Translation Talk and Aeon Genesis' Modifications to Shin Megami Tensei's Script

Apologies about not getting back to this blog sooner. Between CFPro and summer semester I've been swamped, and there's a book I need to finish reading for one of the upcoming chapters. In the meantime, there's a couple topics I'd like to bridge, centering around the general issue of translation.

Let me get this out of the way: I was wrong about several points, and owe an apology for my shortcomings. It's frustrating, because this stems from one root mistake that should have been spotted well before I made my current headway into the game. It's completely counter to the whole premise of TJB, and considering how far my mistakes appear to have carried, I think that my credibility has been blown a bit out of proportion. Any readers coming over having experience with Cardfight Pro are used to me never making mistakes. As a journalist, that's pretty much in my job description. Most incorrect information never makes it into the news cycle, having been rigorously tested and verified, but Juraku is where things run more lax and that's where the room for error arises. And in the process of this, people have trusted my words too much. The core issue is that the text for Aeon's translation patch features a number of insertions that I wasn't aware of, and I mistakenly (and unfairly) criticized Atlus for omitting these. I didn't catch this sooner because there isn't a comprehensive transcript of the Japanese game text for the SNES or iOS ports of Shin Megami Tensei which made comparing text directly much more difficult than just referring to the always well-documented AE script. Accounting for the AE script being the only one that's been relevant in the west for the past twelve years, I ended up walking headlong into my own mistake.

I admit I wasn't expecting--and was definitely unprepared for--translation to become such a domineering topic. In part I owe this to the fact that I simply hadn't reconciled how wildly different some parts of each script are to one another. Between the four translations of SMT we have right now, the core events that happen in-text are the same, but the detailed dialogue, the tone of the script, the ways that characters are presented and the implications created by the presentation are drastically different. But now that those differences are apparent, it raises concerns with regards to what Shin Megami Tensei even is. When I first put down the $5 to start this up and began taking screenshots, I wasn't planning on this being a translation-centric LP, and the first time that I felt it would be a helpful discussion was when I encountered the old man in Kichijoji. It was only during the retrospective point of going back to revise before publication that I realized how integral this would be. If I didn't comment on the translation differences, somebody else was going to eventually, and so I felt it was better to approach it as an actual feature of the LP rather than just ignore it.

In the aftermath of the translation debacles of the 1990s, there's a certain paranoia in the video game community over this topic. There is a fear that somehow, just by reading a text in our own language and not in a foreign tongue, we are being implicitly lied to; that an objective truth exists in foreign languages which is not retained within our own. This paranoia has been built up on by constructed scandals, by two decades of companies like 4Kids butchering anime for the western market, by Pokémon's infamous jelly doughnuts, by Sailor Moon's dub names, by airbrushing the blood out of imported products. In the video game industry Atlus' own Revelations: Persona has acquired a legend of its own as an example of how not to translate a video game, and Nintendo's history with moralized censorship of Final Fantasy, Pokémon and Earthbound has left a strong anti-censorship sentiment within the culture. The problem with that anti-censorship sentiment is that like any anti- movement, it advocates against rather than for a cause, and in the course of advocating against, it becomes easy to lose sight of the rationale behind it. If you're anti-censorship, what is your platform outside opposing censorship? It biases the dialogue towards creating an anti-censorship versus pro-translation discussion, whereby translation implicitly advocates censorship and thus the destruction of the text.

The anti-censorship sentiment is thus easily transformed into one of anti-translation. No official translation will satisfy the community at large; only fan translations, which have the ethos of the community members ("insiders") working on them, will abate the desire for a translated video game. Fan translations acquire credibility regardless of their accuracy. Years later now I recall discussion on Persona 3's GameFAQs board over the nature of Evokers, and comments about how in the then-untranslated FES remake the Evokers were said to be powered by feathers of Nyx. At that time no one thought FES would ever make it overseas, and statements of this kind acquired a certain gravitas because they came from a version of the game we did not have, they were in a foreign language and therefore promoted an understanding we did not get from our English translation. Innately, we felt that our knowledge of Persona 3 was inferior compared to that of the Japanese players with FES. And when that remake did finally get brought over to the western market, across the board I was hearing statements about how little it improved on P3, the shoddy story and poor voice acting (with Tara Platt's Mitsuru and her faux French being a favorite target.) From my perspective there's a certain irony in comparing this to the Cardfight!! Vanguard community that I normally work in, as there's a preoccupation with the "official" story over there to the point of questioning anything that doesn't come from the mouth of a stiffly-suited corporate exec with a nametag reading "MR. BUSHIROAD."

In both cases, the problem is complacency. Either a given community refuses to believe anything written by the official publishers and only adopts information coming from fellow fans, or they become so dependent on the corporate machine as to put blind faith in the work of individuals who are ultimately at the mercy of company policy. In the pursuit of an objectively true understanding of our media, we tend to gravitate towards different forms of rejecting alternate expressions of that truth. Being a blanket moderate won't necessarily help the situation, because to answer these problematic approaches to translation you have to make an informed understanding of the different sides. Keep in mind that it is still the complacency that is at fault, not the extremism of either side. We need to be willing to question the authority of both sides of translation, not accept each of them universally and without question.

Jumping from one can of worms into another, that brings us to the issue of SMT's translation. Some clarifications on my own background with the game; I originally played SMT1 around 2008~2009 using Aeon Genesis' fan translation patch. Around this time I also became familiar with Re-Miel's translation FAQ on GameFAQs, which was more or less contemporaneous to AE and involved a more literal approach but also contained a number of flaws and presumptions that I attribute to it describing what the author was reading rather than try to create a script for insertion into a video game ROM. I ended up reading SMT1 more times than I originally intended through following a series of Let's Plays of it, which gave me a lot of time to think on it and helped spark some of my interest in Japan as a real place instead of as the weird Neverland a lot of Americans make it out to be. I began studying Japanese on my own in 2010 and (after very limited progress) started formal classes in 2012 while working on my undergraduate Asian Studies degree, and for academic reasons stopped studying in the program after my fifth semester in late 2013~early 2014. I first attempted the game in Japanese from 2012~2013, eventually lost my save data during a computer move, and since that time have referred to Japanese playthroughs on NicoNico Douga and blogsites when reading it. If two and a half years sounds like a lot of preparation, it's really not. I'm convinced you need at least four years to be good at this. I would describe the process of learning Japanese as "perpetual exhaustion," a daily repetition act that takes twice as long to learn as any of the Romance languages, and the fact that you have ~2000 written characters to learn looming over you conditions you towards the idea that no, you'll never have 'mastery,' but you can see how far you'll make it. I basically persevered until I could reliably learn things on my own and then stopped signing up for classes, the academic equivalent to turtle-shelling.

Next, the history of the script. Shin Megami Tensei's script was first written in a combination of hiragana and katakana on the Super Nintendo in 1992, phonetic Japanese scripts representing "native" and "foreign" words which are usually used in combination with kanji. This may be attributed to the SNES' limited memory, as there are around two thousand commonly used kanji but just 48 hiragana and katakana characters. (For reference, most second graders can read all of the hiragana and katakana characters, but total kanji literacy is only obtained in high school or college.) The Mega CD remake from 1995 used a revised script which incorporated kanji, and this is an important distinction because in addition to their phonetic readings kanji have innate meanings that can influence how one understands the script. The most commonly known example among Megaten fans is the word "demon," which when rendered in kanji would normally be 悪魔  "evil demon/vice spirit" but which in the games is written 仲魔 "related demon/related spirit." The writers added another layer to it by making the phonetic reading of the kanji nakama "friend" instead of akuma "demon." In English we might try to approximate that meaning as a Familiar, or in AE's case a "minion," but most commonly demons are demons. This is an example of a single word having at least four simultaneous understandings, and one of the difficulties of kanji is that it's totally possible for a skilled Japanese writer to give every word that kind of weight, although that's rarely the case. (Taking an example from some of the material we've covered on TJB, in his career as a novelist Yukio Mishima made a hobby out of using archaic kanji in his novels that publishers would have to specially request types to be cast for, as they were no longer in popular circulation and so the kanji would have to be newly molded to print his books.) The Mega CD script had some influence over the 2001 PlayStation port of the first SMT, which also used kanji, but it's not clear if the script was lifted directly or if it was rewritten from the ground up from SNES to PSX. In 2004 the fan translation group Aeon Genesis translated the SNES game, their translation became widly circulated on the internet and eventually gained exposure through multiple Let's Plays and hostings of it on YouTube. Whether AE referred to, or had knowledge of the Mega CD script is unknown, but I'm writing under the assumption that they did not. The Mega CD script is available for reference here, but any differences between it and the Japanese SNES script are not documented. The final incarnation of Aeon's script was penned by the romhacker Orden, who did so primarily to fix a number of bugs endemic to the AE patch, but also updated the script to be in line with Atlus' official translations. This version of the patch is relatively recent, released September 30 2012, and I have never played it but have seen some of it secondhand from LPs.

One aspect of this discussion that can't be restated enough is that Aeon Genesis did not just translate SMT, the group also localized it. This is a touchy subject across the board because localization is the part of the translation process where modifications, cuts and additions to the new script become an established practice. An unlocalized translation is acceptable as long as it is understandable and relates directly to the text as it appeared in its original state, but a localized translation is the point where a text stops reading like a text and starts reading like a book. A translation is readable, but a localization is fluid and written as if written by a native speaker. In the process of their localization, AE inserted a number of modifications to the script, some of which have become so memorable in the west that they have outright obscured the meaning of their Japanese equivalents. Some of these were minor, like converting Jack Lantern into Jack o' Lantern or calling Tan-ki as Tangie (which I would call a mistake because these are completely different myths), and none of AE's modifications are as drastic as those of the contemporary group DeJap (the group primarily remembered for the line "I bet Arche fucks like a tiger" a very liberal and inaccurate translation inserted into their patch for Tales of Phantasia.) But it's a fact that some major lines by key characters in AE's translation have escaped criticism when those lines are not liberal translations, but outright insertions with no resemblance to anything in the Japanese script.

The implication of this is that the Shin Megami Tensei the English-speaking world appreciates so much has never existed except as created by Aeon Genesis translations. The version of the game where Gotou accuses Thorman of setting up a dictatorship, where every other word out of Chaos Hero's mouth is "damn" and "shit," and where the old man's throat gets ripped out by a Gaki in Kichijoji mall, never existed. It would be unfair to criticize Atlus' translation for not including these things because to do so would be to create a less accurate and/or embellished translation, when even the embellishments that could be said to improve the text are not their own. It is very tempting to say that it is wrong entirely to cling to AE's translations, but with it so heavily embedded in the culture of the fandom ten years after its release, there is a greater justification at hand; that because the community of discourse established around Shin Megami Tensei has never been reading it without these embellishments, that it does not really want for a version of the game without them. The AE script sticks with the community because the non-AE script was never important to it in the first place. As someone who uses and converts Japanese to English every day I cannot approve of how the script was modified, but as a critic I can absolutely back the supporters of AE's script because it is a part of our culture.

At the same time I can't go on calling it censorship when Atlus is simply not adding in things that weren't there to begin with. In terms of practical effect and not literal methods AE did to SMT what Ted Woolsey did to FF6, making it exciting where it was mundane, visceral where it was repetitive and readable where it was not. Nobody likes Cefca and everybody loves Kefka, because "Son of a submariner!" is much better writing than "Heeeee! Kussoo!" But like Woolsey, AE also lost sight of the form of direct one-to-one authorial intent that Atlus' translation tries to preserve, even though Atlus' translation is very wooden. People love to talk about video game translation like a criminal enterprise, treating the translators as always guilty either because they're too literal or not literal enough or using honorifics or changing Engrish into Frenglish, but it's more common to have several acceptable approaches than just one true path among a sea of wrong ones.

One aspect of this many-paths approach is in the visual nature of Japanese as an ideographic system. That is to say, where kanji is being used it is possible to understand the meaning of a text by scanning the kanji printed even where pronunciation is not well understood. Because of this, it is possible to preserve the overall meaning of a sentence made into English without a 1:1 translation, much to the chagrin of more literally-minded translators. It is acceptable to rephrase a Japanese translation, because ideally perfect translations read as if the original author were fluent in the new language. There's actually an excellent example within Atlus' own history of the same lines being rewritten entirely when conveying the same meaning. Devil Survivor and its 3DS remake Devil Survivor Overclocked have entirely divergent scripts with very little being preserved in the transition between them. While Overclocked was fully voice acted and some lines were presumably rewritten to accommodate that, the game doesn't make use of extensive animation so there's no actual mouth flaps to map the dialogue to. Most famously, the Demon Summoning Program's Hello World message "Peaceful days are over_ Let's Survive" was changed to "Peaceful days died_ Let's Survive" but there's more relevant comparisons to be made, like Naoya's introductory line.

俺は「神」が苦手でね。
Ore wa "kami" ga nigate de ne.
Literal: I'm no good with God.
DS: God's no friend of mine.
Overclocked: I follow no god.

Both are faithful translations which convey his standpoint in the storyline to the viewer, but I've personally favored the Devil Survivor line. The kanji involved are 苦 "feel bitter/scowl" and 手 "hand" the latter of which is used in most words involving action, doing or skill. Nigate expresses dislike and a weakness at something, it's used similarly to the English expression "bad at/with." Just as you can be bad with math, bad with women and bad with kids, so Naoya is bad with God.

What I'm getting at is that I'm not going to call Overclocked's translation a wrong one. Certainly I disagree with it and consider Atlus' first approach better, but this line is an accurate reflection of the source material. And that's essentially what good translation is, it reflects the original script the way that the moon reflects the sun. The light that results from that reflection is weaker and visually divergent, but it comprises the same seven colors and comes from one fundamental source. Is AE a good reflection? Not particularly, as in our analogy it would be a weaker one compared to Atlus', but even weak light can be appreciated all the same. The deeper question is if we can even approach it as the same text, which I would answer with an emphatic "Yes." It's a bad translation because it's a fundamentally incorrect one, but if you can accept and have fun with the embellishments, then it's fair to say that AE made the game a lot better than it ever was in Japanese. You just have to recognize that it has little bearing on what Shin Megami Tensei actually is. Atlus' translation, while seemingly unpolished in places as with the American soldiers and occasionally wooden dialogue, is much closer to the objective understanding of SMT's script that we are trying to approach in the first place. There are minor idiosyncrasies like Gotou addressing the party as しょくん Shokkun "my friends" getting dropped from the Atlus script and kept in AE, but as a whole the Atlus script is the more accurate and honest translation.

Sure, it would be convenient if Aeon's was the one more true to the spirit of the game, but that's just not reality. It leaves some lingering questions about the accuracy of SMTII as well; I'm not as familiar with the text of the second game as I am the first, but given the two year time gap between fan translation releases, had their policy shifted at all between games? Seeing how liberal this translation is caught me off guard in part because their releases of Clock Tower, Live-A-Live, Madou Monogatari, Super Robot Wars 3, and SRW Alpha Gaiden have very strong reputations. I'm vexed to have my respect for their translations challenged when SMT if..., a game after my own heart, is one of their projects so close to completion. How will it play into all this? Most of what I've been reflecting on is over a decade old. I have not yet amended my statements in previous chapters regarding the translation, as there's a lot of them and for the time being this post follows up directly from where my mistakes left off, but I do intend to go back and revise those writings. I realize that I've only just scraped the surface of the issues presented here, but I think we still don't have a full picture of how deeply these translation differences affect SMT as a whole, and by proxy the dialogue around it. What confounds me the most is whether or not the fan translators were wrong or not in writing the script as they did.