is it really that expensive to translate text?
I heard stuff like the Saturn is not worth it without the Japanese games, if so , why have they not translated them back then?
Creating the game is the hard part, translating is the super easy I guess

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

Back in the 90's US SEGA pres. Bernie Stolar individually handpicked every game to be published/translated for the US. His policy was that RPG, Strategy, and other non mass appeal (at the time) genres wouldn't sell well in the US, so he decided to take the Saturn in a arcade/action/mass appeal direction for the Western market. These decisions along with discontinuing the Saturn in the US prematurely without approval from SEGA of Japan, and pricing the US Dreamcast at $50 less at launch than it cost elsewhere caused SEGA to literally fire him on the eve of the Dreamcast's US launch.

So if you have anyone to be angry at for missing out on some of the best games ever made for any SEGA system it'd be Bernie Stolar.

[MrPopo]

Really, up until this console generation pretty much every Japanese developer would create games to suit the Japanese audience. Then the American branches of the parent companies and independents like Atlus and Working Designs would go and pick which Japanese games they want to localize and release in the US (I'm not even going to get into PAL, as that seems to be a giant clusterfuck). Sometimes a game wouldn't be translated because it was released too late in the console's life. Frequently a game wouldn't come out in the US until a year after the JP release date, so a game released in Japan at the end of a console's life would definately not be released in the US. In the 32-bit era there was also a lot of pressure from Sega and Sony to not localize games like RPGs, due to them not being "cool" enough. And then some games weren't translated because they were determined to be too "Japanese" for the Western audiences, and wouldn't sell enough to be worth the cost of localization.

[Original_Name]

Back in the 90's US SEGA pres. Bernie Stolar individually handpicked every game to be published/translated for the US. His policy was that RPG, Strategy, and other non mass appeal (at the time) genres wouldn't sell well in the US, so he decided to take the Saturn in a arcade/action/mass appeal direction for the Western market. These decisions along with discontinuing the Saturn in the US prematurely without approval from SEGA of Japan, and pricing the US Dreamcast at $50 less at launch than it cost elsewhere caused SEGA to literally fire him on the eve of the Dreamcast's US launch.

So if you have anyone to be angry at for missing out on some of the best games ever made for any SEGA system it'd be Bernie Stolar.

To add to that, though, Sega had to play catch-up from the very beginning because their Japanese department arrogantly chose to go with the confusing, underpowered hardware that we now know as the Saturn, ignoring Sega of America's acquisition of what would become the Nintendo 64 board (which they would have coupled with CD-Rom capabilities, making it far and beyond the most powerful console that generation) for reasons that suggest nothing other than a sense of national pride and loyalty.

But Bernie Stolar's a dick, too. Big business ruined Sega, but their software stayed strong throughout; shame Bernie kept so much of it from us.

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

Back in the 90's US SEGA pres. Bernie Stolar individually handpicked every game to be published/translated for the US. His policy was that RPG, Strategy, and other non mass appeal (at the time) genres wouldn't sell well in the US, so he decided to take the Saturn in a arcade/action/mass appeal direction for the Western market. These decisions along with discontinuing the Saturn in the US prematurely without approval from SEGA of Japan, and pricing the US Dreamcast at $50 less at launch than it cost elsewhere caused SEGA to literally fire him on the eve of the Dreamcast's US launch.

So if you have anyone to be angry at for missing out on some of the best games ever made for any SEGA system it'd be Bernie Stolar.

To add to that, though, Sega had to play catch-up from the very beginning because their Japanese department arrogantly chose to go with the confusing, underpowered hardware that we now know as the Saturn, ignoring Sega of America's acquisition of what would become the Nintendo 64 board (which they would have coupled with CD-Rom capabilities, making it far and beyond the most powerful console that generation) for reasons that suggest nothing other than a sense of national pride and loyalty.

But Bernie Stolar's a dick, too. Big business ruined Sega, but their software stayed strong throughout; shame Bernie kept so much of it from us.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

[RCBH928]

I still have a hard time understanding why would they not release it in the US?
So what if it doesn't have an audience or its too Japanese?
I think just 1000 units of sales would cover the costs of the translation?

Or are they factoring in all the marketing and advertising for the game to its cost?
I do not think it would hurt any one to just release it with no marketing, what ever units it sell its going to make a extra profit simply because translation is not expensive. I mean I bet some of the Japanese employees who worked on the game originally can do it.

[Pulsar_t]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2 ... _game_.php

You have to look at this from a Japanese perspective. Localising a game for other regions is no easy task.. if the publisher can forecast decent returns then they'd probably go for it. But other times, like Hideo Kojima's Policenauts, it becomes more personal than logistical, and the person(s) holding the rights to the game would decide to keep the game exclusive to Nippon.

Many European games never make it to the US either..

[MrPopo]

Translating from Japanese to English is much harder than from French or German to English. There is a large fundamental difference between Japanese and English which makes translation difficult. Then add in all the words that have no equivalent in English, like the honorifics, and the puns, which just won't work when you translate them (you either change the translation to create an English pun or add a translation note, the latter being unavailable for games) and you have a major production just to get an English script. Then there are issues with the difference in how the writing systems work. You can say a lot more in Japanese than in English given equal amounts of screen space, so it may require extensive reprogramming or changes to the translation to get everything to fit. It's a much more involved process than one might think.

[Haoie]

Plus, when you translate, you need "more intensity".

[RCBH928]

thanx for all the replies

While I understand the difficulties of translation being bilingual myself, but because of that I understand something. Its not really translation, its localization. That is the trick...

Sure you can't translate a culture, you can't translate a Japanese joke or an idiom but the trick is localization . You see you have to change the whole text to fit the pictures and the story line as if it was American/English made, and you can add whatever you want or take whatever just so it works.

I swear by this , you do not want to know much this works. Where I am we had cartoons as kids that everybody loves and got beautiful memories of them. I will be honest, up until few years earlier I thought those were locally made, it was that good I couldn't imagine something else. It turned out to be its really Japanese anime, I couldn't figure out they were Japanese earlier on because the anime didn't look Japanese and I couldn't figure out the housing structure and the settings on the mountains and everything else. Its so different that they change main character's names, imagine Sonic is Sonic only in the US and in Russia he is Blue Alfred. It really really works.

One famous cartoon here is called "Adnan and Lina" , I do not even know its English name or Japanese. By mistake I happened to find it on the web as Future Boy Conan!! Lina is not even in the title!!!

So basically they have to change everything to make it fix up with the culture. Now days they just directly translate everything word by word and they use American animation and it SUCKS, like really really SUCKS,.

trust me, if where I am they could do localization back in the 70's and the 80's of Japanese anime, America can do it in 2009 with Japanese videogames.