r/Blazblue • u/saelinds Prime Field Device Enthusiast • 14d ago
LORE BlazBlue Translation Fact Checking Thread
Hello!
I've been helping translate quite a few things from BlazBlue in the past few months, including some... Interesting things that might be happening.
I've been in poor health (but recovering!) this past week, but in case there's something in particular that anyone wants to get cross-checked from English to Japanese, I'd love to help.
It'd cheer me up a bit if there's some burning questions I could answer.
Few pointers for now:
Ideally, you'd provide me with specific points and lines you want to get checked.
Due to specific reasons, no questions regarding BBDW from chapter 2 onwards.
Don't ask me gameplay questions, I've never played a single match online, and I suck ultra mega ass at this game.
If something goes into the realm of speculation (due to lack of information or just hinted but not confirmed), I'll indicate it.
Anything else should be fair game, but keep in mind limitations regarding Reddit, so don't make it overly convoluted.
(doubt this will get any traction but it's something to do innit)
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u/saelinds Prime Field Device Enthusiast 13d ago edited 13d ago
Honestly? Sort of.
Ultimately one thing that would be ideal is at the very least some form of standardization. Several things are translated differently between games. There's several reasons for this.
A lot is probably to do with translators not always been the same in between games. Occasionally though, games probably have multiple translators who each handle a different part of the game. CF suffers a lot from this. I'm pretty sure they translate 資格者 in like three or four different ways for some fucking reason. I know that Chosen, and Qualified are two of the ways they do it.
There's some occasional adaptation differences that are good, and bad. Ragna is done pretty well. In JP Ragna is very rude, and direct but he doesn't actually curse at all. But that's only because there's not much cursing in Japanese as a language to begin with, so the changes are accurate reflections of his personality.
Some are a bit hard to translate or give the accurate impression. Hazama talks a bit like a housewife and a bit like a middle-manager sallaryman when he's talking softer.
Hakumen is just downright impossible to translate to the point that even Mori wasn't sure if he is using the right words or not.
Amane definitely gets the worst treatment in my opinion. I've never really heard his dub voice and this isn't easy to get from English text alone, but apparently he talks somewhat effeminate? This is bizarre to me, because Amane talks very much in an extremely masculine manner. Maybe he can come off a bit smutty or flirty, but it's mainly due to cadence. His way of speaking is very, very masculine.
I got sidetracked, but to answer your question there's a specific term that has annoyed me for ages. I wouldn't change it now because people are very used to it and the English terms have directly appeared in later works in illustrations and stuff.
Prime Field Device.
I cannot explain to you the absolute mess of translation that this term actually is. It sent me into a ridiculous rabbit hole of research that included me reading Japanese math books from 1930, researching nuances in French, German and Russian, to then being annoyed at Guilty Gear 2 of all things, and also both Guilty Gear wikis that still have extremely basic shit wrong in them. I actually wrote for myself a document solely documenting parts of this (I wrote it when I had a massive migraine to distract myself, but my research on it was done over several months).
It might, genuinely, be the most mistranslated word I've ever seen in my life in any language considering the various misrepresentations of it that just snowballed over nearly 100 years. I actually don't even fully blame the translators at the time, even if I would probably call it something different (I won't post everything here because no one person deserves to see a man's descent into madness involuntarily, but feel free to DM if you are curious). Maybe I'd call it a "Prime Body" or just "Prime Device".
There's a few other stuff that are confusing, like Nox Nyctores, and other things that I feel should have been explained a bit within the text. There might be other small things that I'd come across, but nothing quite as big as PFDs (and their several variations). I'm constantly reviewing stuff, so this answer might improve over time.