Hap Inc. (known for the title Mom Hid My Game! on Switch) recently spoke with The Verge via email about translation troubles tied to the small series. According to the creator, Yuusaka Ishimoto, the title of the first game on Nintendo DS (Hidden My Game By Mum) was the result of Google Translate.
When he approached another company in preparation for the Switch release, he was informed the translation was off. Ishimoto then took the opportunity to change the title to “Mom Hid My Game!” in order to correct the mistake. Apparently, fans of the series would have preferred he kept the original title intact.
The original title was what I got when I relied on Google Translate… When going through another company for the Nintendo Switch release, it was pointed out that the translation was off. I thought that if it’s going to be released on a Nintendo platform, I would like to correct the mistake.
In the same interview, Ishimoto discussed how he was a self-taught game designer, didn’t play many video games previously, and actually had a long-time goal to write comedy manga. His inspiration for his games is also drawn from anime and manga, and he even posts comics regularly on his main Twitter account.
Have you played Mom Hid My Game! on the Nintendo Switch? Were you confused by the premise of it when it first arrived on the eShop? Tell us in the comments below.
[source theverge.com]
Comments 12
Mom Hid the Right Answer.
I wish somebody's mom would hide these heap of stinking offal. What a sorry excuse for a game. I'd rather play Pocket Camp or Sonic 06 or E.T. on 2600. Sheesh.
Machine translation is getting better fast, but it's still a long way from being ready to rely on for anything as serious as product release. Especially for languages as vastly different as English and Japanese. It kind of blows my mind people don't realize this.
'Mom Hid my Credibility'
@Prof_Yoshtonics Go on then.
Picked this up in a recent sale and I'm really enjoying the quirkiness.
I found the translation errors be part of it's charm and for the price it was a fun little time killer, with zany quirky charm.
Google Translate is really only good for single words or very very basic phrases. When my students use it, it's glaringly obvious. Translation is rarely direct, A becomes B. Especially going between languages as radically different as English and Japanese.
Here's an example, in English, you almost 100% of the time need a subject. "I eat pizza." In Japanese you can say " 私はピザを食べる/watashi wa piza wo taberu". "Watashi wa" is the subject meaning "I" or "self" referring to the speaker. But in Japanese, saying that is optional. However as you know, dropping "I" in English completely changes the meaning of the sentence. "Eat Pizza." is an order. (One that I happily would follow.)
Trust me as someone with incomplete Japanese who teaches English as a second language, I run into these issues all the time. Pretty much daily.
Is people really still using Google Translate? I thought everyone would be past it by now, as it’s abundantly made clear it’s not up to task.
@Bass_X0 Too late. Already went on. Or do you mean go on as in, "I could all day", about how horrible this game is.
@Heavyarms55 Well, technically that only means "I" for a certain portion of the Japanese population, as another difference between the languages is that Japanese contains many different personal pronouns depending on the speaker, but I assume you already knew that.
@BulbasaurusRex 私 watashi is the neutral pronoun that anyone can use in polite speech. But yes there are others and their use depends on the speaker and context. Such as 僕boku 俺ore and あたしatashi.
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