shmups.system11.org

Being able to patent the placement of a button is pretty BS in itself.

People posting popcorn GIFs in discussion threads anywhere

even if it's about a movie?

Just GIFs?

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Writing that either omits all capitalization, or worse, capitalizes the first letter of every word in a sentence. It's not a cute personal writing style; it makes the English language objectively awful and cumbersome to read. The person who runs Tower Reverse, a repository of Final Fantasy Legend / SaGa 1 info, chooses to write this way, and it's a shame because their knowledge is comprehensive, but it makes reading stuff like their info dump on the game's ingame event flags very difficult. It's some weird aggressive, nonconformist brand of illiteracy.

(:

Localizations where the translator makes random shit up for no reason. Only very rarely is it necessary to do anything more than extremely minor changes to the original meaning, but translators just can't seem to help themselves. Character renames in particular shouldn't happen without an extremely good reason.


The insane overreach of modern intellectual property law definitely annoys the hell out of me.

I'm convinced that these people are doing it out of a sense of self-importance. Taking matters into their own hands, so-to-speak, is their way to make the source material more theirs and less the author's. They see it as a right to own the interpretation as gate-keepers of the language. Some of them (many of them) go so far as to champion that point of view verbally and make veiled threats to their audience, implying that translations will go away if their views are not heeded. Exhibit A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6weUDd ... 3SarahMoon

It's a really tough balance that translators always face. Even though it's easy to say that a translation should always be literal, and it's up to the audience to apply their own knowledge of cultural differences, it's just never that simple. There's always some amount of localization necessary in order to grasp the correct tone and intent in a dramatic scene. And if there is voice acting too, it gets even more complex.

I agree that characters normally shouldn't be renamed, but there's still some context to consider. One example I always liked is how Terra from Final Fantasy VI was called Tina in Japan. They wanted her to have an exotic name and I think it goes without saying that "Tina" kind of has the opposite connotations in English.

Clearly that's true, and I wouldn't dispute it.

What I have a problem with isn't when translators change the translation in order to preserve the meaning, it's when they change the meaning completely in an attempt to introduce elements that would be more familiar to the target audience.

Often times, the rationale for this is that "the animation or game company in Japan told us to change it as much as possible in order to create maximum engagement. If they had their way, these games and programs would resemble the source material even less." Or something like that.

Honestly, I don't care that much for myself. I don't watch dubs (which this is most relating to), and I speak/read well enough to get by without subs anyway. I have absolutely no skin in the game at all. Regardless, I don't think they should be changing the meaning of things to cater to western audiences. Changing things to make the original feeling more clear is correct, but rewriting things to be westernized sucks. I grew up with the Robotech and Voltron bastardizations in the US, and it was a revelation when I finally was able to see the original shows and understand what was actually going on.

What's been going on in the translation world (at least in the japanese one) recently is a trend towards more heavy-handed localization to the point where things are sliding back towards the 80's again, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

The whole experience of learning about a new culture and understanding those differences is embedded in the experience of deciphering mysteries in the dialog. If I had watched all of those 90's anime with seamless, localized dubs, I never would have wondered what things meant and never looked any further. I would have been robbed of the important part of the experience.

Black eyed babies making guttural noises. It's not scary. It sucks.

Agreed, I've seen enough bad attempts at localized translations that frankly I always prefer a literal-as-possible translation at this point in subtitles except where it's something that literally cannot be translated such as Japanese wordplay (where a literal translation loses the joke). I appreciate it when subtitled episodes have pre-episode notes when this sort of thing comes into play.

Even worse are fan-translations of games where the translators clearly did not know or did not care and inserted their own jokes (that infamous Tales of Phantasia SNES translation that renames tofu to Twinkies despite the picture clearly being tofu, adds wildly sexual commentary to a specific scene, etc).

I think that small changes to the meaning to better capture the tone are not necessarily a betrayal of the original work. Say you have a some dialogue that's supposed to come across cool or charming or funny, and the translator translates it as literally as possible and the end result sounds awkward and unnatural. In attempting to be as loyal as possible to the literal meaning of the dialogue, the translator has thoroughly betrayed its spirit, which imo is an even more severe abandonment of the original work than slightly rewriting a line or two would have been.

But that sort of thing is not really what I'm talking about. The more annoying problem is that translators just love to make things up with the most tenuous justifications imaginable, sometimes there's no justification at all. Sometimes they inject a bunch of memes into the writing just because they can. I don't know if these people really wanted to be writers themselves and weren't creative enough to succeed on their own or what, but it's pretty irritating.

It isn't always an option, but most of the time I'd rather see a translator note explaining any relevant cultural differences over the awkwardness that comes with turning Japan into California and onigiri into donuts.

I know it's not what you're talking about, and I don't think your point is invalid in any way.
I just figured it might be worth playing devil's advocate and realise that the distinction between the two might not always be as black and white when looking at it from the perspective of the person working on the translation. There are so many factors that you might not see when you are only looking at the finished product, as with most other creative work you notice it better when it is done poorly than when it done well.

Of course, there are completely outrageous examples that I can't in any way justify. But I also imagine especially going back to the 80s and 90s that there have been many cases where the translator maybe "wanted to" do it right, but maybe didn't have the confidence to go through with it. Even today I often hear Americans saying that they hate it when a Japanese video game or movie only has Japanese voices because they can't be bothered to read subtitles. That kind of mentality is frighteningly common, and a professional translator will often have to set aside their professional pride, and cater to that sort of audience as well.
I'm sure whatever profession people here work in have encountered comparable situations in their own line of work.

Games and applications that save their stuff in the Documents folder. There's literally an AppData directory for your app data, you don't need to show it to me and crowd the folder I use, surprisingly, for my documents.

I end up setting that crap to hidden.

Oh yeah, this is really annoying. I ended up just putting my actual documents somewhere else on my machines.

When modern browsers and/or websites (not sure who's to blame) don't give you an indication that it's still loading the page - so it looks like the browser has hung. Oh it's loading? How about you give me a fucking indication.

Similar - when it looks like a page has opened and just as you go to click on a link, some other element loads so you actually end up somewhere else. The BBC homepage is a fucking nightmare for this.

Also - videos embedded in pages. Oh the video is at the top? No I do not want it to take up the upper third of the page as I scroll WHO DOES THIS? FUCK YOU IGN. Oh the video is mid-article OH GOD NO WHY IS IT FOLLOWING ME AS I SCROLL DOWN. I swear modern UI design is taught/sponsored by attention seeking whores to just generate page clicks.

Fucking clicks. Recent Microsoft Office versions. Ever tried to save a document? File > Save As, no? No. No I do not want you to suggest where I want to save this document I just want you to bring up my C drive, you know like you did for years? A few clicks later and I can finally get to the option where I can choose where to put the fucking file. Sharepoint! No stop loading documents in the awful shitty web view that's slow as shite and doesn't let you do anything, I have MS Office installed, why would I want to run it in a browser window that can't fucking keep up. God damn is it complicated to get it to load in the application - just give me one click to do it instead of "three dots" > download > open. Intuitive? Fuck you.

Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong.

Power users get shafted harder and harder every year. Newer software is designed to abstract the user away from localized storage, or any kind of file system at all. The future is now, old man.

We managed this far without users accidentally deleting system32 I think they can handle the same C drive they had in Windows 7 oh apparently that's too scary and we have to force them to use the default locations for OneDrive.

The future is stupid.

At least it's called File Explorer now, so users won't open Internet Explorer by mistake when I want them to find something in their user profile. Maybe.

I switched to LibreOffice eight years ago and never looked back. People want everything as a PDF these days anyway.

It's kinda hard to do this nowadays, because the way most websites are designed, especially ones with a high level of interactivity, they are really always loading.

The power company. Imagine this is impacting orange808 as well unless he moved.

Trying to pay for some junk on ebay and suddenly got assaulted by the most detestable thing on the internets: scroogle reCraptcha. I don't know if this is ebay's fault or paypal's fault but when I find out who did it then it's boycott time. (╯°益°)╯彡┻━┻

Now I have to wonder if the occurrence of nonsense phrases in the translated Hyperdimension Neptunia like "could care less" or "begs the question" is intended to stand in for some vaguely equivalent language abuse in the original Japanese like "tondemo arimasen" or something.

Some phone computer ones -

Control C and V are next to each other. Instead of pasting in to a cell you copy it. Then you need to go back to where you copied from

When your scolling through facebook and like something accidentally.

Phone keyboards, never got used to them 100%, the delete key should be bigger its the one that gets most used.

When a game boss needs just one more hit and you do the celebration hit on the joypad to shoot and you accidentally hit jump and hit a projectile.

Everytime I load up a switch game and I need to wait 8 minutes for a download.

Recently I have noticed that certain games in my collection have gone missing, I know I saw it recently but for the life of me I cannot find it.

My Satnav/GPS tells me to turn 3rd exit off the next roundabout, except when I get there, there is no roundabout. I should have taken the new slip road about 1/4 mile back because the roundabout was replaced by a bridge. So now I have to go to the next exit which is about 3 miles down the road / and back again.

Google mail has SPAM right between archive and Delete. I told them to move it to the right via the feedback system but they haven't.

Movies with fucking spoilers in the opening titles. I am BESIDE MYSELF WITH LITTLE ANNOYED HELL

Domestic Drama I've Been Meaning To Watch

Well this should be interesting!

Starring ABC

FFS, not this cunt again

With 123

Cor ye I like him!

MONSTER EFFECTS by XYZ



Thanks, I appreciate the heads-up that we'll be going from mundane strife into outright phantasmagoria. Phew, nothing ruins narrative like a sense of discovery. Fucking neck yourself, whoever put this there. With a noose made of film reels. Hurl yourself through a projection booth, so your thrashing corpse looses its bowels and preferably ejaculates on the audience below. You uncouth, cretinous, gaping no-clues argument for post-birth abortion cunt. -_-

Related, I edited the finale of The Sopranos so They too are a bunch of sheep-fucking inbreds who maimed cinema with their fuckfaceitis - however, at least this story is happy end!

Netflix takes that to the next level and helpfully spoils the ending with the intro keywords. "Time Travel" thank you fucking very much that was literally the reveal in the last 10 minutes.

You guys think that's bad? How about when the creative translator annoyance and the unavoidable spoiler have a child and you get the spawn of hell that is the translated title for Mexican territory of John Ford's The Searchers which spoils the film's climax. Not only that, it's aslo corny as hell and much more fitting for a Hallmark movie.

It's pretty embarrassing to bring up in conversations one of my favorite movies with that travesty of a title, but I also have to spoil it for everyone just by caling it by its name? Fuck that! That's one of the reasons I refer to films by their original title even if I couldn't pronouce them to save my life.

I'm going to spoiler tag that thing for anyone curious. If you speak Spanish and plan to watch it for the first time, look away.

On of the minor reasons I prefer the regular version of Silent Hill 2 over the GH re-release is that the title of Maria's scenario, which you'll unavoidably see when starting a game, straight-up spoils the mystery of her nature.

Much appreciated. Doing a minor catch-up of stuff I've put off watching for years, hence finally seeing the film referred to in previous post. All those years of avoiding plot summaries, my vitriol is blazing.



Oh jeeze, hadn't even considered that. I only played it a couple years after the Xbox/PS2 GH versions arrived.

I'm a little ambivalent on the scenario itself these days. On one hand, it's very well-done. On the other,

If there's a character I'd like to see the vantage point of, it's Laura. Although that too would cost something, to someone (aiee! a misspent youth nerdfighting on SH message boards is all coming back ).

Maybe enlist the game's most infamous face instead. :O

noobs don't click, this son of a bitch was behind everything

Spoiler: show