Today, I’m going to talk about some Japanese translations… that’s not entirely off topic, because this subject came to me as I was playing Uncharted 3, so there, still related to Sony and gaming news.

The Japanese are well known for their shameless use of foreign languages, especially English. Now, don’t get me wrong, what’s fun is not that the Japanese can’t speak proper English (I would be lame to criticize that given my own level in Japanese), but that many companies in Japan don’t even take the two minutes necessary to make sure that the English sentence they plan to print on hundreds of thousands of advertising posters actually makes sense…

What I want to talk about is a bit less known, it’s also less funny, but it’s still interesting: Japan sucks at translating foreign movies and books into Japanese. This struck me as I was playing Uncharted 3 recently. The English title of Uncharted 3 is Uncharted 3 : Drake’s deception. The title is full of mystery and expectation. It plays on the fact that Drake is not only the name of our hero, but also one of his ancestors whose quest centuries ago is the basis of the scenario. And, especially, it doesn’t reveal too much. The Japanese version, on the other hand, reads: “Uncharted 3: The Atlantis of the sands“. Granted, the fact that we’re going to try and find the Atlantis of the sands in this episode of Uncharted is well known from the fans, and it would have been difficult to avoid knowing about it if you’ve seen a few trailers before playing the game, but still… this is something that we are supposed to learn as we play the game, after a few chapters.

To give you an equivalent in terms of story line, it’s as if the Matrix was called: “The Matrix, the real world is actually a computer simulation“.

Uncharted is not the only example I have in mind of disappointing translations from English to Japanese. Another one that keeps tormenting me is the title translation of Pixar’s awesome “Ratatouille“. There is, in this title, a nice play on words with the fact that the main character is a rat who wants to become a chef in a French restaurant (ratatouille is a traditional French dish, for those who don’t know). That play on word happens to work nicely in French too, so the French title of the movie is exactly the same. I understand that wouldn’t work in Japan, so a translation was needed. I won’t pretend I know enough Japanese to come up with a clever idea here, but apparently neither did the translators of the movie, who dumbed it down to “Remy’s delicious restaurant“. Seriously? How uncool is this?

There’s also this movie, I can’t remember the name on top of my head… a father and his son are escaping from something, and the kid asks “don’t we wait for mom?”, to which the father replies “f*ck your mother!”. This last strong insult was translated in the Japanese version into something that would sound like “no, that’s alright” (いいから). Wut? I know translating involves lots of cultural choices and differences, but surely there’s a way to make something sound more insulting than that in Japanese 🙂

Uncharted 3: The Load of the Ring

Again, don’t get me wrong, I know a bunch of westerners who would chop their arm off if they knew what that tattoo full of cool characters they got in Japan really means 🙂