Localisation Dragon Quest's Yuji Horii believes English translations remove a game's 'flavour'

[Ebicentre]

From Automaton Media (archive):


Yuji Horii, father of the eternally influential Dragon Quest, spoke with Famitsu alongside Paranormasight series director Takanari Ishiyama in a 'master and disciple'-styled discussion. The topic of localization was brought up, with Horii saying:

'When it comes to English, the flavor tends to get lost in many ways. Things inevitably end up sounding simplistic.'
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As one example, Ishiyama brings up the variety of first-person pronouns available in Japanese – like ore, boku, washi, watashi, etc. While each of these can reflect the speaker’s gender, age and even personality traits, in English, they all become simply 'I'.​

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Horii seems to consider the shortcomings of Japanese-to-English localizations a result of inherent differences between the two languages, commenting, 'I’ve come to accept that English is a simple language, so there’s no helping it.'​

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I completely understand why Yuji Horii would feel this way, but I wouldn't say it's a result of English being a simple language. Rather, he's surrounded by retarded English-speaking localizers who habitually vandalize Japanese media, especially Dragon Quest.

 

[Narmy]

It's true that you will get a better experience by playing the Japanese version directly, but stuff being lost in translation has little to do with how bad modern localizations are.

 

[TacoBell-kun]

It's true that you will get a better experience by playing the Japanese version directly, but stuff being lost in translation has little to do with how bad modern localizations are.

I hate to admit it, but you're right. Too bad learning Japanese is ridiculously difficult. On the other hand, that language barrier is the exact thing that allowed the Japanese to resist foreign subversion for so long.