![]() ![]() RA: The atmosphere that the development team created for the story and the characters was absolutely perfect, very close to the portraits we can read in books or see in movies. It has the tone and look of an authentic American crime novel or movie. Although the game was developed in Japan, I think it successfully avoids being an overly-stylised, artificial vision of America. ![]() MB: I think the Japanese image of America is formed to a large extent by the same Hollywood movies, TV shows and novels as people in the UK grow up consuming. Are there situations in the game where you felt those diverse influences were obvious, and did you ever run into any big problems preparing the game for Europe? Hotel Dusk is a game about Americans, made by Japanese developers, which you had to prepare for Europe. There were also a lot of words that would have confused UK players, for instance a case where birds' is used to refer to people'. Taking a powder' to refer to doing a disappearing act springs to mind, along with sawbuck ' as a reference to money and land's sakes ' meaning for goodness sake among others. Having said that, there were a few colourful US expressions that left me scratching my head and which I decided to modify. I wouldn't say there were any particularly big cultural barriers to contend with people in the UK grow up on US cop shows after all, and crime fiction by writers like Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy is hugely popular. Therefore, I approached the localisation process by trying to have as light a touch as possible. Kyle Hyde himself was particularly well characterised, with a world-weary cynical sense of humour that worked perfectly.Īs far as adapting the script for a UK audience went, clearly it's a game about a former New York detective staying in a hotel outside of Los Angeles, so we didn't want the characters to be speaking in Cockney rhyming slang. I should say first of all that the localisation by NOA was very successful in capturing the tone of a classic hard-boiled tale. However, I think Mark would like to talk a little about this. ![]() An obvious exception to the rule would be UK English, where we simply fine-tuned the US English to make it more comprehensible for a British audience. You could say, in fact, that we were in the unique position of being able to make the most of both worlds, and I'm absolutely certain that this is reflected in the vibrant nature of our texts. That said, we quickly realised that NOA's English translation contained a vast number of subtle embellishments that would actually serve to maximise the atmospheric authenticity of the game. PL: We made a conscious decision early in the project to remain as true to the original Japanese texts as possible. Did you work from the Japanese original text, or did you use the version translated by Nintendo of America's localisation team? ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |