Thread by @sparkleponycass

I’ve been localising romance games for women from JP to EN for over 7 years now, basically full-time. I spend a LOT of time thinking about how to localise romance.

So as requested, this is a rambly thread about various things I do. It's long, but I hope you find it interesting!

Standard disclaimer: everyone does it differently! This is just my experience.

I actually wrote the guidelines doc for all the freelancers following in my footsteps at the company I work with, but even so, I imagine they all do it a bit differently too. 😊

When I work, I approach every single JP scene and line asking myself "what is this intended to evoke in the reader?"

Sometimes that means directly translating things. Often, it doesn’t.

And you’d be surprised at how many minor things need tweaking to evoke the same feeling.

But I’m always working to tweak it all as I go, on my first translation run-through, so that it’s as close to the final version as possible right from the start.

I know other translators work differently in that regard, too. But this works best for me and my brain.

And look, romance is a particularly fraught genre, because the goal is to make the readers fall in love, and feel loved in return. And the things that evoke those feelings change, both culturally, and according to the times.

But if you get it wrong, your game flops.

What worked for an EN audience 20 years ago doesn’t work now. What works for a JP audience now often reads as sexual harassment to an EN audience.

Romance trends in EN have changed drastically over the last 20 years, and what was sexy then often now requires a content warning.

So I need to know what a suitor evokes in the JP audience, and how to tweak them to evoke that feeling in the EN audience. I need to know which JP tropes will fall flat, and how to make them work. I need to know when to tweak the suitor, and when to tweak the player character.

A lot of the ways JP romance is written make the average EN audience feel like the heroine (= them) is too weak and dumb to relate to. And the suitors often treat her in a way that feels very belittling.

And it’s hard to enjoy a romance story when it feels like that!

So I’m often looking at both sides of the equation.

What is he doing that’s too much? What is she doing that’s not enough? How do I make both of these characters more relatable and lovable without changing the story in any fundamental way?

This is ALWAYS on my mind.

And for what it’s worth, when I’m tweaking personalities like that, it’s really important to me that they remain consistent. Any change I make has to work for how I see the EN version of that character as a whole. If it doesn’t work for me, it’s not gonna work for anyone else!

I'm also making a lot of little tweaks to actions all the time for the same overall reason: a pat on her head becomes a touch on her cheek. Her tugging someone's sleeve becomes her putting a hand on their arm. A suitor leading the heroine becomes them walking side-by-side. Etc.

Basically, every time I trip over something that is normal for a JP audience but will make the EN audience go "huh?" or "argh!" I tweak it.

But I guess this is the core of what localization is. Being aware of those niggling "why does this feel off" things and adjusting them.

And then sometimes there are scenes that need to be totally rewritten because the JP as it is just isn't going to work for whatever reason.

And again, the question I'm always asking when I do this is, "what is this scene as a whole meant to evoke in the reader?"

The romantic scenes and sex scenes are in some sense the easiest to understand; they’re meant to titillate the player, to let them enjoy feelings of love and desire.

But again, what works for a JP audience doesn’t work for an EN one. So these are often very heavily rewritten.

But I’m not just writing whatever I feel like! I use the existing JP as framework. I keep any dialogue that has meaning for the story. I try to work within the constraints; if the suitor smiles on-screen, I make the narrative match. I want to make it easy for the programmers too!

I want the same vibe. I always want the same vibe.

But I have to make sure the EN readers are coming away from it just as satisfied as the JP readers. I need the EN to be sexy!

And particularly when it comes to sex, there are very few tropes that have a 1:1 equivalent.

And it's not just sex that needs rewriting.

For example, I've had to rewrite multiple entire scenes devoted to "stop calling me Name-san, just call me Name".

Because not only does it not work in EN, it feels even more out of place when the setting is, say, Europe in the 1700s.

So what does it mean? At its core, this sort of scene shows the relationship between the two characters evolving.

But depending on when it occurs (early on? after they're a couple?) as well as their personalities and the surrounding setting, it always needs a different approach.

I've done everything from having the heroine ask "why did you bring me here?" and having the normally-distant suitor admit "I thought you'd enjoy it", which showed her that he cared... to having the heroine and her suitor discuss "are we a couple now? What do we call each other?"

You could argue till the cows come home that these aren't what the original JP scenes said. Except that at their core, they are.

Each of those rewrites fit perfectly into the surrounding story to show the relationship developing, in the same way the original JP conversation did.

Oh and yeah, I usually do these full scene rewrites on the first run-through, too. I’m an old hand at rewriting sex scenes. ^^;

I sometimes have to skip other scenes and come back to them after percolating ideas. But I never translate them as-is if I intend to change them later.

I can't really say why, except that for me, I feel that doing so would make them harder to rewrite, whereas the blank lines inspire me when it comes time to do the rewrite that my brain eventually comes up with. I imagine this is different for everyone as well.

The guideline doc I wrote for my company is about 6 pages long now, and includes everything from "give the heroine agency in the bedroom" to "make her interactions with other characters more proactive" to "remove any mentions of her skintone", all with explanations and examples.

And honestly, I could probably make a document ten times as long if I actually sat down and wrote out all the knowledge I've gleaned over the years. My brain is packed full of various coping techniques for jellyfish heroines and wayward suitors. 😛

But for me, this is just what I do. I'm always thinking about this stuff as I translate. Every sentence gets evaluated. Every scene gets evaluated. And every single change I make is for a REASON.

And yes, every change I make is approved by my editor(s) before it goes live!

I’m not sitting here cackling as I sneak my agenda into the text. In fact, I often write comments explaining my choices, and if I’ve added a reference or a joke or something, I’ll leave a note to my editors and say "if this doesn’t work for you, use this other version instead".

And I actually get really excited and happy when I manage to word something in a way I think the EN audience will really appreciate, and then see the players squeeing over it on social media once it gets released. It means I got the vibe right. And that means the world to me.

I once had to do something special in one suitor's story that basically didn’t exist in the JP, because the way a certain JP word was used throughout the story meant it could not be translated the way it normally would have been in the EN without sounding really weird.

I thought outside the box, wrote my editor an essay on why I thought what I'd done suited the characters, and got it approved. After it was released, I saw fans making excited memes about how much they loved it. I can’t even explain what that felt like, but it was pretty amazing!

My partner says that my job is "making women cry all over the world", and it's basically true. If I localise a story full of angst leading to a happy ending that makes people sob all the way through and come out going "I LOVED IT!" then I’m doing my job right. And I love that 🥰

When I was a kid I wanted to be a published author. It never occurred to me that it might work out this way, because this job didn’t even exist then. But the fact is, there are thousands of people all over the world reading my writing and loving it, and I couldn’t be happier!💗

P.S. Sorry, I have changed who can reply to this thread as the anti-loc crowd found it already and I'm just not interested in hearing the same-old same-old from them. I have limited energy and time and more important things to do with it. This thread is for localization people.

P.P.S. One thing I didn't mention, but... when I first started this job, I translated everything as-is. The company listened to player feedback and came to me and asked me to start making changes. EVERYTHING that I change is because the company who makes the games asks for it.

And EVERYTHING that I do is with the full blessing of the original JP writers of the text. They want me/us to make these changes because their goal is the same as mine: they want the EN fans to get the same enjoyment from the stories that the JP fans do.

These companies have multiple in-house staff who are fully bilingual and who are aware of the context for both the JP and EN audiences. Nobody is making these changes blindly.

So if you have a problem with what people like me do, then take it to the CEOs.