Here, we have loads of lines which have absolutely NO business being awkward. Like the principle's "You might have done a variety of things in hiding in your hometown, but you will behave yourself here."
It makes sense, just about. But it doesn't sound like much thought has been given to make it sound like what someone would actually say. It would have got across exactly the same sort of sentiment to say:
"Perhaps you thought you could get away with being a troublemaker back home, but you'd better keep in line while you're here."
Both versions express the same sentiment, and neither are disastrous but the first reads like a '1st pass' sort of translation, get the meaning across, don't worry about making it sound natural, and the second sounds a bit more like how the line might read had it been written in English initially.
And again, I think most of these lacklustre translations come up during the main plot sequences - less so with the side stuff.
That line is actually specifically one of the lines that was listed on the site that I didn't think had any issues, and this is kinda why I posted what I did. That is a completely proper and natural English sentence that I wouldn't second-guess at all if someone said out loud to me tomorrow. If I was going to change something, I'd probably change 'might' to 'may' and 'a variety of things' to 'various things,' but that's just because I, personally, prefer to speak more colloquially/casually than formally (though, it could be that the writer wanted the principal character to speak more formally; we have no way of knowing. This is why a lot of the lines that Sae has that people have pointed out as 'wrong' (the line is something like 'Keep your responses brief and only of the truth') just read as characterization to me. Sae is shown to be a prim and proper DA/prosecutor, so it only made sense to me that she would speak in a stilted-and-unnatural-but-focused-on-being-proper-to-a-fault tone, and that was reinforced to me by just how many of her lines during the interrogation sound that way. At a certain point, a lot of the proposed rewrites I've seen on that site and elsewhere no longer seem to fit the voice of the character. It's all up to interpretation, I guess.).
I honestly remember having way more trouble dealing with localization in P4 than I had going through this, although it was an entirely different set of potential problems. That game was very insistent on consistently rendering things the same way over and over and it stood out as such an annoyance for whatever reason. I remember being driven slightly mad by hearing Nanako weave 'Big Bro' into every line of her dialogue for example.
I guess for me individual stilted lines just don't really stand out so much.
This was actually the kind of thing that stood out to me in P5. There were a bunch of phrases that felt unnatural that they used over and over again. Just off the top of my head:
Ryuji says he's "going to memorize their faces" like six times in a 10 minute period
They consistently talk about "those adults"/"shitty adults"
Even "make them have a change of heart"/"change their heart" doesn't sound particularly natural, though I will say that that one would understandably be much harder to substitute given its importance in the story/marketing/game visuals.
etc.
These phrases wouldn't have stood out nearly as much if they had just thesaurused out a few instances of them. "Remember what they look like," "people/older people," or even just "change them" would all have made things sound more natural if they had substituted them in a few times instead of just using the same phrase over and over again.
I realize this might read like I'm saying "there is no need to rewrite things" and then immediately saying "rewrite things," but I believe there's a subtle difference between 'completely rewriting entire sentences with different intonations' and 'occasionally substitute out these specific overused phrases.'
Another wonderful thing about language that's vaguely relevant to this conversation is that I can use 'thesaurused,' a totally-made-up and not-real verbed noun, but you still understood the sentence I used it in perfectly. Ultimately, is that not all that writing or translation need to do?
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