Fan Translator Likely Finds His Work In Official Game Release And Is Totally Cool With It

Culture

from the lost-in-translation dept

Fan translations of movies and video games, while wildly popular in many different countries, have also come under recent attack. Claims of copyright infringement have been leveled against many sites and groups that put these translations together, with the theory being that it violates copyright to make works understandable to fans in countries where, often times, a translated version of the work isn’t even on offer. If that sounds stupid and protectionist to you, ding ding ding, you’re right.

But it’s somewhat interesting to see this scenario happen in reverse, and note how different the reaction from fans are when they find their hard work in official releases, without credit. Meet Francesco, an Italian game developer with a particular affinity for a game that I’ve honestly never heard of.

Francesco, who also goes by Mewster online, is a 25-year-old game developer in Italy. He told Kotaku over Discord private messages that he started translating The World Ends With You when he was sixteen.

“I decided to approach it only because I really loved The World Ends With You and I wanted to keep ‘living in its world,’ and in the same time, do something to let others who couldn’t understand its language play this game,” he said. “I found out that I like to translate, and being able to change a word and see the edit ‘in real time’ on the final game was really satisfying.”

And so he completed this labor of love almost entirely solo, with a second person working only on translating the cut scenes. This was purely about his love for the game and making a translated version for other Italians to enjoy. Pretty cool.

Then The World Ends With You got a port for the Nintendo Switch, with an Italian translation being included in the release. Francesco was thrilled and eagerly watched a series of let’s-plays to see how his translation compared with the official release. Well, either he did a very, very good job, or the game publisher took silent notice of his work.

It didn’t take him long to recognize what he says are undeniable similarities to his own work. Francesco said that some phrases were cleaned up and translated in a different way, but he recognized the majority of the work as identical to his own translations, right down to where the Switch port version had placed line breaks in the word balloons.

Although Francesco hasn’t seen the whole game, he said that, “according to what I had seen I could say that 90% of the main story was a possible estimate,” in terms of how much of his work he believes they used.

Now let’s stipulate the obvious: the title and its story text are protected by copyright by the developer and rightsholder. Were Fransesco to complain, the developer/publisher would likely point that out to everyone paying attention. And they’d be right. But that doesn’t remove the moral failure that is using someone’s — a fan’s no less — hard work without bothering to give them an ounce of credit. Were the shoe on the other foot, you can imagine the hell that would be raised.

But for fans? Anger isn’t so much a part of the equation.

“The best I could hope for is an official acknowledgement of what happened, but I’m happy just in seeing my translation in the official game,” he said. “I hope it will remain in the game after all. It means they liked 90% of my translation.”

The question is why more content makers can’t take their cue from fans like this and behave just as gratefully for the fans out there translating their works. These are, again, almost always labors of love, not threats to the content creator. So why are fans so much better at being awesome than far too many of the creators they support?

Filed Under: fan translations, fans, italy, mewster, the world ends with you, translations, video games