Speaker 1: I think first of all okay again not only this for this local but first of all know the market is really important so like in Japanese we have this hierarchy different way to talk to people depending on the hierarchy if the person is you know older than you or like boss or you know parents as opposed to younger than you or you know subordinate and all the thing but American in English especially if you're translating Japanese into English in American culture we don't really have that so we have to understand the difference first of all and then think about if that nuance in Japanese is is really important, we really have to localize that much, we really have to put that much effort to translate or localize into English. Because sometimes, all these kind of differences could be ignored, because that's not the point in a show or in a movie. So yeah, to understand both, you know, the difference between both cultures is maybe the most important thing that you have to understand as a localizer.

Speaker 2: something I thought of was when it comes to machine translation between Japanese and English there's in Japanese you very rarely you don't need a subject of a sentence as often so like when you say like you are you going to the store are you like you always have that you or I or something in Japanese you can omit the subject a lot of times because it's just implied by context yeah So, when you use machine translation, that's becoming a big thing that a lot of people use in their workflows. When you translate the English into Japanese, the machine will just automatically add the subject with the English because English requires a subject most of the time. So, you'll end up with this extra subject in the Japanese that might sound a little bit unnatural because you can just omit it since Japanese usually omits the subject. So just being aware of linguistic things like that is very important when you're just to be aware that, you know, that exists and you need to make sure that you're not like including あなた for you in a lot of the translations because that's that doesn't sound quite natural most of the time.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good point, actually, not only for machine translation, but translators have to understand the content. Like in Japanese it says like 行くよ that means like going but you don't know we're going or let's go or I'm going or you're going or stuff like that. So yeah, translators really have to understand the context and then understand the context is the base thing otherwise they can't translate into English because you need a subject. It's ambiguous language, Japanese is, like you, you as a listener, it's almost feels like you're as a listener or reader, if that was a book, Yeah. has a responsibility to understand, has a responsibility to, you know, to guess who is a doer. And that's not difficult for me because I'm a native Japanese speaker, but I can, you know, I can assume that for Japanese learners, I think it's extremely difficult because it's just like it is what it is kind of thing I can't explain sometimes because I'm a native speaker of the rules and everything

Speaker 2: But yeah, then when the machine has to take a Japanese Sentence without a subject and put it into English It has to add a subject in the English and it just kind of has to guess and it will guess wrong a lot of the time Yeah, I would just ask the question first, does the keigo have importance, like how important is it that we know that they spoke in keigo versus normal polite speech or casual speech? Does that have an impact on what happened in the plot of the movie? Like for example, if there's a scene where there's a character who intentionally uses Casual speech to his boss instead of using keigo and the boss is like insulted because of that like that's very important You need to make sure you're careful when you're translating that but for the most part Keigo if it doesn't have a direct impact on the plot like that You can it's there's not really that too much stuff you can do to get that into english like you can maybe Just omit some contract you would write out a contraction instead But and make sure you're using like more formal sounding words, but it doesn't matter too much I feel like a lot of the time

Speaker 1: Right. Yeah, I think yeah, he's right. Maybe we can use formal words Versus maybe lots of slangs so that you know the register of it, but because English American English There's no cable in English. So I don't think even audience here so much about it So most of the time you can maybe ignore But then I just remember You remember Squid Game? That's from Korea, but they also have K-Go and stuff. Yeah, and lots of Korean speakers who watch the Who watch the movie on I mean TV series on Netflix You know lots of Korean speakers who understand English they said their English subtitle is so wrong because K-Go was not reflected and But at the time, I thought that was like, well, that's not really a big deal, but then again, nuance, maybe. Maybe you really have to be careful about it, because yeah, like he said, sometimes maybe they intentionally speak super rude to the old people. I mean, older person to the person, I mean, speaker. That's really rude. And then like just only one sentence or even one word That speaker says to the person you would understand the nuance of it. Oh, this person is so rude Oh, this person is so you know, there's that there's a huge respect going on. So I think it's kind of important Yeah, so yeah, maybe sometimes really really important yeah, and then I think that's the I think that everybody who does the same job as we are, like Japanese, English localizer, I think it's our ultimate goal, you know, what to do with it. I think we're still on this, you know, progress, on process to be a perfect localizer because I don't think there's like concrete standard, per se, for that field.

Speaker 2: One example that I always like to tell people is there's a huge cultural aspect in addition to just the language when it comes to localization. So, for example, the movie Inside Out, the Pixar movie Inside Out, there's a scene near the beginning of the movie where the main character, Riley, is just a little kid and she's being forced to eat her broccoli. And that's the English American version, but in the Japanese version, kids actually like broccoli. So, you know, that nuance of like, you're being forced to eat your broccoli, like that kind of hatred that kids have for broccoli, that isn't a thing in Japan. So they actually went in and they changed the visuals in that scene. They changed the broccoli to bell peppers, because bell peppers in Japan, that is like the broccoli of America for Japanese kids they hate bell peppers and so Riley eating that bell pepper in Japan that carries across that same nuance so it was really cool for me to learn to kind of learn there's an entire industry behind you know adapting the culture and the language and that's part of the reason why I really love localization.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great point. yeah all these kind of things I mean so I'm a translator and I have experienced being a translator for five six years so I could say I'm experienced translator but yeah before I started this being a translator I I didn't know the localization and translation and now that I know localization is not only translation that in a localization field you have to actually change things like Kaio-san as an example. So it's kind of really cool.

Speaker 2: Culturally, like I guess something specific to Japanese that really interests Japan and Japanese that interested me was when it comes to designing like websites, American websites that a lot of the advertising kind of focuses on like visual stuff like catching your eye like the overall just seeing, you know, catching viewers' eyes so that they'll be more likely to like scroll through the page and stuff. Whereas Japanese websites, a lot of them will be very like lots of text just all across the page because Japanese people tend to want to read a lot more to like make sure they know all the details of something before they purchase. So if you look at the Yahoo website, the design is completely different in the American vs. the Japanese Yahoo. The American one is very visual, there's pictures, and the Japanese one though, there's just so much text and a lot of Americans would look at that and be like, this looks like it's from 2000, this is so outdated. But no, it's really just a cultural thing. If you try to make the American website, if you try to just directly take that design and put it in Japan and just put Japanese text in there, you wouldn't get the same kind of viewership as you would in America, because the way that Japanese people look at websites is different than in America.

Speaker 1: When I was a teenager, I was watching this movie that was about American college kids, and they're talking about prom, and they're talking about the sorority, sorority, yeah, kind of thing. And that was just translated on a subtitle saying like, hey, let's go to prom. And like, we don't know what prom is in Japan, so that even that was in Japanese, promu ikou, you know, that's literally the translation of let's go to prom, but we don't know what prom is. so that was kind of confusing but then at the same time that opened my mind to kind of well there was no google when i was younger but like when i was you know i was like asking my friends from you know western culture or like you know english teacher so that oh my gosh maybe it's not answering your question but that lack of like perfect localization could open somebody's door to more interested in the culture and you know the person is more aggressively checking or searching or googling in this you know time. Something else that I tend to notice is

Speaker 2: the um like tv commercials for like American audiences versus Japanese audiences. the Japanese commercials, TV commercials, they tend to have a lot of like gay dolls and like celebrities and well-known figures and that is kind of like the main focus of the commercial where even if it's it's like a McDonald's commercial like I just saw this like a few weeks ago in America you focus on like the juicy burger and like just you know getting you know visually getting the viewer to look at it and be like that looks so good but that there was a Japanese McDonald's commercial and instead of being being more on the visuals it was more on the they invited two very well-known actresses to kind of like do this little thing together and that there's a lot of shots of like the actresses faces like and it was more on them rather than the burgers which I thought was really interesting because yeah in like American culture it's kind of changed recently but when like celebrities come on to advertise a product like some people are like wow they're selling out like that's so dumb like why why why is that celebrity just like selling out for this product and it's kind of looked down upon but like that's the norm in Japanese commercials where you you need to get like a well-known figure to kind of draw attention to the commercial.

Speaker 1: About the crown, you know, dot dot dot thing?

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: That might have been, I mean, because I don't watch anime, right? That kind of things are difficult for even us to understand as Japanese speakers because we don't know the anime culture and anime creators, they don't care about us. They don't care about Japanese who don't understand anime culture. That mean is, you know, so like Japanese anime translated localized into American English, I don't know how much they have to do because the anime culture is like right there. You know, you just kind of have to understand. If you know, you know kind of basis. As opposed to, you know, TV drama, TV shows, that's for everybody. So I think localizing to anime or game is a little bit different, if you know what I mean. I think to understand the context of the video or movie, footnote is maybe important, but that has to be super short and when it comes to, for example, if the movie is about war or history or something really serious, you don't want to put the footnote about something that's not so important for example I don't know like about food or you know all the kind of thing is unnecessary I don't know if they do it or not because I don't really watch so much TV shows and movie about that kind of genre but yeah I think that's something that localizers have to think about if it's

Speaker 2: necessary or not. I have not watched very many like official like translations of Japanese shows or movies, so I also can't really say if there's that's very common But I can say that in the fan subtitling world There there's a lot of that kind of thing where they just give like footnotes for explanations of certain words They're using and there's actually like some Notorious, you know culture around like the fan subtitlers just kind of add so much detail Like they'll have like a three line long footnote and it's like impossible to read it in the time without pausing but it's I think it's because like those fans sometimes like you can tell they're so passionate about doing this work and they do it for free for the most part and so like they just want to get across like this cultural thing is so cool and I want to be able to transmit it to the world so that's why they write those but I think in the in a real situation with a professional situation when you're making it for the general general audience you need to make sure that you take into account like how easy it is to parse everything so you probably want to avoid those when possible when it's not too important or if it's you do include the footnotes you can have something really short like for example Reiwa is the name of the current era in Japan and it's 2019 to the present so you can just have like a short footnote being like Reiwa 2019 to present so just gotta check that. Instead of that they just have like a

Speaker 3: celebrity dancing a lot with like super super you know super uh how do you say energetic music background music and they just kept dancing dancing dancing and lots of like you know yeah yeah yeah oh but like animation

Speaker 1: and at the end you were like what are they selling

Speaker 3: Well, are they selling exactly? Ah, Daily C.

Speaker 1: What are you doing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's Japan, right, that's true.