“Funky Fantasy IV” is a 100% machine-translated version of Final Fantasy IV for the Japanese Super Famicom. The project is still unfinished, with little bits and pieces of untranslated menu text still strewn about, but all of the main and important text has been run through Google Translate.
Looks like my venerable profession is safe.
For now.
There is some good advice in there.
My favorite: “The enema is saying that you should not wear a basketball !”
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve always found that to be true.
I’m not going to take advice from a talking enema. Give me that basketball!
I assume this will be roughly the quality of the original official English translation of the game. Good thing Mr. Woolsey was given a more realistic timeframe to translate the next game in the (English version of the) series.
Problem with Google Translate it that it does a very good job is a language is fairly close in structure and idiom to the target, but gets progressively worse if the language is in any way more idiomatic or complex in structure. That describes Japanese very well. Extremely idiomatic and with a fairly complex structure. You get a similar problem with Korean and Finnish. Anything where the language is more synthetic than analytic (i.e. English to Finnish or Japanese), BOOM!
Japanese obviously makes it harder because the written form it insane. With 3 different possibilities for writing : 2 Syllable based scripts, 1 based on Chinese morphology slammed in to Japanese multiple syllable rendering, with at least two possible readings of any one character (Chinese or native.) I’m surprised that Google translate even works as well as it does. The other problem with Japanese is that all of Japanese can (and in older 8-bit times often was) written purely in Hirigana (this is something Japanese often do in children’s books and on characters that are uncommon also get adorned with furigana – essentially hirigana helper subtext.) Mainly becuae the amound of characters required in RAM was reduced massively doing this.
Edited 2016-12-14 10:11 UTC