We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

Far be it from me to presume you have forgotten that you are talking to a Japanese–English translator whose specialty is video games, but unless “action shooting” can accurately mean “a run and gun video game” in French, that phrase came directly from the Japanese version of the text.

Please don’t talk about how it’s “literally their only job and they fucked it up”. It’s not even that bad (and it might have been their tenth job that day besides); it’s a faithful effort from someone who seems to have understood that the original phrasing was hella awk. I’m not saying it’s a great translation, ’cause it isn’t, but there are good rea$ons and bad reasons for why these things happen. And one of them is that it was probably at some point presented to an agency’s (i.e. probably not specifically game-focused and done at the lowest bid) translator as a press release (to be reprocessed by, you know, the press), and then some PHB type decided that since the text said the same thing originally, it’d be good enough to slap on the storefront, too. Some sort of misappropriation like that.

It’s not often the translator’s fault, exactly, if the translation is a little strange (not everyone is in it for the art, for starters), and I often even find it easy to forgive people who cause these bad translations to get out because they simply don’t understand the craft or don’t have the resources to make it better.

At any rate, I’d still take this quality over the translations SNKP was putting out on a regular basis last decade, and I hope that one day they will treat bringing their A-game to English localization as a priority, but I can understand that they’re somewhat niche in the Anglosphere. It wouldn’t be cost effective for anything except their actual new releases, like when they had Atlus take care of KOF XIII.