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Fudgenugget

Fudgenugget

Member
Indulge me a moment in this most extravagant of pedantries:

In processing a few Japanese quest files I've noticed that the spacing in the "Description" part is inconsistent. For English quests the official standard, as far as I understand it, is two single spaces. In the Japanese quests I have seen two spaces, three, one Japanese space (about 2x as wide as ours), and nothing at all. Occasionally several different kinds are used in combination in the same quest! (Such occurrences suggest to me perhaps that the quest files were edited far prior by individuals who may not have shared my, uh, concerns.)

In viewing videos from the official servers I have found that such discrepancies were present even then. Since PSO doesn't have a terrific amount of sophistication in things like this, the number/nature of the spaces is at least a semi-noticeable little detail and can affect how the server is perceived.

Thus my question: does anyone know if there was an original standard for Japanese quests that was ultimately deviated from in later years? If not, is it reasonable to change quests that don't follow the conventions that 98% of the other quests do, and if so to what?

Edit: turned into generic quest details thread
 
Re: Quest description text

Sega pretty clearly changed translators over the years, as the quality of the translations started going downhill with Episode II (lulz @ Garon -> English unit of liquid measure). The Client: Quest: format for the first two lines isn't even followed on many Episode II quests, which I also think looks pretty unprofessional (Quest got retranslated as Job Description).

As for the Japanese spacing, the best I can tell you is that on DC, Mop-up Operation #1 uses 4 spaces on each line, MU2 uses 2, MU3 uses 1, MU4 uses 2, LHS/LIS/LSB use 4 on the first line and 2 on the subsequent lines, Endless Nightmare #1 has "detail dummy" :cool:, and NM2/3/4 use 4 on the first line and 2 on the subsequent lines.

I guess Sega was trying to go for a little indentation on line 1, but the translators never carried that over to the other languages. I'd say as close as you can get to being official would be to either use 4 on line 1 and 2 on subsequent lines or to stick with the English convention of using 2 on all lines (sans the Client:, Quest:, and Reward: lines).
 
Re: Quest description text

Many thanks for your response. I'm slowly making headway.

----

Now I've changed the point of the thread to avoid making countless others, I was wondering if anyone knows if the second Dangerous Deal with Black Paper quest has an official name? On SCHT (from whom the "official" name for the first came) it just had a 2 added on the end, but in Japanese it says "Black Paper's (even) More Dangerous Deal" or "├Æ├ó├╗├Æ├ó┬«├Æ├ó├ó├Æ├®┬╗├Æ├ó├£├Æ├ó├ó├Æ├ó├ª├Æ├óÔòØ├Æ├╝┬½├Æ├®├®├Æ├╝├║├Æ├╝┬┐├ò├¼ÔûÆ├Ü├ûÔòæ├Æ├╝┬¼├ò├à├╗├òÔòØ├▓".
 
PSO-W adds a 2 to the end, as well. Was BPD2 ever released on USBB? If not, then there is no official translation for it. I agree that "Black Paper's Even More Dangerous Deal" is an accurate translation.
 
I don't think it did get a release on USBB, tempted to go with the standard naming convention since how does one include "more" in the title without making it sound lame?

Or "A second dangerous deal with Black Paper" perhaps?
 
I agree with Aleron I like very much the "Black Paper's Even more Dangerous Deal" as a proposal for the english title of this quest.

It was never released in the US was only available on the japanese servers.
 
I've also heard the first quest called "Black Paper's Deal" and not "A Dangerous Deal with Black Paper". Is the latter name official? I've always preferred the former, as the latter is too verbose (and you should know Black Paper is dangerous by virtue of having played "Black Paper" already, anyway).
 
I'm fine with whatever really, just that "even more dangerous" as a qualifier sounds very much like how one might describe a baddy in a story to one's child. Plus, as far as I know, the character limit on names is 32 characters, and "A dangerous deal with black paper" exceeds that...
 
That might explain the alternate title, then; since Japanese is much more compact than English, you can't translate the quest's name accurately within the allowed length for quest names. BB quest titles are handled differently than on previous versions, though, so it's possible they may have more space.
 
Well then, so now it's just picking our favourites.

Dealings with Black Paper
Dealings with Black Paper 2

Black Paper's Dangerous Deal
Black Paper's Dangerous Deal 2

Anything jump out at you?
 
OK guys, got a corker for you here.

I've been sitting on a mostly done translation of a certain quest for ages but I've been unsure of how to translate its title for a while now and I was wondering if you would all lend me your creative energies. It was the final quest purchasable with team points on the Japanese server, and is known as 黄昏る遊具達 or "Toys' Twilight" to give it its SCHT name so we know which quest I'm talking about.

Story quest spoilers just ahead!!

So here's the dirt:

It's a quest set several years in the future after the main events of BB with the ship still orbiting Ragol. One of the only diversions available to the populace is a museum with super realistic robots and set pieces constructed from data the Hunters brought back from their many expeditions. At some point the robots go bananas, the museum curator calls you in to help, Five Nights at Freddy's is born. Quest begins here.

Of potential importance is that several NPCs stress how valuable the museum is on psychological and emotional levels, both for the citizens of Pioneer 2 and for themselves as individuals. Also, the curator's son who is also present at the start and end of the quest makes reference to having played with the robots and viewing them as his friends and he speaks of them as if they were living things that could feel and anticipate. Remember this!

So now we have the name of the quest which is just two words, the verb meaning to fade to dusk/twilight (importantly, this shares with the English word the connotation of something waning past its prime, i.e. 'the twilight of one's life' e.t.c.) and the noun that suuuper usefully usually gets translated as "playground equipment" along with a suffix indicating plurality. Of import here is that the suffix indicating plurality is used only when referring to people or animals or otherwise living things, and given that the "playground equipment" in the context of the quest is actually the museum's robots, there is a strong vein of personification in this quest's title reflecting the attitudes of the NPCs and especially the curator's son whom we know shared a particularly strong relationship with the robots as mentioned above.

The robots end up destroyed at the end of the quest, thus: it is their (admittedly rather hasty) twilight throughout the quest that the title refers to, (or perhaps a transition towards twilight for Pioneer 2 after one of their only avenues of enjoyment gets destroyed and they are left in a semi-dire situation.)

SO!

It seems we could a) find good words for each of the above and more or less directly translate the title, b) use the Japanese title as a kind of source material with which to bang out a more liberally translated title that perhaps more accurately reflects what we understand the nature of the quest to be, or c) take the true PSO path and just cut half the meaning to make it vague and mysterious (and remarkably more easy to translate!)

Help please...
 
c) take the true PSO path and just cut half the meaning to make it vague and mysterious (and remarkably more easy to translate!)
 
I don't think the word "toys" can properly describe what's going on in English, though. I'd be inclined to use a word such as "relics" to describe them, because they're remnants of something from the past that are now in a museum. The fact that they were considered to be toys by future generations that didn't know what they were doesn't matter.

You could go with something like "Remnants of Playthings Past", but it doesn't really convey the meaning, either, as their true purpose was not as toys, but as useful tools from the era when Pioneer 2 had just arrived. The fact that the robots get destroyed at the end brings a strong sense of historical loss, i.e. nobody's going to really know what happened on Ragol now that the last museum pieces from that era are gone (not that anybody really understood at the beginning of the quest, but now there's definitely no hope to get at the truth).
 
Aleron Ives said:
I don't think the word "toys" can properly describe what's going on in English, though. I'd be inclined to use a word such as "relics" to describe them, because they're remnants of something from the past that are now in a museum. The fact that they were considered to be toys by future generations that didn't know what they were doesn't matter.

You could go with something like "Remnants of Playthings Past", but it doesn't really convey the meaning, either, as their true purpose was not as toys, but as useful tools from the era when Pioneer 2 had just arrived. The fact that the robots get destroyed at the end brings a strong sense of historical loss, i.e. nobody's going to really know what happened on Ragol now that the last museum pieces from that era are gone (not that anybody really understood at the beginning of the quest, but now there's definitely no hope to get at the truth).
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As far as I know, and after consulting a native or two, the "playground equipment" thing is just a Japanese way of giving the quest name a literary flavour, it's not actually calling them playground equipment, so there's less constraint on us there in that regard.

I do wonder if the robots can be called relics for emulating something from times past though. To the best of my knowledge the robots are a few years old, and the events concerning the monsters that the robots emulate aren't that much older, again only some years.
 
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If you want to stick to the Literary flavor, you cannot use Robot since that's a new word and "Relics" sounds too strange to me, what I would see more suitable would be the word "Machine" (機械 KIKAI) to describe those things something similar to "Phone" or "Calculator" (電話 = Denwa 電卓 = Dentaku).

We are trying to put ourselves into the position we are part of the SEGA localization team in America, considering they like to keep the japanese style of writing sometimes for many stuff in the game even if it sounds wrong or vague...I would go for this approach in the localization of the quest even if it looks wrong to us but that's just me Σ(・ω・ノ)ノ
 
Neirene said:
We are trying to put ourselves into the position we are part of the SEGA localization team in America, considering they like to keep the japanese style of writing sometimes for many stuff in the game even if it sounds wrong or vague
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I definitely disagree with this approach. Many of Sega's translations are downright terrible, and we should hold ourselves to a higher standard, which is easy to do, since Sega set the bar so low in many instances.
 
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