Secret New Product!
We’re working on something new! I’d love to hear your guesses on what you think it might be~
We’re working on something new! I’d love to hear your guesses on what you think it might be~
The proof for “I’m Stuck in a Video Game” arrived last week! I gave it a final proofread before signing off and shipping it back to the printer.
Now we play the waiting game~
Happy July! I come bearing bad news:
Yep! The LoL EarthBound book is sold out. It’s already being reprinted, so we should have more by mid-to-late August.
So much happens behind the scenes while working on Legends of Localization projects, but I’d say 99% of it never gets shown or shared. I’m always poring through research materials, magazines, sites, and more, and new things are always happening. So I thought it’d be nice to set up a side “dev blog” where I and my fellow LoL members (yep, it’s not just me anymore: Heidi/Poe and Tony are also on the team) can make quick posts about what we’re up to or share some cool stuff we’ve stumbled across.
First, here’s a not-so-quick look at the current projects and general goals. It’s a lot of stuff šÆ
I receive a lot of e-mail every day, usually questions about specific localization issues in certain games. It takes a long time to answer each one, so I’ve become notoriously bad at taking forever to respond to e-mail in general. I feel it’s important to answer every one, though. I’ve been chipping away at my e-mail backlog and finally have it down to just 60 e-mails, down from ten times that just a few months ago. So if you sent something since 2015 but haven’t gotten a response, hopefully one will be coming in the near future.
The newest Legends of Localization book should be out in a few weeks! It’s not a standard LoL book, though – it’s something much lighter and easier for general audiences to get into. More details soon, but on our end we gotta do a bunch of prep (product photos, product page, promo video, outreach, etc.) before it releases. We’re also thinking of doing a promo stream for it, but I don’t know what that would entail yet.
Late last year, my Funky Fantasy IV game translation experiment made a bunch of headlines around the world. I got invited to write about it in a fancy academic journal that focuses on translation, so I’ve gotta break the rust off of my academic-style writing soon if I’m gonna make this year’s deadline.
I’ve also been prepping a book about the Funky Fantasy IV experiment. It’s set to focus on the particularly interesting and entertaining translations in the game, with accompanying info + explanations on how said translations even happened. It’ll also touch on the technical side of things, the responses I received from surprising organizations, and general info on why machine translation and video games don’t mix as things stand now. I’m considering making it part of a “Horrors of Localization” series, or some similar name.
Early this year I started to put together a blog article on the history of EarthBound fans’ hopes for Mother 3 since 1995 all the way to 2017. As I wrote it, the post got so big that I realized it’d need to have its own dedicated web page instead. Even that’s started to get so big that it makes more sense to put it into some other format. It approaches the topic from an unusual angle that isn’t about the game, but rather about the fans and one of the most wanted game localizations of all time. It’ll materialize in some form someday – maybe as a book, or maybe as something else.
A while back, Nina Matsumoto and the creator of Game Center CX/Retro Game Master put together a children’s book about a girl who gets trapped inside a video game. Recently, it was announced that Fangamer is releasing the book in English. The announcement was even on Game Center CX itself!
Anyway, the Legends of Localization team is involved in a small way! Plus it’s not every day that Japanese children’s books get localized into English, so I also interviewed everyone involved to document the process. It’s been a dream come true for me in several ways. More info on all of this later, of course!
I’ve been slowly putting together some content for the “patch pages” of our Zelda 1 LoL book. Stuff keeps happening, though! The latest example is when we discovered that Nintendo quietly fixed some text for the Zelda 1 NES Classic Mini release. This stuff is lower priority, but I’d like to get some patch pages out sometime. Basically, they’ll be released as free, downloadable files that you can print out for yourself. We’ve considered also offering them as professionally-printed stickers too, but I’m not sure there’d be enough demand for it. But maybe that’ll change if there’s enough hooting and hollering.
The next big, main LoL book is about the first Super Mario Bros. Just as the Zelda and EarthBound books looked at localization in different ways, this one will take a different look at localization too. After last year’s EarthBound book, we decided “no RPGs in 2017” and that it’d be beneficial to try our hand at smaller paperback books on separate topics. As such, we’re still in the early research, planning, and buying phase of the SMB book. We’ve been buying games and consoles from all over the world for the book, and as each new thing arrives I always learn something new or get a new idea to add to the book.
The main Legends of Localization site has had a very ugly design since I first created it in 2013. I have no art or design sense, so it was all meant as a placeholder for something much better.
Tony did some design work for a redesign a few months back. I’ve slowly started implementing it in HTML, but it’ll be a while until it’s ready to go live, especially with 212+ posts that will likely need to be hand-tweaked to display properly afterward. I also gotta reprogram some technical stuff to work with the new layout. The good news is that it’ll work much better on mobile devices than it does now. No real estimate on when this’ll all be ready, but it’s something else that’s in the works.
The EarthBound LoL book is selling out fast and already needs to get a reprint, so we’re completing the final steps for a new run. We’ve fixed a few typos and such for this new edition. We also got about 1500 more bonus bookplates lying around, so we’re gonna try to sign them all before the second edition arrives. More info on all of this later. As always, if you ask in the order form, we’ll gladly sign one of our books and/or draw weird things in them!
It’s long been my dream to translate classic Japanese-only video games and release them in an official capacity. It’s still too early to say much of anything, but the quick story is that it’s become a less impossible-sounding prospect in recent months. We’ve been putting a good amount of effort into this, so if anything develops I’ll share what I can. It’s very possible nothing will come of this, but I’m personally optimistic about it.
Amid all the books and projects and whatnot, standard site updates are always on my mind. I have a big list of topics I want to cover but I’ve learned I gotta be choosy or they’ll take up all my time. I also have an update for the next Final Fantasy IV page about 30% done. I don’t know when it’ll be ready but I at least expect it to be up by the end of the year at the latest.
A recent addition to the current LoL site is the gallery section. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years now, and it offers a way for fans to help out too. After the first two galleries, I’ve learned that they take MUCH more work than they seem at first!
We’ve been trying to brainstorm other LoL merchandise lately that ISN’T a book, but I also want to make sure that whatever we make, it’ll be helpful or useful in some way. We’ve come up with a few ideas but nothing that I’m 100% sold on yet.
Last year I showed off an experimental program that allowed me to display the Japanese scripts for Breath of Fire II and A Link to the Past while I played the English versions. With this program, I was able to compare the Japanese and English scripts live on stream while interacting with stream viewers. The program later made a bunch of headlines on gaming and translation sites.
More recently, I’ve started to develop a much more powerful program that does the same thing with more reliability and flexibility. It’s still in the early development phase but it’s got an insane amount of potential for Legends of Localization projects. It could also be used by other people for completely unrelated purposes. It’s a really cool system and I hope to be able to share it when it’s more complete. For now, I’ve been slowly developing it with different projects in mind. At the moment I’ve used it in different ways with Final Fantasy IV, Super Mario All-Stars, Super Mario World, Tecmo Secret of the Stars, and Super Mario RPG.
This will deserve an entire site section of its own sometime, but after our Super Mario RPG translation comparison stream series ends, I’ll probably use my custom program to make Final Fantasy VI T-Edition (an amazing Japanese hack that’s supposedly insane to try to hack into English) sort of playable in English. It’ll take a good amount of time but be worth it; since the hack doesn’t change much of the existing text, I can also use the same setup to do a live comparison stream of FFVI at the same time.
Speaking of streams, after Super Mario RPG ends in a week or two, I’m not sure what we’ll move on to next. It’s possible we’ll pause our stream schedule for a good while, but I’m not sure. But I DO know that I want to stream these someday:
I held a poll a few months ago about what games to stream someday. Here are the results:
The problem is that streams often take 3+ hours out of my day, which eats a ton of time out of my day. I like them, though, and many of the head-turning LoL projects wouldn’t have existed without the streams. Plus they basically involve what I already normally do anyway for LoL stuff (take a zillion screenshots of games while analyzing stuff live). It’s a weird problem, so I’m still trying to figure out what’s best for everything.
Last year we were lucky enough to get giant boxes of old Japanese gaming magazines that aren’t well known outside of Japan. I’ve skimmed through many of them, and Poe has been busy cataloging their info. There are so many cool little articles, pics, and more but it’s been awkward trying to share them on the main LoL site, so hopefully this new dev blog will be filled with scans soon!
I also occasionally dump game data from the Wii U Virtual Console to see how classic games have been modified since their original releases decades ago. I don’t know if anyone out there is doing this or cares about tiny little differences, but the topic is pretty important to my books and articles, so I try to do it whenever it’s relevant. For example, I found these changes in Breath of Fire II:
Super Mario RPG also features some changes, but no text changes that I’m aware of. I noticed one enemy got fixed so that it isn’t invincible under certain conditions. If you’re interested, here’s a big text file that lists all of the changed bytes: smrpg-diffs.
By accident, Legends of Localization got a lot of attention for covering one of the earliest Nintendo Switch games that featured a particularly bad translation. Even after the developer updated the game’s text in response to gamers’ reactions, the translation somehow got worse! The game’s short enough that I’ve considered offering them a competent translation for free, but I have yet to reach out. I’m thinking I might just get screenshots of all the text I can, translate them properly, and then send it all to the CEO (who’s also the game’s designer, head programmer, and translator). Between everything else, though, this is pretty low priority.
Legends of Localization has been donating prizes for the Games Done Quick events for a little while now, and this upcoming one will have LoL representation too. Poe’s been coordinating a lot of it so I’m not sure what exactly is going on, but she’s been busy with it recently. Look for it!
All of this is happening while I also continue with my regular translation job, advise people looking to become translators themselves, do interviews, etc. It’s all pretty exhausting, so lately I’ve started to slow down on everything. I’ve started to play the latest Zelda game to relax… but even then I take screenshots of all the Japanese text for future LoL use š
Anyway, this is all to say that Legends of Localization has a lot going on at the moment. Check back regularly for smaller updates about stuff we’re doing or stuff we’ve found!
So much is going on with Legends of Localization that I wanted to give a quick status update on a bunch of it. Lots of book stuff, site stuff, and more!
Last November Fangamer and I released the first-ever Legends of Localization book, and it sold out quick! We had a second run printed earlier this year so there should be plenty for a while now. Fangamer has the book on aĀ celebration saleĀ until the end of June 2016, so if you get a copy this week youāll save some money! Thereās also been so much demand for the book to be sold on Amazon that weāve been experimenting with Amazonās marketplace. Amazonās fees are pretty steep so it costs more than buying it from Fangamer, but itās an option if you prefer Amazon.
The response has been great, and itās gone farther than I ever expected ā bookstores around the world have been picking it up, itās been mentioned in several magazines, and itās even being used in the classroom 😯 The reviews have been a lot of fun to read too, here are a couple:
āI had no idea that I could be learning so much new information about a game that I thought I already knew everything about!ā
āI canāt stress enough how vital it is for the video game industry to have people like Mandelin taking on projects like this.ā
āItās also great that he digs into the āwhyā of things, instead of just stating āthey translated it this way, the end.’ā
āItās such a niche topic that Iām so thankful it got released. I hesitate to give it a rating because thereās nothing else quite like this out there.ā
āExcellent offering and even got trolled in a pretty epic way. Highly recommend.ā
āThe Legend of Zelda seemed to have no secrets and my impression was that whatever an overzealous translator could nitpick out of the differences would lack much substance. [ā¦] I not only stand corrected by this excellent book but also excited to see that if so much content and information few of us were aware of can come of this title, what about others (games and authors)?ā
These past few months Iāve been hard at work on the next Legends of Localization book: EarthBound. Itās finally nearing completion and should hopefully be out sometime this autumn. Iāve rewritten everything from scratch, done all-new research, and made sure that every page has something new or interesting that I never knew about before. Even better,Ā the team has been in touch with the gameās head localizer, the gameās creator, and the gameās head marketer. This book is going to be epic.
Oh yeah, weāre trying to get scratch-n-sniff things included too.
Sign up hereĀ to get notified as soon as the book is available. Weāre also planning an EarthBound āpassportā similar to theĀ Zelda passport, but itās still in the planning phase.
The book team and I have been prepping for some Zelda II stuff, but nothingās set in stone yet. Itās one of the most-bashed Zelda games, but in terms of localization itās even more fascinating than the first game in many ways. In my sparse spare time Iāve been trying to master the game semi-speedrun styleā¦ but the English and Japanese versions are different enough that Iāll probably need to master them both separately. If you can think of any interesting tips or topics I should cover or whatever else, let me know.
Thanks to the success of the books Iāve been able to focus on Legends of Localization a little more than last year. Iāve been trying to post articles a little more frequently when I can. I want to get a few Final Fantasy IV comparison updates out this year too. Iām also considering some changes to the site and the siteās design. Having guest-written articles is another idea Iāve been toying with but havenāt put too much thought into yet.
A lot of the work I do for the site and for the books requires me to play games for weird, specific reasons. I realized it might be interesting to stream these kinds of things, so Iāve been doingĀ some test streams on Twitch, separate from my usualĀ Poemato CXĀ streams. Iāve been archiving them on YouTube too if you canāt make it live:
My hope is that I can do these more often and regularly as a way to level up my game knowledge, get screenshots, and get outside advice on topics. Itās also been a nice way to show off our latest progress and the latest goodies weāve acquired for book and article research. Itās all still in the early stages but should be fun.
Iāve been trying to stay on top of my e-mails but have fallen far behind. If youāve e-mailed me but havenāt heard back, Iāll still try to respond, even if itās super-late. If you send a question for me to answer on the site, though, I usually move those to my little database for future updates.
I recently wrote a Legends of Localization article for issue #21 of Nintendo Force Magazine. You can check that outĀ here. Iāve been considering writing small articles like this for other sites and magazines and such, so if you have any suggestions or recommendations let me know!
Thatās about it for right now, but for more day-to-day updates on our progress you can follow me onĀ TwitterĀ andĀ Tumblr.
Thanks for reading this far!
– Clyde
A lotās been happening this year ā I recently made a deal with Fangamer to release a series of Legends of Localization books, and the first one is well underway. Sign up for a pre-order notificationĀ here!
The first book is going to set the standard for all future books in the series, so we decided to go with The Legend of Zelda. The book will feature what you can read and seeĀ here, but with even more information, new content, info fixes, and lots of improvements everywhere.
Iāve been working hard on updating the content, and Tony, one of Fangamerās designers, has been working hard on the book layout. I canāt show off any work-in-progress stuff yet, but it looks AMAZING. Itās visually entertaining AND classy at the same time. Tonyās design style matches my presentation style perfectly ā itās going to be great!
I shared more details and pics about the book during a recent Poemato CX stream, check it out below!
Currently, the bookās content and layout needs to be finished by around the end of August 2015.Ā Fangamer hopes to release the book in November or December 2015, with preorders opening probably in October.
For preorder bonuses, weāre thinking weāll have a fancy bookmark that matches the theme of each Legends of Localization book, but weāre open to suggestions. Some other ideas Iāve thought of include:
If you have any other suggestions, let me know in the comments orĀ on Twitter!
The Zelda book is going to help us figure out the book-making process. After it, weāll be moving on to the big one: EarthBound! This is going to be a HUGE book, and itāll have a lot of new, updated content too. We have lots of cool plans for this one ā Iāll post more about it when it gets going.
A Zelda II book is also in the works ā in fact, most of my work on it is already done. This was going to be combined with the Zelda 1 book originally, but it wound up being so big that we had to break them apart!
Those are the three books Iām slated to do for Fangamer so far. Beyond that, Iām really looking forward to a MOTHER 3 book. I feel like I better hurry before Nintendo finally decides to release an official translation sometime 😛
For the most part, Legends of Localization has just been a hobby of mine for years and years. Technically, I started doing all this back in 1999, so thatās how long this has been a part of my life. These books mark the first time Iām turning my hobby into a serious job, so I wanted to thank everyone whoās supported my work here. Whether youāve shared the site with friends, posted comments on here, e-mailed me with info, or donated in the past, thank you!
Iād love to continue to make Legends of Localization more and more of a serious endeavor ā if these books do well enough, Iāll be able to focus more and more on this site and future books. Iāll also be able to update more frequently if everything goes well! I sometimes daydream of Legends of Localization being my ONLY focusā¦ Iām not crazy enough to make that leap yet, but letās see how well these books do first 😛
But Patreon is a thing that exists these days, so that might be worth looking into instead. Thatās a scary step to take, though. If you have any Patreon tips or suggestions, let me know! Maybe a high tier could get you each book for free as theyāre released or somethingā¦
A common question Iāve gotten lately is: āIs Legends of Localization dead?ā
The answer is no! 2015 has just been a crazy year. I had surgery a while back that Iām still recovering from, my professional translation work has been super-busy, thereāve been deaths in the family, Iām in the middle of buying a house, etc. Once things settle down ā and if the books do well enough ā Iāll be able to focus more time on updates here. I love this hobby of mine, so I want to get back to it!
I receive a LOT of e-mails about Legends of Localization every day, so I apologize if I havenāt replied to you. I do read all my e-mails and keep them organized, so even if I havenāt gotten back to you, you havenāt been ignored. My backlog of reader questions is huge, too! I feel so bad that I canāt keep up with them allā¦ But I also feel glad that this little hobby means so much to other people.
Final Fantasy IV. I get asked this question more than any other: āWhen are you going to update with more Final Fantasy IV stuff?ā
A few months ago I actually started to do some behind-the-scenes work to get updates rolling again. Iād like to get one or two updates out before the end of the year. It might be tough with everything else thatās going on, but I really miss FFIV.
Iād LOVE to do a book version of FFIV too, but I fear that it would literally wind up being thousands of pages. For reference,Ā this pageĀ is currently 18 to 20 pages in our WIP Zelda book. I donāt want to do the math, but I think the current FFIV stuff would be several hundred pages, and itās only halfway through the game!
Basically, I havenāt dropped FFIV. It means too much to me to ever drop it, donāt worry!
So there you go! Thanks again to everyone whoās ever supported Legends of Localization in any way!
– Clyde
FangamerāsĀ āYou Are Now EarthBoundā KickstarterĀ is ending soon, and Iām involved with one of the final stretch goals! Indeed,Ā if it gets high enough within the next three or so days, Iāll be able to make a book version of my EarthBound localization analysis!
Believe it or not, Iāve been comparing games and translations since way back in 1999, when I first started a site that compared EarthBound with its Japanese counterpart:
I didnāt get too far ā I soon studied the language a lot more,Ā did a lot of projects, and even becameĀ a professional translator. Armed with all this, I eventually went back and did aĀ full comparison of EarthBound and MOTHER 2Ā ā and later turned that into the start of Legends of Localization.
After I finished it, I dreamed of making it into a book somehow. There was also a lot of content that I skimmed over that Iāve always wanted to go back and cover, plus Iāve actually had the honor of meeting EarthBoundās head localizer, discussing details with him, and even chatting about MOTHER 3!
So with all this, now would be a wonderful chance to put EarthBound Legends of Localization into a book form!
If this Kickstarter stretch goal is met and Iām able to work on a book, Iād be able to:
And more, of course! Iām still trying to figure out how I could include secret image text, but I think it might be a lost cause 😛
Anyway, if the Kickstarter stretch goal is met and the book does well enough, it could open up opportunities to do more books on a more regular basis! Iād love to be able to focus my efforts on plenty of other games and series āĀ my MOTHER 3 translations noteswould be a perfect start, for example.
And Iāve already had the groundwork laid for a good EarthBound Zero/MOTHER 1 analysis too:
And there are the other projects I always have on my mind but not enough time for usually:
And if things go REALLY well, Iād love the opportunity to go and seek out the various people responsible for localizations and see what their experiences were!
Of course, this all rides on whether or not this stretch goal gets hit and if the EarthBound book does well enough. Even if you donāt back the Kickstarter, if the goal DOES get met youāll still be able to order the book from Fangamer, but if you do back it I think thereās probably a tier or something where you can get a copy of the book automatically.
Depending on how things go, I might do a smaller, simpler book before the EarthBound one just to get the kinks and everything worked out. But thatās getting ahead of myself ā for now, if any of this interests you, consider backing FangamerāsĀ āYou Are Now EarthBoundā Kickstarter!
– Clyde
I was just looking through theĀ Legends of Localization article archiveĀ and realized that today marks one year since I started doing these single-topic articles!
The very first article, which seems like just yesterday, was aboutĀ someone sending me a copy of Zelda II for the Famicom Disk System. Since then, thereāve been 145 articles, or about 1 article every 2.5 days 😯 I had no idea Iād written that many!
Anyway, that aside, hereās a quick site status update!
For a while there, I was able to keep the updates flowing at a good rate, and even managed to do the bigĀ Final Fantasy IVĀ andĀ AVGNĀ updates once a month. But alas, the work of a freelance translator can get crazily unpredictable, so right now Legends of Localization is back in the hectic āupdate whenever a hole in time opens upā mode. More specifically:
Now that I think about it, I did recently do some small updates that you mightāve missed:
Pretty much every day I wake up thinking how swell itād be if I could monetize Legends of Localization somehow so I could focus more time on it. I fear that a Kickstarter wouldnāt succeed, and I donāt think Patreon would have enough backers. If anyone has any suggestions, though, let me know! There are a million things Iād like to dig into and write articles about sometime ā just off the top of my head:
Anyway, while thatās the dream, in reality Iāve been working on lots of really cool and rewarding professional translation projects too, the most recent of which I can mention is Attack on Titan!
Itās crazy to think back to when I first started learning the language so many years ago, and now millions of people are watching the result of those studies. Itās actually kind of stage fright-y!
Oh yeah, and Legends of Localization is apparentlyĀ in the running for top professional language blog of 2014Ā at some language siteā¦ even though I write about poop jokes and horse wieners.
Oh, and there was a Polygon article the other day about fan translations, which includes some snippets about MOTHER 3 and some interview bits from Jeffman and me. Check it outĀ here!
So thatās the latest so far! If you wanna keep up with more of my goings-on,Ā follow me on Twitter, where I often post stuff thatās too small to write a whole article about here, like:
– Clyde