You should see the other comments more, they do not criticise. Using a fallacy to attack the director’s character.

Still, commenting on the qualities of a language without any actual fluency is a great way to look ignorant. He didn’t do himself any favors with those remarks.

No one here is upset or hurt. People are allowed to disagree with Horii just as he is allowed to voice his opinion. Remember passion is hard to measure through text alone and try to give people the benefit of the doubt.

However, I also disagree with what you said. There is a fundamental difference with the languages, yes, but that is why the fault is on poor translation. Both Japanese and English are very complex languages, most languages are, but they are obviously complex in different (and similar) ways. In translating, you can either try to translate as closely as possible while still making grammatical sense (as opposed to direct translations, ie. all your base are belong to us), which is easier and what most localization teams do, but good localizers are willing to stray from word to word accuracy to instead capture the spirit of what’s being said, which is admittedly way harder and if done poorly can be worse than a direct translation or misrepresent the text. Think of it as translating the complexities of each language into each other, rather than just words or meanings.

Mr. Horii is saying that isn’t possible at all though because English is “too simple” which is I also disagree with. It is possible if he lets go of direct comparison with things like the pronouns. Him saying things like that unfortunately goes to show his ignorance in the matter. Just because he’s a writer doesn’t mean he’s an expert on translation or language as a whole.

Why raging?

Yeah, his going to think everything about his country is superior no matter what. It was foolish to get one of your main buying base mad by calling their language simple. That means he thinks we’re simple minded. Because only a simple minded person would use a simple language. Unlike the more advanced Japanese language 😡 what a slap in our faces

Yep 🙄

Sounds fine to me.. keep Japan for the Japanese.. EN translators have been ass for decades

In any case, if I wrote something, and it got translated to Japanese, I’d be well aware that some aspects of my wiring cannot be quite so adequately conveyed to Japanese as I had originally intended it. It’s no fault of the Japanese language in and of itself; only that my possible usage of idioms, or words conveying feelings and sensitivity inevitably loses some of its zest or vigor when translated to Japanese. No big deal. Regardless, the main points, the most important points, will be maintained. Yeah, it’ll lose some of the original English flavor. Whatever.

As a trite example, Japanese makes no distinction for singular and plural things, much less the English madness of ” a murder of crows”, “a pod of dolphins”, or whatever plural zaniness for the varied animals English likes to delineate. Yeah, some flavor will be lost. That’s just what happens

Language also reflects culture. In most English speaking countries there’s no need to tie personality, age, or gender to the first person pronoun. If that’s important to you, as a writer, you have to add these information in another way: “I, the cunning and only male successor of Emperor Nintoku, (…)”.

Depending on how you do it and how much information is given this can be a bit convoluted for Westerners but total ok for the Japanese speaking community. It’s more of a question of how much of the culture do you want to convey with the use of language. And if that’s important to your game’s story/writing.

I think it’s cool this Japanese writer apparently puts effort into his dialogue, trying to convey personality and personal characteristics with each line and word choice.

However, it’s pretty ignorant to think English has no way of conveying those traits merely because we do it differently. From my perspective, English has fewer shortcuts, (“I have my character use this defunct pronoun and the audience will know this list of things about him,”) and instead holistically uses word choice and sentence construction to convey characteristics like age, education level, confidence, background, and personality.

Some English writers don’t differentiate much between how their various characters talk, and other English writers, like Charles Dickens, go all in on their dialogue being distinct. Writing in English provides a huge toolbox of vocabulary and sentence structure to work with, although admittedly, writing quality can vary widely. But that’s not indicative of the level of simplicity in the language—merely showcasing different levels of skill in wielding it.

That is absolutely not unique to Japanese devs and I would argue its presence in western games isn’t inspired by Manga at all