I will break all the lightbulbs in your home with my hand

This is a way better threat than “Im gonna punch your lights out”

One of my favourite instances of adaptation got to be Ted Woolsey’s “son of a submariner! They’ll pay for this…”, for the English localisation of Final Fantasy III / VI.

In the game, Kefka (the villain) is saying this as the heroes escape him, but the original only says “ヒーーー　くっそー！このかりは必ず返しますよ!”; literally “heeee shit! I will definitively return this debt” or similar. However:

• That “ヒーーー” interjection has no meaning on its own. It’s only there to highlight the character’s emotional state. It could be safely removed, without loss of meaning.
• くそ / 糞 kuso “crap! shit!” is vulgar, but by no means as vulgar as English “shit”. Specially given the 90s, and this game being marketed to kids. But it means the villain is being rude towards the heroes (makes sense, right).

So, translating it as simply “hey you!” or similar would mutilate the original, by removing the rudeness. But at the same time, Woolsey couldn’t use “shit” or “crap” or similar. So he looked at the context:

• Kefka is crazy, and the way he uses Japanese in the original is odd. For example, he uses the pronoun “ぼくちん” bokuchin to refer to himself, as if he was a kid - and yet he’s a court mage of an empire dammit. (It’s a bit deeper than that, but let’s focus.)
• a bit before Kefka says this, there’s a city in the desert also fleeing Kefka - by going underground instead, as if it was some sort of “sand submarine”.

So Woolsey went with “son of a submariner!”, something he likely made up on the spot. And you know what? It’s perfect - it’s completely on-character for Kefka to insult people in such a weird way.

O.G. San is such a good name.

This is exactly why lazily throwing your game’s text into a machine translation tool is not the same as hiring an actual localisation specialist.

I do a *literal translation where I want to preserve the original context of words. Otherwise I generally just go for stage 3 to get the gist of what a writer or speaker means, and usually it’s a combination of the two, I don’t try to use different idioms.

So “I’ll punch your lights out” might likely become “I’ll beat you so that the lights in your eyes go out” if I were to translate to Japanese (*translated back).

It’s a neat way to show how each person translating has their own style. (And how Japanese news and diplomatic translators have had a rough time with Trump, forced to sanewash a lot).

“How ‘bout a nice Hawaiian Punch?”

“Sure!”

assault

DO NOT WANT!

But AI can do that! - my first attempt at rage bait.

Can you imagine what the foreign press must go thru trying to interpret the shit that comes out of Trump’s mouth. Then, having translated his garbage, explaining that it is all a lie. He’s a nightmare in US English.