No, These Are Not the Same Job.
These are three separate, distinct jobs with different requirements and they leverage different skill sets. However, they are all linked because they are steps in a process. And steps must be done in order, unless you want to trip and break your face.
And no, they should (usually) not be done by the same person.
My brother sent me a link to this Steam discussion thread for the game “Metaphor: ReFantazio” and it seems to be a few people who don’t know what they’re talking about, bickering as if they are experts. And as usual, the one who is the most combative is the one who knows the least about the topic. Welcome to the internet, I suppose.
The question of whether the game is “a translation or a localization” is a stupid one. This is not an either/or scenario. In order to have a localization, you HAVE to start with a translation.
What is a Translation?
Translation requires functional knowledge of two languages: the “source” or “origin” language, and the “target” language. If a JRPG (Japanese Role-Playing Game) is being released in an English-speaking country, then the text in the game needs to be translated from Japanese (the source language) to English (the target language).
The difficulty in this job is that there is rarely such a thing as a direct translation. On an individual word level, there are certain elements of communication that cross cultural lines; every culture has words that mean “no” and “yes”, for example. However, the context and the modes of communication usually differ.
In American English, if someone asks a friend, “hey, do you want to go to the movies this weekend?” it is perfectly acceptable to say, “no,” or “nope,” or “no thanks,” or “nah.” If the friend said, “uh… maybe a little,” then the asker would be justified in thinking that their friend is a noncommittal weirdo who might be hiding something or playing coy.
In Japanese, if someone asks a friend the same question, the socially acceptable response between everyone except for teenage boys (who are expected in most cases to speak to each other with the least amount of formality), would be the equivalent of “uh… maybe a little.” Saying “no” or one of its variants is rudely abrupt.
The job of the translator is to go ahead and write “uh…maybe a little.” because that’s what the original text translates to – this is the “rough translation”.
Then, the Localization.
A localizer (often referred to as a localization editor) is responsible for taking that rough translation and turning it into a draft that is easily understandable by the target audience, but still reflects the context, meaning, and intent of the original text.
I think a big problem with today’s localizers is that they often forget about that second part – reflecting the context, meaning, and intent of the original text. That’s where all of the “woke localizer” scandals have sprung from; people taking liberties with the translation and putting in things that they think SHOULD be said in the given context, rather than what was actually said in the source material.
In order to be an effective localizer, it is necessary to have an in-depth understanding of the source/origin culture, as well as the target culture. While translation makes the words understandable in the target language, localization makes the concepts and references understandable in the target culture.
Here’s a good example of where a game was translated, but not localized: I have been replaying “Harvest Moon: A New Beginning” (also known as Harvest Moon 3D), which was released in NA by Natsume in 2012. In this game, there is an annual festival in the summer where the villagers gather to watch a fireworks display.
Conveniently, the USA and Japan both have summer fireworks display holidays as cultural norms. In the USA, it is a celebration of the creation of our country and the fireworks serve as a symbol of our independence (“the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air” from the Star-Spangled Banner).
In Japan, fireworks are a signal of the transition from spring to summer; the festival is actually called the “fireworks festival” – hanabi (fireworks) matsuri (festival). To break that down even further, the term hanabi translates as “fire flower” – hana (flower) bi (fire); in Japanese, the syntax is reversed from English, so the adjective comes after the noun rather than before.
At the fireworks festival in Harvest Moon 3D, one of the characters remarks on how beautiful the fireworks are, and how appropriate it is that their name means fire flower. In the original language, where the name actually does mean fire flower, this makes perfect sense. In English, it doesn’t – unless you know enough about Japanese culture and language to make the connection.
This is an example of where they stopped at translation and didn’t go through a thorough localization process to make the cultural references clear to people with no knowledge of the origin/source culture.
An Art, not a Science
One of the problems with there not really being such a thing as a “direct” translation is that the responsibility for remaining faithful to the source material while also making it understandable to the target audience rests primarily on the localizer.
It becomes an issue of ethics – and if a localizer’s personal ethics prioritize the preservation of the integrity of the source material, you end up with what’s commonly called a “faithful adaptation” of the original. If, on the other hand, the localizer’s personal ethics emphasize progressive ideology (or any other ideology, for that matter) over the source material, you get the “woke” abominations that have been spat out by NA-based localization companies in the past several years.
And even when you have localizers that prioritize the source material, there will still be differences of opinion in what constitutes a good choice of wording.
For example, in “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up“, the translator (Cathy Hirano) uses the term “outfit” to refer to any piece of clothing. I haven’t seen the original Japanese text, but based on my knowledge of English, I don’t think that was the best choice. Personally, I would have said “garment” – this represents any individual piece of clothing in isolation, whereas we typically use the term “outfit” to mean multiple pieces and accessories that are put together in an ensemble.
However, “garment” also tends to have a more formal or technical feel to it, and I can tell that Hirano (and likely Marie Kondo, in her original text) wanted the book to read informally, like a conversation with a friend. Other options, then, might have been “piece” (shorthand for “piece of clothing”), or even just “item”.
Ultimately, it comes down to the localizer to make the decision on what words to use to best convey not just the meaning of the source text, but also the tone, the feeling, and the cadence. The only “wrong” choice is that which destroys the original meaning altogether.
Lastly, the Editing
I think the reason editing often gets lumped in with localization is because people doing the hiring are thinking “well, they’re already reviewing and revising the text, so they can just edit it while they do that.”
The problem is that unlike localization, editing is more technical. It isn’t more art than science; there are manuals that spell out (Ha! Pun!) exactly what is and isn’t correct. There are rules, recognized spellings, and formalized grammatical structures.
You can have someone do both, but that person has to understand that they are using two separate skill sets to do two separate jobs, and not try to do both concurrently.
Perhaps somewhat ironically, being able to shift from artistic choice to technical reinforcement (and vice versa) is yet another, separate skill from translation, localization, and editing. And I think it’s the least common of all of them.
As a result, it’s usually better to hire specialists to do each individual step. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a broken face and a jacked-up text.
