Archive

A Neat Find in the Desert

Mato and I had a nice time visiting a little Japanese garden in the middle of the Arizona desert recently. In the gift shop, we found a neat book:


Just a few days previous, we’d seen this book on the anthropomorphism episode of Japanology Plus. And then here it was near where we live!

It’s a goal of mine to utilize the many photos I’ve taken over the past decade by making my own photography book(s). This book is good inspiration and motivation for me!

Japanese Ads for Foreign Consumers – Winter 1958

Mato & I found a set of 4 magazines from between 1958-1960 at an antique store recently. It’s called “Japan Magazine” and it appears to be targeted toward Americans and Europeans living in Japan. The whole magazine is in English and the articles are written by both Japanese and foreigners, and everything is edited by a Japanese staff. That’s probably why there are some silly-sounding phrases here and there.

I picked out some interesting advertisements to share from Volume 1, Issue 3:

Click on the thumbnails for a closer look:

Looks like the focus is on industry and production, with a few sprinkles of creature comforts. That Ajinomoto ad in the style of American 1950s ads is my favorite of the bunch. And given that there’s been a sort of anti-MSG movement in recent years, it’s doubly amusing.

A Pliable Layout

I was going through some old files the other day and found some pages Tony had printed out for me. They’re from when press start to translate was still in mid-development, and it was time for me to take photos. I thought it’d be neat to show a before/after thing:

The top sheet of paper is the in-progress layout, and the blue square with the green X is where the picture was originally going to go. You can see by comparing it to the finished book below it that page layouts almost always change when we add a photograph or some other kind of visual aid.

I’ll make a point to save more of those in-progress pages to share when we’re working on future projects!

Shorts and Guides and Manga, Oh My!

We got a cool package in the mail yesterday:

Talk about your opposites attracting! The Yoshi stuff is more examples of “Yossy” being used as an alternate romanization of Yoshi’s name. And the Yakuza 0 stuff we got because that game is just damn amazing and I need to absorb everything about it.

LoL EarthBound: 2014 vs 2016

Mato found a gem while looking through old emails recently. It’s a mockup of what we thought the EarthBound Legends of Localization book would look like:

The name of this file was “open zine copy.png”. lmao, we thought it’d be small enough to be a zine! For those who don’t know/remember, LoL EB was funded as a stretch goal during Fangamer’s You Are Now EarthBound Kickstarter in October 2014. And two years later, when the actual LoL EB book was released, it looked a damn sight more impressive than the mockup:

And a “zine” it is not. At over 400 pages, I hope the EB book stays our biggest book. I don’t want to go any higher pleeeease!

More Goofs from the Google Translate App

One of the best things about receiving packages from Japan is using the Google Translate phone app on the newspapers stuffed inside the boxes for padding. We got a game recently (which I still need to post about), and the app churned out some funny phrases on the newspapers:

We will never be free of eagles here at LoL.

Poisoft Relaunched Their Translation Kickstarter

Knowing there was little chance they’d reach their 5,000,000 yen goal, Poisoft canceled their Order Land Translation Project Kickstarter last month, saying they’d relaunch it after tweaking things a bit. Well hey, they made good on their promise! The Kickstarter was relaunched this morning – the goal has been lowered to 2,000,000 yen and some of the rewards have changed.

Mato’s been playing a lot of Order Land on the Switch in Japanese and he’s been really liking it. All but the King mode.

The Origin of the Miserable Little Pile

So, this book arrived yesterday:

I was confused as to why we needed it until Mato tagged a page for me:

Whoa. So the Symphony of the Night localizer didn’t pull that line out of his butt. Mato goes into more detail about this line here if you’re interested!