Neat Junk Archive

Help Poisoft Get Their Game Translated!

Kickstarter recently launched in Japan, and my favorite little game company Poisoft started a campaign! They want to release their game Order Land! in NA and Europe for Switch, Xbox One, and Steam. To do that, it needs to be translated.

Poisoft made a Switch game that I’m completely in love with – Vroom in the night sky! You can see from this gallery we made that their translation skills aren’t … good. And so this Kickstarter for Order Land! will allow them to hire professionals to localize it!

Their cute Kickstarter video explains both their plan and the game in more detail (turn on closed captions):

If you want to support Poisoft in their quest to hire professional translators, please donate to their Kickstarter campaign!

Wacky Random Generators

We’re still struggling to come up with a title for the Funky Fantasy IV book. Mato got desperate and tried a random title generator…

  1. Machine Translation Is Your Worst Enemy. 6 Ways To Defeat It
  2. Machine Translation On A Budget: 6 Tips From The Great Depression
  3. 6 Things You Can Learn From Buddhist Monks About Machine Translation
  4. Marriage And Machine Translation Have More In Common Than You Think
  5. The Lesbian Secret Revealed: Machine Translation For Great Sex
  6. What Oprah Can Teach You About Machine Translation
  7. Create A Machine Translation A High School Bully Would Be Afraid Of
  8. Never Changing Machine Translation Will Eventually Destroy You
  9. One Word: Machine Translation
  10. Warning: Machine Translation
  11. Machine Translation May Not Exist!

You can mess around with this goofy title generator here.

What Could Have Been

About a year or two before I started working with Fangamer to make Legends of Localization books, I considered making books on my own. Anyone who knows me knows that my design senses are poop though, as this mega alpha first test prototype experiment PDF shows:

I think I was just seeing how the current LoL site would look if converted straight into book format. I’m glad I decided it was a bad idea. I think I also calculated it out and a Final Fantasy IV LoL book in this sort of format would’ve been around a thousand pages or more anyway 😯

Fun with the Google Translate App

Google Translate has an app for phones where it will live translate any text you point it at. I’ve been testing it out recently, and it’s … got a long way to go. Here are some of the funnier mishaps:

Mmmm, delicious flesh pocky.

What Does Japan Think of American Cops?

There’s a funny image that’s been circling the internet ever since I gained access to the internet in the late 1990s of an American policeman surrounded by an absurd amount of fast food. There’s also Japanese text all over the place, like it’s a magazine cover or something. I always assumed the image was a fake, like “haha American cops are lazy and fat”. But it turns out, that magazine is real. And it’s incredible.

The magazine isn’t making fun of American cops at all. In fact, it’s a fanzine! This is Wild Mook issue #44, released in 1980. The Wild Mook magazine focuses on lots of different stuff, mostly military. I found issues on eBay about the US Navy, Japanese model airplanes, military combat suits from around the world, and weapons from the Imperial Japanese Army. But this police one is great. Take a look inside:

If you ever have the opportunity to buy this issue, get it! The magazine is very thick and every page is fascinating.

Splatoon Ramen?!

Well, close. It’s seafood ramen with squid ink, and the packaging just happens to be covered in colorful paint splats.

They know what they doing.

Japanese Box Art – Comedies Part 2

Here’s the final clump of box art from Japanese versions of American movies. More comedies!

The Addams Family

There’s nothing particularly weird about this one, I just like how the screenshots are at silly angles and Thing is pointing at stuff. It looks like something I’d design myself.

Home Alone

This one hits all the right marks. You get to see Kevin goofing around on his own (I love the popcorn shot), his cunning expression when he’s setting traps, and there’s even some slapstick of Harry getting his head set on fire.

Wayne’s World

The layout and design of this one brings back feelings of the early 90s big time. I love the translated exclamations all around the box, hehe. And dang, they even show the Terminator 2 reference!

Stand By Me

Okay this one isn’t a comedy, but I didn’t have enough “coming of age” movies to make a separate post for it. I just thought it was fascinating that they prominently show a kid holding a gun on the back cover, especially since handguns are outlawed in Japan. I guess guns make things seem more American? ;_;