I wanna talk about something amusing, and I feel it needs more than simple context. I like to be critical, sometimes overcritical about some topics and this one is important to me in a way that makes more sense than most topics.

English is not my native language, it’s my second language. I’ve heard that I’m a good speaker, and that my English comprehension and text creation can pass off like a native speaker, but that because I’ve been immersed into this language since I was a kid. I remember the days trying to understand anything related to Top Gear 2 (unrelated to the show) for the SNES, and it was fun (also where my love for racing games came from).

I continued to study English and it’s now my second language and my preferred language if nothing else is available. Not that I can’t understand the others but my brain has been trained to understand English (and my native Portuguese) more than anything. So if I can translate this to English or Portuguese, I’ll understand what it means.

Meaning in words

I saw an article over at Arstechnica saying that on why AI chatbots can’t process Persian social etiquette, which is a great read by the way, but it had two paragraphs that made me create this post.

In a way, human language acts as a compression and decompression scheme—the listener must decompress the meaning of words in the same way the speaker intended when encoding the message for them to be properly understood. This process relies on shared context, cultural knowledge, and inference, as speakers routinely omit information they expect listeners can reconstruct, while listeners must actively fill in unstated assumptions, resolve ambiguities, and infer intentions beyond the literal words spoken.

While compression makes communication faster by leaving implied information unsaid, it also opens the door for dramatic misunderstandings when that shared context between speaker and listener doesn’t exist.

This is the reason why I don’t actually dislike when people change things when they are translating to other languages, it’s because the context of their culture will impede the listener from understand what they meant.

I’d like to give you an example. Here’s an expression in Portuguese.

Não se mexe em time que está ganhando.

This expression translates in a literal sense as ‘Don’t alter a winning team’, which for an English speaker wouldn’t exactly work in a grammar sense, but would be understood. However, English speakers know the expression ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, which is what that the term translates into.

This is why I don’t mind when a translation doesn’t do a word-per-word change, because you can swap expressions to other expressions that will convey the same idea, even if the speaker didn’t say that, they meant that.

And it’s why I get annoyed at people that want to be purists, where the text has to be translated word-per-word, ‘keeping the original text intact, because it’s the only way to convey the true meaning of it’.

Text Purism

Needless to say, I absolutely hate this approach. Meaning conveyed in text is only good when you can understand what it is saying. It matters little to me if the text is in English but I can’t understand it.

‘Text purists’ as I like to call them are terrible people because they think that translators add bias without necessity to text and because of this, the text has been ruined, so the ‘raw’ pure form of the text needs to be kept. These people are trash and should be put in the bin.

Another example: Hyperdimension Neptunia has the character Neptune, that represents a fictional Sega console, named after a real Sega console prototype (I own the new non-Fandom Wiki by the way). Sega in Japan was mostly neutral, and although they were against Nintendo in Japan, it was more or less the same level of competition.

That wasn’t the case outside of Japan, where Sega was known for their more edgy marketing which lasted through their console era, and it recently came back with newer games. This is what Sega is known for outside of Japan so it would make sense that Neptune would sound more edgy in the English translation and she does. She often throws jabs at many things, and more importantly, sounds radical as hell, which is what Sega sounded like back then. This is what you, an English speaker, know Sega as.

Yet… We have a mod for the PC versions, called ‘Retranslation’ (will not link it because they don’t need the publicity), that does what it says, robbing the character from their cool, radical Sega-like status. Mind you, this was a decision to translate the character in English text, and one I approve, because she just sounds boring.

This is because they want the true version of Neptune to come up, by just translating the text without trying to give the same edgy style that Sega had. While I have no issues on what the retranslation wants to convey, I have an issue with its existence altogether, because it doesn’t improve the work by making the character sound more boring, taking away one of their major traits, that she’s radical. Every other officially licensed work in the Neptunia that is in English has Neptune to be radical, including the anime, that was dubbed in English.

Dub vs Sub

And then we get to another point I didn’t want to get into. Dubbing and Subbing to me are equally valid as long the text still conveys the meaning. You can do something like what Sega did with Judgment: The game has two translations, one for the English audio, and one for the Japanese audio. Both are equally good, and faithful to their text, as they translated the English for the English audio that would make more sense for the English-speaking voice actors and actresses, to enhance their performance, and the Japanese one makes the translation convey the correct information that even non-Japanese players can understand without issue. Great work there, Sega!

Not everyone has the budget for that, unfortunately, but it should be the standard, in my opinion. Both options are equally valid, if I’m honest, if you prefer the original audio or the dubbed audio, that’s fine, as long it convey the message.

“What do you pick?”

This is an inevitable question when Dub vs Sub comes up. I personally prefer English audio whenever possible, because it’s my second language, assuming that Portuguese isn’t an option. Stellar Blade with the Portuguese audio and text was actually pretty good, and I’m glad to have given it a shot, which made me surprised to hear that English Eve is British (and quite sexy).

Does this mean I hate the Japanese language or something? No, quite the opposite. If I have something like a show that was translated to Portuguese and it has audio to match, but the original was in English, I usually pick the Portuguese first and only if there’s no option for it, I’ll pick the English one.

It’s also weird because sometimes my brain is so hardwired to see English words that when they aren’t, I feel confused sometimes, so I usually default to English audio and text. And if English audio isn’t an option, I’ll pick the original audio.

Might not sound logical to everyone, but that is what works for me.

Closing words

Translating things is hard, and yes, it’s a job and just like with any job, it can be done poorly (Hello Persona 1 for PS1!) but that doesn’t mean that English translations or any translations are bad, just that thisspecific case was. There are many works out there where the English translation is not only great but becomes the default way to play, even for Japanese folks (like Danganronpa 1 and 2, Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward, etc), because it’s just so good.

What I want from translations is that they convey the message, while keeping it clean of obvious mistakes and keep it grounded to the language they are translating into. As the Arstechnica article says:

This process [language compression and decompression scheme] relies on shared context, cultural knowledge, and inference, as speakers routinely omit information they expect listeners can reconstruct, while listeners must actively fill in unstated assumptions, resolve ambiguities, and infer intentions beyond the literal words spoken.

What’s the point of a translation that that still uses the proverbs of the original text that could be meaningless to the listener? Might as well fire up Duolingo or something like that and learn the original language if that’s the way it does things.