Random: The New Denpa Men Is Getting Roasted For Its Translation Issues

All your denpa men are belong to us.

It’s pretty charming though. I might just give it a whizz before it’s fixed up.

Just downloaded it for trying it between Bo sessions. If English translation is that bad I can't even imagine the Spanish one... oh man, time to grab some popcorn, this gotta be terrible.

I really hope they don't fix it.

@Bobb

Didnt you see the screenshots? Somebody came all over the place!

I always took the grammatical oddities and improper tone as just the odd way the Denpa Men speak rather than it being a translation issue.

@Arminillo them saying “another” is saying there are multiple denpa men and it’s a common incident lol.

This is actually pretty funny! I’ve seen fluent English speaking people say more ridiculous things than this (even leading politicians!) so this game doesn’t look bad at all in light of that 😆

One of the Denpa men I recruited said "Damn it"...this is a E for everyone game 💀

Seems to me the last guy used Google translate for his post too which failed even more.

@Supervideoman22 seriously??? XD

I'm reading these with a Nopon voice in mind, and I'm kinda liking it. It matches the game's vibe

Wow the last guy complaining about language when his own post is just as legible? Never heard of punctuation and English?

Honestly I'd love a 'Book of Mario' version thats intentionally badly translated just to have more lines like this.

@Mrkittyhead
https://imgur.com/a/KhJJR3j

Considering that Genius Seniority did the Gamecube Pokemon games and those translations, I would want nothing kess of a stupid translation for this game

If it were 100% machine translated there shouldn’t be any spelling errors like ‘wituout’. I imagine there’s a degree of human input, but I also imagine the human in question isn’t fully at home in the English language.

The translation issues are not that bad. Funny, if anything. The game is charming and loads of fun, which is what really counts.

No! Don't fix these poor translations! Have some fun people! Sheesh.

@GamingFan4Lyf exactly brings some lighthearted fun to what's already present in the game

I for one am here for the janky translation. If I remember correctly, even in denpa men 2 and 3 (didn't play 1) the dwarves spoke in a slightly odd, literal translation manner so this text wasn't too out of place. Honestly noone is playing denpa men for the deep philosophical story so why not?

My own head cannon is that the real language being spoken in universe is so odd it can't be translated properly. In a similar vein to how a complicated nuanced social situation/concept may have a word associated to it in one language but it simply doesn't exist in another language, leading to a on-the-nose unnatural translation with no alternative.

Haven't touched it as it had the free to play tag on it. I liked the previous game in the series though. Should I give this a go?

@LEGEND_MARIOID I haven't played any of the previous games and I'm having a blast with it. Haven't spend a dime on it either

It's Zero Wing all over again. It's actually funny and I hope they keep it in.

Yeah, it's certainly something, but I don't think it's machine translated. A lot of the sentences sound like they've been written by Japanese peeps who aren't perfect in their English. The sentences sound like ones the kids in my classes would write.

As a fan of the series since the original, I'm disappointed :/

• The translation has obviously been AI generated and this is the 2nd time this year that AI has blemished a game I've looked forward to for many years (Endless Ocean Luminous being the other)
• The gyro aiming when catching Denpa Men is broken and I had to disable it.
• The free to play aspect of the game feels seedy when the original trilogy cost less than £10 each and provided 30+ hours of content per game.
• The need to be constantly connected to the internet is terrible and the way it frequently has to spend a moment connecting takes me out of the experience. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't it also mean that one day the game will be shut down, like the Japan-only smart phone Denpa Men game? Why would I want to spend money on a game like that?
• The original trilogy looked superb for downloadable 3DS titles. This looks like they took all the assets from the smart phone version (which itself was created from 3DS assets), blew them up on the big screen and made it HD.
• The scale of the world and available activities was always growing with each new game in the original trilogy. This game feels like it's stuck somewhere between Denpa Men 1 and 2.
• There are timed events, with missable exclusive items, meaning in future the game will be impossible to 100% when replayed.

Thanks for trying to bring back the series Genius Sonority, but I will just stick to the original Trilogy and your Gamecube/Wii Pokémon games.

It has begun. Localizers have ruined their industry and the machines have replaced them.

Another stupid came all over the place trying to steal my grammar!

If anyone is curious about the screenshots, "mizudeppou" is a water pistol, "aibou" means partner.
Yay! I'm a better translator than Google!!

AI-generated Engrish is almost as funny as the human-created stuff. It seems to suit the Denpa Men here, so by all means leave it in!

But the bad translation is part of it's charrrrrrrrm!

Just started the game on my Switch set to Spanish, and it seems the only language options for the game are English and Japanese.

I mean, it's understandable, even if a little wonky. Personally speaking, it's easy to just imagine it as how the in-universe Denpa Men are speaking.

@Overzeal Unless you're joking, please don't entertain that culture war nonsense... It only winds up distracting from the usual suspects of people higher on the food chain deciding to cut corners to save a few bucks.

Bro I saw the boss of the ice level say that and I was like “I’m sorry WHAT??” THAT’S gonna end up on accidental innuendo on tv tropes. And also gonna get a few people on this site in trouble.

this is so lazy, even if they did use machine translation they should at the very least restructure it to fix the grammar errors.

@DTFaux I wouldn't view AI tools like ChatGPT as a "culture war" "issue"; unlike most of "that" hyperbolic nonsense that isn't worth the time of day, AI is an actual tool, a useful one at that, and now that it exists, that isn't a cat that can be put back into its bag at all, regardless of the subset of people who cry hysterically about it. 💼❌🐈
AI has been a godsend for me for coming up with topics/points to write about for school assignments.

Personally, I miss the days of All Ur Base and other poorly translated text; it's beyond hilarious and charming. 😂

The "Is AI a tool or not?" discourse is a whole other can of worms. There's a lot of valid criticism and concerns against it that I wouldn't consider "hysterical" (doesn't matter if the cat's out of the bag or not), but that's not my point of contention here...

What I'm talking about is how some folks justify the rise of AI tech as a bludgeon against workers and laborers for the pettiest of reasons.

Overzeal saying "Localizers have ruined their industry," implies that bad [allegedly] machine-produced translations are the fault of the localization industry, rather than (more likely), producers and higher-ups looking to sacrifice quality to save some money. It's a talking point that effectively welcomes anti-consumer practices just to stick it to the handful of faceless people they actually have a beef with.

Yeah this was bugging me a bit, makes it hard to read some of the dialogue in this game sometimes.

At least the game is free, I guess.

The bad translation isn’t a part of the charm when the previous 3 games had no translation issues whatsoever. This is a disgrace to their legacy.

Google and AI don't make spelling mistakes.

I mean, it's a bad localization for sure, but falling back on buzz words and fearmongering never makes your argument stronger, especially when it's obvious that it's not the case. This is human translated. It's just human translated poorly.

Considering the game is free, I'm not surprised they cut a few corners such as using AI translation...

@MeloMan

That's actually a really good analogy and I wish more people were talking about things like that rather then blaming AI, given this was clearly human translated (AI dosn't make spelling mistakes)

Zero Wing, as well as a lot of games back then, was translated by "the guy on staff who paid the most attention in high school English classes". I'm guessing that's what happened here too. It's a free game, so they just had that dude on staff who listens to US pop music do the translation in a day, thinking it would be "good enough" and people would find it funny.

@JohnnyMind The game is only available in Japanese and English unfortunately.

@Nuclearpineapple Exactly. Kind of like The Orz in The Ur Quan Masters, who speak English, but are translating untranslatable ideas, so some of it is plain wonky. Happy Campers, anyone? That's what it makes me think of, just quirky English translating from another, almost alien culture and mindset.

An imperfect translation isn't the same as a bad translation. Honestly, it's good enough for me to understand it, and I've seen far worse than even Zero Wing's translation in my day. At least Denpa Man's translation is just quirky and fun.

I'm concerned about all the people getting not only upset by a perfectly playable game, but, against all good logic and reason, using it to further their anti-AI agenda.

I'm not even pro-AI, I'm genuinely cautious about it, but even I know this isn't what happened with this game.

It's not like AI to make spelling mistakes. Grammar, for sure, but even basic trained AI translation tools nowadays don't make spelling mistakes.

Plus if it was AI translated, it'd lack the internal logic and cohesion this translation has. I've played a small amount, but it seems like terms and other errata are always translated to a standard guideline they have written somewhere.

AI wouldn't be able to keep track of name logic and standards, especially amongst small amounts of unrelated text everywhere.

If you want a game with an obvious machine translation to be upset over, go look at the Princess Maker releases.

I was only half-joking when I said in another article that the inventor of the Jill sandwich likely translated this. It all seemed human translated to me, albeit by someone who's likely never lived (or perhaps even been) in an English-speaking country.

I think there's a certain charm to it, and it (unintentionally) gives this little world an identity that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to replicate intentionally.

It’s worth mentioning that the dwarves in the previous games already spoke in broken English, but it was only them… not the entire game!

They need to leave it as is. It is hillarious.

@Olrun It hasn't even been translated to any other language, just gives you an option of Japanese and Engrish.

In the way they write and, as someone else points out, with spelling errors, this is definitely not AI. It tends to avoid weird sentence structures like this and come up with something rather bland instead. Maybe old Google Translate, but unless they went out of their way to use that, this is most likely human written.

That being said, I wouldn't bat an eye if a guy in a onesie and hat like that said weird stuff.