In 2004 I played what I consider to be one of the finest “serious” adventure games I’ve ever encountered: Kojima’s Snatcher on the Sega CD. Afterward I prayed along with many others for a sequel, which never came. I’m the last person that should be writing a story on one of Hideo Kojima’s games. After Snatcher, I tried to enjoy Metal Gear: Solid on several occasions, but the gameplay did not appeal to me, and I ended up passing on the rest of the series as a result. In that sense, I am thoroughly ignorant of the mass appeal to Kojima’s games.

In 2006, I found out that Kojima had made a spiritual sequel to Snatcher in the same genre of “hard” science-fiction: POLICENAUTS. And though the game had never been localized and released outside of Japan, a few dedicated folks had already been working on an English translation of it for years.

In August 2009, the Policenauts unofficial translation team announced that their long journey, begun in 2002, had come to an end and they were ready to release it to the public. As one of the many fans who waited anxiously for a Kojima game that followed in the spiritual footsteps of Snatcher, I dove right into Policenauts on the release date.

I wasn’t disappointed.

Policenauts is a game with a rich and sardonic sense of humor, colorful characters drawn from all kinds of ‘buddy cop’ films, and full of the political intrigue that Kojima is recognized for. To date, I have not seen a game that has paid as much attention to describing the underlying scientific and cultural detail of its world as Policenauts has. It managed to win me over from even its legendary spiritual predecessor.

Much of the game’s appeal, I feel, is owing to a fantastically lucid translation of the game from its original Japanese. The translation takes just the right about of poetic license. It attempts to do justice to the dialogue and descriptions, but usually sacrifices exact word-for-word translation (if such a concept exists at all) for a much more stylized and emotional effect. The character relationships and expressive “voices” of each character are perfectly drawn out by the translation, creating a world that appears to live on its own.

Even English colloquialisms not found in Japanese are jokingly inserted into the translation and remain surprisingly faithful to the development of the narrative and characters. I got the sense that this was a localization team that really cared about their final product, and spent time agonizing over the little things to get the translation just right. Handcrafting each conversation in fidelity to the original text as well as to the intent of the game, I think, a truly loving tribute to Kojima’s work.

I contacted the Policenauts unofficial translation project members to discuss some of the finer points of translating a game so dependent upon dialogue and description. Marc Laidlaw, who is an independent localization and translation professional, kindly and patiently responded to my often naïve questions about localization. (No, he’s not the script writer from Valve.) Below is a transcript of our conversation:

Chris Lepine: Who were the original translators, and did that change over time?

Marc Laidlaw: I’ve been the project’s translator from the start. We probably could have found other translators if we needed them, but it’s always better to stick to one person if you can afford to. Otherwise you usually have to go through the script and iron out inconsistencies. For better or for worse, I always like seeing one translator’s fingerprints on a product.

When I started working on Policenauts during the summer before my senior year of college, it was the first sizable translation I’d ever done, so I really cut my teeth on it. One lesson I learned is the importance of planning. I was a bit reckless at the start and thought I could just go back and fix any problems later on, but this made my life a lot harder when that time came.

CL: There is a HUGE amount of text in this game! Conversations are thick and branch out, and items can often have 2-3 different descriptions. Any idea on the total number of words translated for the project?

ML: I don’t know exactly how many words are in the game, but the files totaled around 2.5MB. The branching conversations and multiple pages of text per object were one of the biggest challenges for me. The only way to address them was to playtest, playtest, playtest.

CL: I came across your post on the JunkerHQ.net boards when you noticed that if you drink too much milk during dinner with Ed’s family, Jonathan suffers from some pretty bad diarrhea in Act 2. Was that feature retained in the translation?

ML: Yeah, that’s still in there. What’s funny is that I didn’t even know that was in the game until I came across it in the text dump. It’s amazing how many details are hidden away. For instance, if you have save data from Tokimeki Memorial: Forever with You on your Memory Card then the game will throw out extra lines in a handful of places, pretending that Jonathan was that game’s main character. I didn’t know about that until I read about it in a Japanese strategy guide 3 years after I first played the game.

CL: The Eurogamer review notes some distaste with the “breast jiggling” scenes in the game. From a translator’s standpoint, how does (or doesn’t) this reflect something about the game world, Jonathan, and/or Japanese culture in the 90’s?

ML: To my knowledge Hideo Kojima has never publicly disclosed anywhere why he included that in the game, so we’re left to guess. I think we need to begin by acknowledging his history of this kind of thing, especially given how he said on Konami’s Japanese website in a retrospective of the game in 2003 that Policenauts contains numerous elements of his personality. Maybe being able to do what Jonathan does is some fantasy of his. Maybe he just wanted to create a talking point. It does feel out of place in a way, since you have this very serious story, and meanwhile you can fondle almost any woman you meet and somehow not end up in jail. I know some in Japan were surprised by a mainstream (i.e. non-hentai) title containing such an element.

CL: Compared to some of the quick’n'dirty translations I’ve seen on the net of scenes in Policenauts (for example this one), your translation retains the smooth, back-and-forth character of real conversation. What kinds of difficulties are there in translating a Japanese conversational style, which brings many subtleties of tone and speech, into English?

ML: It’s interesting you should put it that way, because that was my goal all along: to have the characters speak like real people. That was easier to do with the voiced segments, because I knew exactly who was saying what — I suppose because the voices stuck in my head — but the in-game text was harder to get the way I wanted it. It was spat out into text files with varying degrees of order, so I had to play through the game any time I wanted to edit dialogue sequences. That was grueling, and like any other translation, in the end I wasn’t 100% satisfied with it. As with certain other creative processes, I don’t think you’re ever “done” with a translation; you walk away from it.

My process with Policenauts basically involved reading each line aloud and deciding if it was something that a native speaker of English would say. If something didn’t sound right, I would change the actual words that the character said while preserving their message. I gorged on buddy cop movies when I began the translation too, which helped a lot, since if I’d translated the jokes and insults and such literally from Japanese, then much of their intent would’ve been lost. My aim is to have English speakers have the same experience, or as similar an experience as possible, that Japanese speakers do.

As you say, Japanese is a language rich in varieties of style. What you see in the Japanese version isn’t necessarily what you would do in English, an example being Gates. There is no way to convey in Japanese that Gates is speaking British English, except for maybe using British katakana loan words, and even then not all Japanese will be familiar with those words. They will know from the content of the game that he is English, but for an English version of the game players are going to expect him to speak like someone from England. Salvatore, a New Yorker of Italian descent, is another example. This is one way in which you can try to add the same sort of variety in English that’s there in Japanese.

Another factor that influenced the text, at least the voiced segments, was subtitle duration. I had to make sure lines could be read in the time that the Japanese subtitles are shown onscreen, which often meant making text as short as possible while still retaining its message, or as much of it as possible. Even then, a few people have said some subtitles weren’t onscreen long enough, but we didn’t think that spending time to rework the game’s subtitle display routine was worthwhile, given that we heard no complaints about it during beta testing.

CL: Have you had a response from anyone at Konami so far?

ML: No, we’ve never heard directly from anyone at Konami. I don’t believe they’ve commented publicly on the project either.

CL: I noticed a few phrases snagged straight from 2009 pop culture and inserted into the translation (ie. “That is full of win”), and honestly, they gave me a good laugh because the phrases suited the characters just right. What kinds of editorial decisions did you have to make in trying to convey a sense of humour, and seriousness, in the translation?

ML: First of all, I think there’s some confusion about the use of what is today known as internet language, of which there are four instances in the game. I included it because in the game I’m imagining some migration of such words to mainstream speech by 2040.

If the game had been set in the present day, or had a fantasy-type setting, I wouldn’t have used them. They were to give players an idea of one way in which speech had evolved. However, I understand that there are different ways to interpret their appearance, and it’s never spelled out exactly why they’re there. But in the end I thought most players would accept them as part of Jonathan’s personality anyway, given his other, far more extreme, behavior.

Another criticism I’ve seen is the amount of profanity. I don’t consider the dialogue any more profane than your average buddy cop movie; I think the reason for this impression is the difference in length. After a 10-hour game players will have experienced more of it than after a 2-hour movie. I used such language in emotionally charged situations where I believe people would swear in real life, and never just for the hell of it.

I think it’s great that we’re now seeing fewer and fewer games playing it safe when it comes to this.

In general, I did take some artistic license, but I feel I always stayed true to what Mr. Kojima was trying to achieve — the spirit of the buddy cop movie. That’s the same reason “fag” and “gay” are in there too. I would rather adapt something to English than back down out of reverence for the source material. In my view, translation is a marriage between the author and the translator, and being unable to consult with the author in this case, I had to go with my own judgment and the opinions of team members and beta testers.

CL: How does the Policenauts fan translation relate to your professional work in localization?

ML: As you can imagine, despite the progress that has been made, this is still an under-appreciated aspect of game development, often just an after-thought. Say I was a project lead and asked an artist or a programmer how much time he or she needed to do an adequate job for their part of the game, and they replied 18 months. Well, if I said to them, “Finish it in 9,” that’s basically what we have to deal with a lot of the time (2 months as opposed to 1 month or less). And then I might even restrict the assets that the artist or programmer had access to, as sometimes we’re not given proper scripts and have to guess who’s speaking! I think the words that characters speak are just as important as how a game looks or sounds. Don’t many people cite “story” as their main interest in a game?

Another point is I myself prefer the term “unofficial translation” to “fan translation,” because a lot of these projects are now undertaken by industry professionals, and can turn out better than official localizations. Sure, not all projects do involve professionals, but as a nod to those that do, I think it’s a more appropriate descriptor.

CL: Part of what I am so surprised at in your translation project is the amount of polish in the final product. Localization is an afterthought at best, even in the Square-Enix games where they take the time to pin down a good translation, they often come off a little stilted and dry… a lot of colloquialisms just don’t translate well for North American audiences. Kojima’s “voice” was even preserved in Policenauts - his particular style of writing dialogue and characters.. that is something difficult, at best, to pull off. Did you spend a lot of time with his other work, or was that a consequence of diving into Policenauts?

ML: Well, if the game feels polished, it’s partly because I had adequate time for such a thing. If more Japanese game developers only gave this aspect of the development process the respect it deserves, more official localizations wouldn’t turn out the way they do. It’s actually amazing to me that more aren’t taking it extremely seriously, given the threats the Japanese gaming industry is facing right now.

I have played most of Kojima’s other games, so that may have played a part, but I think the reason Policenauts came out the way it did was because I really cared about it. I think a lot of translators just don’t care about the material they’re working on, and with the respect some developers show them, it’s not surprising. But again, there’s also the time factor. As anyone will understand, a great translator can end up doing just an average job on a product if he’s forced to rush his way through the material.

CL: Do you have any plans for future collaborations with the rest of the team, or was this a one-off deal?

ML: Right now we have no plans for any future collaborations. Policenauts was really the only game I’ve ever had an interest in translating in this capacity, and I think it filled a big gap — not just for Kojima fans, but for those interested in adventure games and mature stories.

The Policenauts translation patch can be found at Policenauts.net.

Many thanks to the Policenauts unofficial translation project for creating, what I think, was the best adventure game experience of 2009.