Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

Allow me to point out that none of the saucy and risqué renarks in the game are liberties of the translation team.
Everything is in concurrence with the original text, translated and contextualized as needed, but essentially nothing
is changed.

@Red Soul: Eh?

Is that so? So the game had adult undertones to begin with? I didn't know that.

I thought you approached the game like how Byuu & D's team approached Der Langrisser. Their English translation of that game was so full of swearing it got stale sooner.

I thought that Byuu did a great job with Der Langrisser. I too don't like swearing, but you can't expect people to spare each others' feelings during horrible wars. It's hard for me to image Elwin in the middle of a desperate struggle sayings; "Gosh darn that Bozer! I am going to bash his noggin and send him to heck!" There's games and there's games. Some have more mature themes to them...

I believe a level of adequation is necessary as well, but as Recca said, it depends on the game entirely, you have to analyze not only the script itself but
character stereotypes and the overall game setting to decide on which tone to adopt for the game.
Slayers was never officially localized, and the mature references within the script may have very well been a reason.
If you check the readme you'll see none of it are ravings from any of us.

Everyone around here (save for maybe the newcomers like Red Soul and Filler) knows that if anyone tried to adult up a game just because they could, I'd go ballistic. I absolutely HATE that, and I've had many an argument with other hackers on the subject. It isn't professional. And doing it just because you can screams "Hey, I'm a 14 year old loser that thinks I'm being super smart!" Of course you're just being a kid/kiddish instead and looking stupid. I got into a huge argument with Dark Force one day over this very topic and a certain game that I refused to play for this very reason. I like Dark Force, don't get me wrong, but as I told him, it isn't necessary when it isn't necessary, and I won't play a game when it isn't. And I have never played the translation of said game. Now I only bring this up so you know I will stand up for this very fact.

Anyway, rest assured, if the game says "Hey, I'm adult oriented and themed, we need adult content," such as say Feda, then sure it will be there. If a game says "Hey, I'm a younger teen oriented game with only mildly suggestive themes and I don't need to be soiled for no good reason, say such as Villgust or Phantasy Star Gaiden, it won't be if I have anything to say on the matter. It is a MAJOR pet peeve of mine.

As one of the writers, I'll convey a bit of inside information.

I may have actually toned down this story somewhat to make it more compatible with a wider audience, My training almost instinctively steers me away from the pitfalls that Taskforce mentioned. As a youngster, I got my hands on Salinger's Catcher in the Rye . I recall lurking behind the school gym with the other pimple-faces and mumbling some of the more salacious content aloud amid the giggles, grunts, and other guttural utterances of my fellow snot-noses. I can still recall my adrenalin-charged blood racing through my temples that day.

Years later, I picked up that novel again and scanned a few chapters, thinking, How could I have possibly been stimulated by this rubbish?

I suddenly realized that formal training and writing experience solved the mystery. Stories define works; literary devices construct stories; and dialogues bring stories to life. However, if dialogues contain copious amounts of salacious content, audiences soon become anesthetized, and that particular device loses its effectiveness. This leads up to my favorite treatise on racy subject matter: less equals more! Also, to have the greatest effect, writers try to catch readers off guard.

In other words, if a boot camp scene portrays a squad of shave-heads sitting around a table slurping gruel and speaking normally, and one suddenly yells out of the blue to pass the f***ing salt, it's only shocking and maybe funny once - not because vulgarity is humorous in itself- but because this device communicates the abandonment of table manners that would earn this kid a slap at home if he was raised by civilized parents. On the other hand, you may walk into an actual boot camp and hear the f-bomb every other word, but in reality, that slang term has lost it's meaning in this closed, extreme environment. Therefore, if a writer creates a work that accurately replicates that warped environment exactly, he will repel a significant proportion of his readers and maybe even lose them altogether if he doesn't return to actual storytelling in a hurry. In other words, s*** isn't art, regardless of what some boobs in NYC might try to sell ya.

*SPOILER*

Personally, I don't like introducing profanity into my writing but must sometimes as a sparsely used literary device. Nevertheless, toning Lina down by about 90% was easy in this game because I knew she wasn't really Lina. Instead, I could construct the other characters to muse about Lina not acting like Lina and thus introduce that particular aspect of the Slayers culture without actually practicing or condoning it. In fact, I would have great difficultly writing the real Lina's antics into a game. Being a parent - if the real Lina was my adolescent - I'd take her over my knee and teach her how to act out in the world so as not to be a total embarrassment to the family!

Despite what I said above, I wrote a scene in which a shocked, angry Lina Copy discovered proof-positive she was not original. That coarse, indelicate Galleod was so crass in his disclosure, I had Lina Copy bellow out he was an a$$hole. During that emotionally-charged scene, however, people should realize that Lina Copy wasn't reduced to total anguish by Galleod alone. She hated the situation even more, but Lina Copy was spring-loaded to focus all of her energies on Galleod - to take everything out on him, and she did. In fact, throughout the remainder of the game Lina Copy tormented that hapless magician. Even in the Bonus section, when she found a crippled Galleod in a bed in a house in a town, one more time, Lina Copy beat the guy to a pulp as he lay convalescing - just for general principles!

Regardless, Filler asked me to substitute a$$hole for something else in that scene, so I did. I constructed other devices to effectively convey the primal emotions that coarsed through Lina Copy's arteries during that seminal moment in the story. Afterward, everything that followed Deeole's house was basically just pre-determined story resolution.

These are some of my reflections on the decision-making processes during the creation of our English Slayers story.

And as you can see from Wildbill's post. We've never had to have this argument internally Although, he actually has been very kind to sometimes personally talk to me privately about a game that might be in the more mature category and explain his decision on certain things, because he knows I do have a low tolerance for it. Which I appreciate, and always have agreed with the choices. Some games are mature. There is no denying this fact. When they are, they should not be written as anything but mature. Some games are a fun ramp, and to make them adult just because you can takes away the fun ramp that could be had by all players.

The problem lies in the fact that fan creation leads to the thought "We don't have to listen to censors, so we'll give the people what they really want." Or this thought, "I'm going to do what professional companies can't do." The thing is, professional companies CAN do it. There was never any real control over the video game industry until very recently. The fact of the matter is, those companies knew those things didn't please the masses, and didn't lead to sales. And while we could have a long argument whether you should call "professional companies" writing professional. You have to hand it to them that they know what sales and it is a good model for fans to base their works on.

I completely agree with TF on this. Mature games should get the adequate treatment, non mature games should also get that same treatment.
If anything, this is our measure of respect for the original developers of a given game, and also the same dose of respect towards
the players of our translated version; having been on the other side of the fence before, as just a player, I always expected that groups
respected the script in the manner it was due.

Filling one's script with swearing "just cause" doesn't make a translation more authentic or ups its
quality or appeal in any way, and people that think so have the brains of an amoeba.
Let me give you an example to set a contrast:
Take for example Shining Force and Feda, they were quite contemporary games in their day, same genre and
similar quality in graphics and sounds, still they are worlds apart in script and setting yes?

Now imagine the following - try swapping the script tones between both games, you'd
easily ruin them both, its that simple.
So the simple maxim here is stay close to the truth.

Agreed, the translator/s must be as accurate as possible when translating games. Adding text which never appeared in the game and changing the tone of it is not really "translating". That's re-writing the script which is not a translator's job. The most important thing when translating is context. Like Red Soul said, you have to take both the characters' and the overall game tone into consideration. Making the script full of swearing for no reason is just plain stupid, especially if it's a game that's supposed to be light and for all ages.

Edit: Of course, by accurate translations, I don't exactly mean a literal translation. When it comes to expressions and jokes, translating them literally is usually not a good idea as it might not make sense in another language. During such cases, it's best to try and find an equivalent. However, if non exist in the language you are translating into, you could just translate it literally and try to explain what the joke or expression means in the other language. That's what's usually done for manga and anime (with subtitles), but you're better off trying to find something with the same meaning in games as you don't have enough space to explain in the text boxes.

Or you could just scrap it all together and replace the expression with actual dialogue which means the same thing. For example: "Let's get the hell out of here!" to "Let's escape/withdraw!" Of course, that was an English only example, but you know what I mean...

In sum, I believe we have developed a formula that has worked over the past 13 years. In my writing, I have two basic guidelines that I follow. One is to get inside the Japanese author's head and try to create a parallel English story that matches his overall spirit and the nuts and bolts of the story. My second goal is to create a pleasant gaming experience for myself, my teammates, and the broadest audience possible.

Naturally, the best guideline I have for getting inside the author's head is the raw translation, but I go much further. I research biographies and interviews with the author and people's interpretation of the game from sources all over the world. I pull the entire soundtrack, observing the titles of each track and what moods I feel as I listen - over and over. I analyze the visual scenery in a game, the expressions and body language of the characters, and finally those sound effects that are not technically music. I look for fan-fiction and artwork to give me an idea of which particular aspects of a game and/or series capture people's fancies and imaginations the most.

Then, I meld everything together in my storytelling techniques while the team murder-boards every detail, over and over. Finally, I invite world input post-release. Each project teaches me new lessons that I file away and use in the next endeavor. Last, but not least, I play a more recent video game simultaneously so I can compare possible new styles and approaches against the tried and true.

This is why I take so long to do my part in a project. I would rather put my best effort into one or two stories per year than just shove pulp out the door because I believe that one golden nugget is more valuable than a mountain of garbage. I'm guessing that everyone in the group feels about the same. True, we rushed Slayers a bit to make the anniversary release but still wound up with less than a half dozen typos reported so far - a super testament to the beta team. Still, that's why we called V1.00 the penultimate release, even though the changes in V1.01 will be very minor.