Introduction
In 1993, at the young age of two, I held a controller in my hands for the first time. It was the Super Nintendo, and the game was Final Fantasy II (Final Fantasy IV in Japan. There’s a whole story behind that). My love of video games would go on to define me.
Final Fantasy VII, while not being my most favorite game in the series — that would be FFIX — was still a game that left a lasting impact on me. The story beats, the humor, and the characters were ones that I loved and still love to this day. So when the opportunity to simulate a remaster of the beloved game’s, admittedly poor at times, dialogue came up, I jumped at the opportunity.
I worked together with three others — Xingyue (Silver) Zhang, Harlyn Lane, and Regina Dukes, who all share a passion for Japanese — to take a portion of the dialogue and retranslate it. We chose the very first portion of the game up to the escape from Sector 5’s blasted reactor (where we first meet Aerith) to translate.
The tools we used included SDL Trados Studios 2021, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Antconc, and a glossary converter.
Proposal
There were six parts to our proposal: Specifications, Project Goals, Terms and Conditions, Processes & Resources, Deliverables, and the Quote.
For our deliverables, we had: Source Text (.docx), Pseudo-translation (.docx), Styleguide (.docx), Termbase (.sdltb),Translation Memories (.tmx), and Target Text (.docx).
Lesson Learned
There were a number of hiccups we faced as we worked through this project, but in the end, I believe we did very well. We learned a lot about how Trados works and a number of things about the smaller functions – for example, packages and recombining – that we would have had to likely bumble through if faced with it in a real working situation. It’s good that we learned about it early. We also learned a lot about the importance of style guides and how easily things can go wrong without some pre-flighting done to the documents ahead of time. Xingyue was very helpful with the technical aspects and documentation, and Harlyn did a phenomenal job as editor. We definitely did our roles well.
Check out this lessons learned video helpfully uploaded by Xingyue: