
Yessss. YESSSS. Give us more localisation articles, precious. We loves them, precious. Especially when they come from Janet Hsu, the localisation director at Capcom who's worked on the series since the beginning, crafting incredible puns and making sure that jokes still land in their new tongue.
In her latest blog, this time for PlayStation (because the upcoming Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is coming out on PS4), Hsu details even more about the difficulties, challenges, and good times that localisation brings, especially in a game so deeply entrenched in Japanese and British culture.

"My guiding philosophy for the localisation of this title was “Authentic, yet Accessible”," says Hsu of her approach to the two games. "Translating and localising for video games is a sort of art: a balancing act of faithfulness to the literal words of the original text and correctly conveying the intentions behind them in a way that the audience can connect with."
A lot of things have been said about localisation in the past, and there have even been a fair few controversies about whether or not localisation is "dumbing down" or censoring the source material by changing its cultural references to ones more easily understood or accepted by the new audience. Hsu's goal — "Authentic, yet Accessible" — means retaining as much of the cultural context as possible while not alienating players without a great deal of knowledge of Japanese history.

Hsu gives the example of a 1972 translation of Soseki Natsume's "I Am A Cat" — a Japanese author from the late 19th and early 20th centuries who features in the Great Ace Attorney — which translates the Japanese currency references into "penny" and "crowns", in keeping with the age of the original text. "To me, this is a case of favouring accessibility over authenticity," says Hsu, "which is certainly one way to assign weight to these two opposing elements. These sorts of balancing decisions are made all the time whenever a piece of work is translated, let alone localized."

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is not only set in Japan and Great Britain, but it's also set in the past — which made for a massive challenge for the localisation team. Hsu spoke to Polygon just last month about the team's choices in trying to depict an "authentic" old-timey vocabulary while keeping it "accessible" and not totally incomprehensible to modern readers.
One particularly tricky episode was the one that features Soseki Natsume himself, because so much of the text is based on Natsume's poems, his choice of words (in Japanese), and wordplay — arguably one of the most difficult things to translate in any language.


For the best understanding of why it was "a nightmare" to localise, you're best off reading Hsu's own words on the blog — we don't know enough about Japanese or poetry or the Meiji era or Natsume's work to even begin to explain — but the point is basically that wordplay is hard enough to localise without the additional complexities of trying to translate beautiful poetry and the culture from which Natsume's work arose.
As for the British elements of the plot and the dialogue, Hsu tended to defer to her colleagues: "From the outset, I’d told the translators that they could write as Britishly as they pleased, and I would be here to dial things like grammar and phrasings back as necessary to ensure accessibility to a wider international audience." This meant creating a "faux-Victorian" style of words and grammar, attempting to balance the "authenticity" and "accessibility". An example is given in this pretty creepy nursery rhyme, that's an old-timey version of "eeny meeny", apparently:

There's even a bunch of interesting tweaks that they made to the punctuation itself, if it's not already clear that localisation specialists are absolute heroes. Hsu had to grapple with the fonts themselves to get it working in the English version — "You do NOT want to know how many fonts I had to look through on that day in search of one tiny dash… *shudder*".
But that's enough about localisation for one day, although we could easily talk about this for hours. Make sure to check out the blog for all the juicy details, even if it is on the Blue Website Which We Dare Not Name.
What's your favourite example of localisation in the Ace Attorney series? Let us know in the comments!
[source blog.playstation.com]
Comments 8
Just glad to have the game. I appreciate everything that went into this.
Interestingly, this reminds me of an interview with the game’s director (I think) around the game’s original release about difficulties of writing a game set in a different era, and trying find a balance between language that was evocative of the period while being accessible to modern audiences.
Sōseki’s works - while far from impenetrable to the modern reader - are clearly a product of their time, and current copies of his books are peppered with annotations and explanations for the modern reader.
He’s also among the least ‘modernised’ characters in the game, partly due to him being a real writer with an established ‘voice’, and partly to reenforce his position as ‘the eccentric academic’; head so buried in books he can barely function in the real world.
He’s a ditsy don who finds himself far from his own country, and even further from the comfort of his books when dragged into the very real world of the British courts, and every part of his speech is designed to enforce his ‘fish out of water’ status.
To the degree that at times I feel it’s a little unfair. One of his famous works, ‘I Am a Cat’, is written from the perspective of an incredibly haughty feline. Due to his association with this book, much of Sōseki’s own lines are written in the same haughty style as reference to it. But as far as I’m aware, Sōseki was never as haughty as his fictional felines were.
Maybe I shouldn’t shed a tear for a long dead literary figure but I did feel a bit sorry for him at times.
okay. so I have been watching alot of the preview videos for this game.so from what alot of people are saying that if you are not a scholar in British and Japanese history then you won't understand the game? has any one else taken away from that the same feeling or is it just me. the game looks great. and i have played a few ace attorney games and i understood them.is this game really that hard to understand?
I love the effort put into this. The translators must have had a blast. Somewhat frustrating I am sure but fun nonetheless. Sometimes I wish I went unto linguistics and translation academically rather than as a hobby.
@tntswitchfan68 “if you are not a scholar in British and Japanese history then you won't understand the game”
I think this definitely overstating things. It certainly helps to have a basic understanding of the social and historical context of the period that the game is set in, but there’s nothing that a quick bit of Googling can’t fill you in on.
Around the turn of the century, Victorian Britain was a terrifying globe-spanning imperial powerhouse, and Meiji era Japan was undergoing radical societal and technological change - largely as a result of opening up to western influences in the forms of science, medicine, law, and… well, lots of other stuff.
The game takes place at the crossroads of these two worlds. That’s probably the bare minimum knowledge you need, but should be enough to get you started on your journey frolicking through the streets of Victorian London.
You may have to supplement your playthrough with some light research as you go along, but I certainly don’t think you need to be a scholar in anything. The game is self-explanatory enough that you’ll probably learn enough about the period just by playing through it.
And here I struggle to localize bland company notices from Japan HQ for my coworkers in the US! Of course, it’s probably infinitely more fun to localize something creative and hip like video games. I missed my calling! 😅
But I can only imagine how challenging this Ace Attorney game must have been. I am awestruck by the work of these talented translators sometimes.
I’ll attack those ambiguous subjectless sentences and passive verb usage with renewed vigor tomorrow! 👍🏼
Singular "they" has always been stupid and just doesn't sound right. You should still use "he or she," "he/she," or "(s)he" when the identity is unknown even nowadays, not just back in the Victorian Era!
(I'm not commenting on the use of "they" to describe non-binary and similar people at this time.)
@Maxz thanks for telling me. i am looking foward for this great game.
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