Let's Play Some Motherf*$&ing Games: 2010!!!!!!

[Fudozukushi]

I'm kind of assuming that's already gone, and that you're starting to get affected physically.  Hence the liver question.

Well, my hands hurt from punching the cushions so much... so yeah...

[Grefter]

Tai will probably be much more capable of correcting me, but I would hazard a guess that Tseng pronounced as Sung is mangling a more Chinese sound to the name than a Japanese one.  Tseng never being localised into something a bit more westen (Compared to the rest of the Turks) felt a bit odd, so I had suspected that may be the source of that.

Lost Odyssey - Up to disc 2.  Short discs.  Edit - Oh yeah I bitched about this in a half empty chat, but dude way to fail up a funeral.  Your character design is always outlandish, but making a funeral director look like a clown is creepy as all fuck.  Then after a fairly long cutscene with the death of a character, way to really hammer home the point by making the player run around 2 areas and find 10 items for no fucking reason.  Good one dick heads, don't even bother writing any dialogue other than "you need to find these items" and "I found 1 of 10 of item".  Oh and then make you do it twice.  Why not throw a mini game in DURING THE MIDDLE OF A FUNERAL you could even stop the funeral to have the creepy clown funeral director give the player directions on how to play the mini game.  Oh and make the mini game instructions tell you to press a button when you need to hold it.  Just you know to drag out the mini game for a few more seconds of confusion while the player works it out.  Wait no don't actually do that it was a joke.  Goddammit.  Of course now you have another cutscene sequence where stuff happens, but at least there is plot!  Sure you resolved the main motivation of the plot to go forward, but I am not running around as a thousand upon thousand year old immortal invincible mercenary picking up sticks anymore.  After all of that?  Now you can save.  So boring and all I wanted to do was stop for the night and sleep.  I was so bored I had to do the next dungeon and end the disc otherwise I might not have gone back to the game.  I needed the reminder that you know there was an actual game inside all this shit.

I like the game still, it is fun and is trying a few things.  Square stuff IS interesting when it is trying stuff that doesn't completely suck endlessly forever in everything it does, but man when they miss they miss hard these days.

[Cotigo]

I'm only passingly familiar with Chinese, but there is indeed a lot of phonetics/language fuckery going on there.  This includes not only which language Tseng comes from (maybe Chinese, could very well be Korean), but also which romanization (Pinyin or Wade-Guiles) is used, or whether the romanization was based off of the Katakana rewrite and the Chinese/Korean was ignored completely.

So, I can't give a definitive answer.  In any case, assuming the "e" in Tseng is a Pinyin "e" (maybe Wade-Guiles but I have no fucking idea), a better westernization is indeed "Sung."

Man.  Even becoming passingly familiar with Asian languages makes me realize that everyone who bitches about name localization in videogames needs a nice kick to the jewels.

EDIT:  Wait, I'm stupid.  Let's just look at the Japanese version of the name.  ツォン.  Romanized, that's Tson (So-N).  Yes, Sung is more correct in English phonetics than Tseng.  Song would probably be even better? 

And all of a sudden, I realize that Soul Calibur is probably correct in saying "fuck it" and changing the spelling of Seung Mina's name every game.

[Dhyerwolf]

I actually liked all the stuff they made you do for the funeral scenes. The whole plot thread really felt like it came out of nowhere that if they just brushed it off quickly it would feel so tangential and dismissive. Gave is a slightly grounded feeling which worked fairly well for me for all that I can understand just wishing the game would get on with it. Especially worked for me since it revolved so heavily around the game's super driving theme too.

[Dhyerwolf]

WA XF Replay- Up to 3-8. I couldn't resist and did fight one Creeping Chaos, but for the most part, I've been seeing how the game shakes out without the CSP overloading. I actually basically got all the skills I wanted around 3-3 before the new classes came (And generally tended to be a random assortment of skillsets/IFF/Widespread. I really still can not believe that IFF wasn't even the penultimate skill, but the 3rd from the last).

Running 2 fighters-4 mages. Hadn't used Nightstalker before so was disappointed to see that I wasn't going to be running around with my +25% ATK and AIM Bow Six Shooter of doom! Nevertheless, switched that one fighter over to Extremist, realize that that the accuracy up part of the Fantastica skillset was necessary to make Six Shooter have any point, and watched it (after admittedly 1 buff admittedly) unleash 425 damage twice. Granted, ST and needs buffing. Just shiny for the level of smash (Of course, throw on...3 more buffs and it hits near 2500!).

[Dark Holy Elf]

near 2500

How?

If you have 500 ATK (pretty darn high) vs. 350 DEF, and use Hyper (750 ATK), Invoke (always hit), Command Critical (and hope for a crit, though Invoke admittedly makes them likely), Fragile, and Debilitator (131 DEF), that's... (750*1.5-131)/6*6*1.5 = 1491 damage. Even against 0 DEF that's only 1687. Mastered Extremist would multiply this damage by a further 1.5 and get you to the ballpark you are talking about, but I'd assumed from your post that you didn't have that.

[Meeplelard]

Man.  Even becoming passingly familiar with Asian languages makes me realize that everyone who bitches about name localization in videogames needs a nice kick to the jewels.

I couldn't agree with you more here.  The number of whiners about "OMG! THEY RETRANSLATED THE NAME FOR NO GOOD REASON!" need punchings.  They even go so far as to act like name changes are a MODERN convention, when shit like this has been going on since ANCIENT GREECE/ROME (I mean, apparently, there's nothing wrong with Zeus having *2* Roman names in Jupiter and Jove, and neither looking anything like Zeus, but god forbid they spell an R as an L from Japanese -> English!)

[OblivionKnight]

YOU JUST AREN'T A TRUE GAMER MEEPLE

[Shale]

I'd rather have consistency than accuracy myself, but this is more a question of Asian languages not being spoken like they're written, which ain't exactly rare.

[Cotigo]

I'd rather have consistency than accuracy myself, but this is more a question of Asian languages not being spoken like they're written, which ain't exactly rare.

Uh, Chinese, and... what, exactly?  To my knowledge Korean is phonetic, while Japanese uses Kanji it does have a syllable based system, and ... well, honestly I'm not sure about Vietnamese, Cambodian, etc.  But even Chinese has a phonetic system (pinyin).  And one thing's for sure--Anglicizing the pronunciations (well... hell, any part of the language) any of these languages is fitting a square peg into a round hole, which I now realize was your point. 

Anyway, time for some mental masturbation because it's the DL. Translation itself is a creative process (direct translation doesn't actually exist since the translator is acting as a filter), and if the translator's goal is to keep the pronunciation of name in tact and get Americans to pronounce it correctly, then varying translations is going to happen.  Square peg, round hole, etc.  However, another course of action is to not bother keeping the original names.  Here, I'm with you 100%--consistency should take absolute precedence. Tina isn't Terra, and Terra is always Terra.  The PW games get this head on by completely renaming everyone.  But then you get people bitching about "OMG WHY DIDN'T THEY KEEP THE ORIGINAL NAME" so you can't please everyone on that one.

Of course, there's option 3--Fudge the phonetics and spell it like you'd spell the characters in romanji/pinyin.  I don't think it works so well with voice acted games*, but it is fine if you really don't care about the audience pronouncing names correctly in their heads. Now, if you're going to argue that for the sake of consistency, different localization teams shouldn't pick different objectives with their names?  That's a fine debate in and of itself, and I'm not sure where I stand on it.  It's worth noting that it's not what happened here, anyway--Tseng should be Tsong in that case.

...Wait.  This little interlude started because someone was bewildered by a more modern translation DEVIATING FROM FF7'S. 

wat

I appreciate the opportunity to get all translation/linguistics-wanky, but... wat.

*Funny story.  Before learning Chinese a little bit, I was really, really confused as to why they pronounced Zhuzhen "Jew-gin" in SH1's ending.  And now I know.

----

Oh, yeah.  I play video games I guess.  Um... 16 more scrap metals to my TF2 scout hat?  Yeah.  Relevance.

[Taishyr]

* Taitoro looks up, looks back. Uhhhh hold on a bit...

Cantonese pronounciation Tseng is indeed pretty much "Sung".

[Shale]

Chinese and Vietnamese (A "D" sound transliterates as "T", and no, I don't have the slightest idea why) are the main ones that come to mind.

[Cotigo]

Chinese and Vietnamese (A "D" sound transliterates as "T", and no, I don't have the slightest idea why) are the main ones that come to mind.

Well, it's not that they don't sound like they're written, it's that they don't sound like English.  Pinyin is very much the same thing--as far as Mandarin goes, "e" is more of an "uh", ji/qi/xi are jih/chih/shih, and zh/ch/sh AND z/s/s are those sounds but in a slightly different position in the mouth. 

The reason for this is that the Chinese invented it.  It's all arbitrary symbols to sounds anyway, and why should the Chinese care about catering to making their Pinyin representations mirror the Western ones, much less specifically the Anglophonic ones?  Especially since, IIRC, Pinyin came about after China was part of the Soviet Union and the West was the Enemy.

IIRC, Wade-Guiles was a system designed by Westerners to describe Chinese sounds, so the sounds were represented by letter combinations that would approximate the sound in Western languages.  But don't quote me on that one.  Or that when Pinyin was invented.  I'm going off of memory as I don't really have the time to look them up right now.

[hinode]

Checking Wikipedia, pinyin was created primarily to help produce and promulgate a standardized set of Mandarin pronunciations for the sake of education and increasing literacy across the country. Bear in mind that 'dialects' of Chinese are distinct to the point where, for instance, Shanghai dialect is completely unintelligible to a Mandarin speaker like me; getting a single standardized dialect taught in schools throughout the country was pretty important for improving productivity and cross-country communications. Pinyin does its job at getting grade schoolers to understand how to pronounce words properly; it's completely internally consistent and the pronunciation makes sense to Chinese people; if Westerners have trouble with pronunciation, well, it wasn't originally designed for them.

Pronouncing Chinese correctly (or even to the point of sounding aesthetically pleasing, IMO) is hopeless without the capability to distinguish tonals properly. I prefer people use a less accurate pronunciation of my name in real life because the closest equivalent most English speakers can manage just grates on my ears.

[Just Another Day]

I've always thought Pinyin did a better job than Wade-Giles representing the pronunciation of "standard" Mandarin to anglophones. Guess that shouldn't be surprising, though.

Even leaving aside the rather significant issue of tone, no romanization method will be able to cover up the fact that Mandarin's vowels are just plain different than English's. They're simple enough for all that, and Mandarin's vowel inventory is smaller than English's (about six versus about 11, I believe), and much less likely to change contextually (though they do in dipthongs, and the two sounds written as 'i' in pinyin surface about equally often in complementary distribution, e.g. 'zhi' vs 'zi', 'shi' vs 'xi' etc.).

But regardless, even though a Mandarin 'a' is relatively similar to English's, it's still not the same (I think it's usually higher and maybe even a bit further back than our IPA 'a', but don't quote me on that), and casual listeners could hear it as all kinds of things, particularly when distorted by tone and rapid speech (to say nothing of mangling by native Japanese or English voice actors, god knows; Japanese's vowels are actually extremely similar to ours, and even more static than Mandarin's, which is why that romanization is so damn easy, but the Mandarin -> Japanese -> English transition will wreck all kinds of havok).

As a transliteration, Tseng to Sung seems pretty reasonable to me, for the record, though I'll agree that consistency is way more important than accuracy in these things ^_^

[DjinnAndTonic]

casual listeners could hear it as all kinds of things, particularly when distorted by tone and rapid speech (to say nothing of mangling by native Japanese or English voice actors, god knows; Japanese's vowels are actually extremely similar to ours, and even more static than Mandarin's, ).

Are you talking about English or Mandarin there? I don't actually know what your native language is.

[hinode]

Wade-Giles was created in the mid-19th century; I suspect that Mandarin has evolved linguistically since the creation of Wade-Giles. Pinyin has the benefit of coming about a century later and being sanctioned by the government that effectively defined and spread modern Mandarin. Regardless of intent, that's a huge advantage when it comes to representing pronunciation accurately.

Also, checking Wikipedia it seems both Thomas Wade and Herbert Giles were primarily stationed south of Beijing, in Hong Kong and Shanghai respectively. Makes sense for British subjects, but I wonder how much of the Mandarin they learned came from non-native speakers who might've changed/corrupted it slightly.

[Just Another Day]

Er, sorry, English is my native language; I've got pretty good Japanese and pretty basic Mandarin besides.

Japanese and English vowels are really really similar: their 'u' is unrounded, which doesn't actually sound that different, otherwise every Japanese vowel has a nearly identical analogue in most English dialects (I think they tend to be a bit quicker, but that's another thing I'm not sure of, it's been a few years since I took any linguistics, and also not a big difference regardless).

[Dhyerwolf]

near 2500

How?

If you have 500 ATK (pretty darn high) vs. 350 DEF, and use Hyper (750 ATK), Invoke (always hit), Command Critical (and hope for a crit, though Invoke admittedly makes them likely), Fragile, and Debilitator (131 DEF), that's... (750*1.5-131)/6*6*1.5 = 1491 damage. Even against 0 DEF that's only 1687. Mastered Extremist would multiply this damage by a further 1.5 and get you to the ballpark you are talking about, but I'd assumed from your post that you didn't have that.

Ah, you are throwing in a lot of debuffs I wasn't even considering. But the 4 buffs were Hyper, Invoke, and Sentinel's skill that stacks to 3x. I was estimating 2500 based on the numbers I was getting on average from Extremist at the last map.

[Dark Holy Elf]

The Japanese A is fairly different from any English A's, but it's certainly closer to English A's than other letters in general, plus there's pretty much a strongly held to convention that most low vowels in other languages (vowels in which your tongue is lowest, e.g. the generic "aaaahhh" sound doctors have you say) get anglicised as A's. Granted, English has one low vowel it often writes with an O (the short o sound in "hot", etc.) despite the fact that the other uses of O in English are a mid back vowel like it is in most languages which use Roman script, but English makes no sense.


EDIT: Ninja'd by Dhyer, so back to RPGs. Oh, yeah, I forgot about Amplifier, I tend to dismiss it as impractical since it can't be used after moving AND has a hefty MP cost so the only way you get ahead in terms of damage per turn or damage per MP is to use Rush while doing the other setup.

[Cotigo]

I'm here, so more language wank.

it's completely internally consistent and the pronunciation makes sense to Chinese people; if Westerners have trouble with pronunciation, well, it wasn't originally designed for them.

Glad to have some confirmation on that.

Pronouncing Chinese correctly (or even to the point of sounding aesthetically pleasing, IMO) is hopeless without the capability to distinguish tonals properly. I prefer people use a less accurate pronunciation of my name in real life because the closest equivalent most English speakers can manage just grates on my ears.

Since I don't actively keep up with my Mandarin, I'll admit I completely forgot tonals and that's because tonals are hard and I don't like them.

Re: NEB.  The Japanese A most certainly isn't different from any English A. It's the same A as in Father.  ... Isn't it?  Maybe somewhere between "father" and "hot".   Nevermind that this is going to differ depending on which English accent one has.

I agree with that last thing you said though. English makes no sense.  At all. 

[Dark Holy Elf]

Hmm, Wikipedia in its eternal trustworthiness calls its A a low central vowel, which is what I remember (something in between the A in father and the A in cat), and something English doesn't have. The father A sound is generally low back, though blah blah varies by individual dialect. So it's different, but not by enough to matter since neither language has the other.

[Just Another Day]

NEB ninjas my post. With the same source, even (go wikipedia!)

If you differentiate the vowels in 'cot' and 'caught' (more likely if you live on the east coast), and if wikipedia's correct about low-centre, then the Japanese 'a' is between those two vowels. But even North American English speakers who make that distinction really strongly are unlikely to be able to hear the difference all that reliably.

Yay language wanking! To draw it back to games a bit, an anecdote: when a classmate of mine applied to Square to be a translator while we were living in Japan, they had what was basically a written test, with questions like how you'd translate 火剣, 炎剣, and ファイアソード respectively in the same game, which I always thought was neat (I think he went 'fire sword' 'blaze sword' and 'pyro sword' which I think was relatively uninspired, but anyhow).

[Captain K.]

EDIT: Ninja'd by Dhyer, so back to RPGs. Oh, yeah, I forgot about Amplifier, I tend to dismiss it as impractical since it can't be used after moving AND has a hefty MP cost so the only way you get ahead in terms of damage per turn or damage per MP is to use Rush while doing the other setup.

Please stop talking about games in the Language topic.

[NotMiki]

RS:MS

picked this up again, after trying to entice Gate to play it.  Nearly done with my Claudia runthrough, which has been tricky because I'm trying to beat the game with every single PC, and the theme of her supporting cast was male scrubs: Dowd (the best of the lot by far), Gian (godly +3 BP regen), Patrick (who?), and Herman (what?!).  About the only thing they're good for is having tons of LP: at least 12 per.

Beat 4 corrupted Elemental Lords, Jewel Beast, Death, Schirach.  I'll finish this playthrough once I admit that this party isn't beating 10 Fatestone Saruin any time soon.

Side note: 10 Fatestone Saruin acts multiple times in a turn, and knows Fold Time, which ends the turn when cast.  Which is a much more creative way of screwing you than spamming Deus ex Machina, but he does that too on occasion.