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Check these idiots out

By Heath | October 11, 2007 at 1:33 am

A popular thing to do these days is fan translate games and anime that don’t get official English localizations. Similarly, sometimes retranslations are done to smooth out some of the rough edges left by a first effort. For example, Square Enix redid the original translations of a few Final Fantasy games when they were re-released on Game Boy Advance, and the result was impressive. One game that doesn’t really need the treatment is Chrono Trigger. But hey, some nerds went ahead and did it anyway. That wouldn’t be cause for news by itself, really…except that they made it worse.

Verily, the Chrono Compendium has released this patch, which takes a Chrono Trigger rom and adds a new, terrible awkward-sounding translation. It takes sentences and phrases which sounded fine, and adds Japanese honorrifics like “-sama” to the mix. Not only that, but it makes things unnecessarily wordy, vague, and far too literal. It simply does not sound like dialogue people would actually exchange. The time consumed doing this retranslation was, clearly, time poorly spent.

Fortunately for those that got sucked into this without thinking, ElFly over at NeoGAF has worked out an Un-Re-Translation patch, which takes a retranslated Chrono Trigger rom and reverts the text back to the original English translation. Check it out here.

Example of the translations, as taken from ElFly:
chronotriggerunretranslation.jpg

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