The World Ends With You: Final Remix Might Have Borrowed An Italian Fan's Translation

@JHDK Except this has nothing to do with Nintendo.

A lot of time companies have to hire contractors for this sort of thing. It's not at all impossible that some outside hire would try to cheat and just steal someone else's work.

Still, I hope whomever stole it is fired hardcore and that Square Enix and Nintendo credit the actual translator.

@Rika_Yoshitake Good call.

Hmmm.... I'd kind of like to see some evidence for this, such as word choices, particular identifying phrases, names, etc. Because the way I read this article, it sounds like the claim is "I used line breaks in my translation, and they're using line breaks in theirs so they must be using mine.", which to me sounds like if I said "I wrote a tune and used F Sharp accidentals. This other piece of music has F Sharp accidentals in it. They must have used my tune."

CV?

@adh56 curriculum vitae.

Sounds like Square Enix didn't remix the translation enough to hide their plagiarism.

Well, look at Squenix going all Filip Miucin on this one!

Wow. If Nintendo did this, surely we would be burning them at the stake right now?

Edit: Now that I think about it, maybe not. People were angry with the official FE Fates translation right? Maybe should've let fans do that one.

@Liam_Doolan @Yosheel gotcha. That’s what I was thinking after reading the full context, but I’m not familiar with that one

This person sounds like they're telling BS stories to get attention like the countless nephews and nieces of a certain Nintendo employee who remains anonymous to this day.

@NotAceAttorney : SEGA used a fan-made DS emulator for one of their Sonic compilation releases back in the day.

The release was widely panned for its rubbish emulation.

I hope Squenix gets to the bottom of this and hopefully fires the translator they used. This is absolutely disrespectful.

@Silly_G if you check the source (Kotaku) they actually have comparison screenshots. The guy isn't just making it up.

If this is true, I hope they address this issue if if not publicly so something like this doesn't happen again and stay un credited.

As an italian and professional translator myself, I guess the only way to know would be to compare the full fan-made translation with the full official translation and see if they match in the "unique touches" and quirks each translator naturally adds to the text. Common parlance will always be translated as common parlance - you can't claim originality on that!

I've never played the game, but if it's really all made of short lines of text like it appears in the screenshots...well, there's only so many ways you can translate "You said you need no friends" to another language - you could virtually ask 10 different translators and most of them will come up with the same translation, because in short sentences you can't paraphrase much.

Not saying any of the two parties is wrong, but IF Square hired a professional translator, I see no reason for him/her to "steal" somebody else's work - it looks like a rather straightforward game to translate, it's certainly not British pastoral poetry. However, many companies don't want to hire translators and end up using other means - but I can't tell until I read the text.

@Liam_Doolan
I'm a little confused, is it Mewster or Mewtwo?
Or are those names referring to 2 different people?

Well, not sure whether I should believe this or not to be honest, as the screenshots posted on Kotaku show no decisive proof.
I’m Italian, and I can tell you that pretty much any Italian who knows English a bit would translate them that way, as they don’t even offer that much room to interpretation.
But then again, to have a clearer idea I should read both scripts in their entirety.
Also, it’s weird how he chose a font that works better than the one present in the official release lol

Another thing I want to add - many translators today use "tools" to assist them with the translation of large bodies of text - basically they feed the text into the machine and the machine translates it roughly - then it's up to the individual to refine that into a more natural language (I've never used these tools personally but I've been lectured about them at the Uni).
What are the chances of both of these translators using the same tools, thus producing similar results?

But really, before any further investigation, somebody should check who is credited for the italian translation in the Switch game (if it's credited at all). I can't find the credits anywhere.

@DawgP I am Italian and trust me when I say that Square Enix used the exact same translation, word by word, comma by comma, for most of the game. There's really no room for it to be a coincidence.

"I’m not interested in making someone pay for something I made so many years ago."

This person is either rich, stupid, or lying about creating the translation.

@Natzore Okey dokes. Doesn't mean I wouldn't still like to see a comparison myself, especially from an outlet "reporting" the story.

Before you call bovine fecal matter on Mewster, I have to say that, aside from an actual TWEWY cartridge, I also did play his translation on yarr-four. And I have to say some of the translated lines are the same as the official localisation.

He went as far as making custom sprites for certain captions, such as the "NOISE ERASED!" at the end of every battle. It's not like the guy didn't do his homework. (Which is what everyone should do, before implying Mewster is merely jumping onto a bandwagon.)

And, most importantly, Mewster did not ask for money, which apparently flew over everyone's head.

Can we get Sword of Mana 3 now and Mother 3?

@spizzamarozzi
Didn't know that much about you despite having you in my WiiU friend list; mad props to you for landing one of my dream jobs!
That said, of course there are several different ways to say one thing and just one or two to say another, but then again, I played the original game and its fan-translation. I have to check the patched rom again, but if memory serves, the script is identical.