Tuesday, July 18, 2023

Translation Issues in Café Remix?

Whilst I've discussed in brief a present issue that Pokémon Café Remix may have, there is actually and seemingly another present issue that needs to be discussed at length, since it is "up my wheelhouse", so to speak. The game is designed to be multilingual in its interface, and therefore translation is involved in this aspect. However, there may be a sign that the translation is imperfect in at least one part, which may suggest that there are imperfections elsewhere. Because I deal with languages and translation, this becomes something that I have to address in a discussion.

The part in concern is a feature that allows a previous party (in the game called a "lineup") to be immediately selected for use in a One-Minute Cooking stage. When activated, a popup is displayed with this exact wording:
It will be changed to the following lineup you previously played with.

Would you like to proceed?
The problem is that while the statement I quoted makes grammatical sense, it is slightly referentially off. The "It" that will be changed is obviously the current lineup, which is to be changed to the previous lineup; it seems rather abnormal to be referred by "It" as far as English is concerned in this presentation, and for that reason, I suspect that a slight error in translation may have occurred from the original Japanese, which may very well be considered as such given where Pokémon hails from.

In all my years of playing the puzzle Pokémon games, including Pokémon Shuffle as the predecessor, this is the first one that has caught my eye as an egregious wording "error", if it really is as such. Still, I don't have access to the original Japanese to verify or the skills to do so, nor am I really considered a native English speaker (near-native at best) or able to confirm the technical details that may have contributed to this "error", yet based on what I know about English and its specific uses (here user interfaces), this does raise some questions.

Having said that, whether this may indicate further translation issues elsewhere in the game may be something that I cannot establish for certain, but given the necessity of this game and its predecessor to be continuously updated - and in multiple languages, no less - translation issues may just arise as part of that process. And it's just as much an issue, if not more so, as any other issues the game might have.

Four years ago: The State of Nominations
Five years ago: The Eevee Identity
Six years ago: Only One Save File

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