Hi, I’m professional translator and shut-in Arunaru. On most days, I’m either playing video games, watching other people play video games, translating video games, or some combination of the three. Recently I played this cool hip new game called Danganronpa in Japanese, and subsequently watched streams of the game in English by one Joseph Anderson . Around the time of Sayaka’s infamous crane story event, and the question therein that the translation rendered impossible to know the answer to, I started to notice something was amiss. Maybe NIS America didn’t put their best effort into the translation of this game that’s comprised mostly of text.

But when I looked around to see if there was much mention of the translation quality anywhere, I didn’t find a whole lot. Some arguments about how specific terms and titles differed from fan translations, such as Ultimate vs Super (Duper) High School (Level), but that’s about it. Maybe understandably so; if you can’t compare against the original game, it’s hard to say whether those bizarre non sequiturs are supposed to be there or not. In that case, I thought maybe I’d take an example from Clyde Mandelin’s Legends of Localization and demonstrate how the translation compares against the original script.

But there are a million lines in this game, and to do a completely thorough job would be about as much work as retranslating everything, so I have to be a bit picky. I’ll usually be trying to pick out lines that weren’t a deliberate, if poorly conceived, decision, but a clear lack of understanding on the part of the translator. There are far more problems with the translation than what I’ll list here, but it’s already hard enough to make a case to people that the first translation of something they read and enjoyed was wrong, and any level of subjectivity only makes it harder. So, understand I’m trying to be as fair as possible. I’m not especially familiar with the Danganronpa community, so maybe some of these things have been discussed somewhere, but not that I could easily find. I also have no familiarity with the fan translation or the let’s play aside from how they translated some terms, so as far as I know those are much better and you could figure this all out simply by comparing those to the official translation. I’ll be providing my own rough translations for the purpose of comparing against the official translation. They aren’t necessarily how I would translate these lines if I were working on a release of the game, but the point is to give a better idea of what the intended meaning was and where the official translation went wrong.



Japanese: 特別な趣味や趣向がある訳でもなければ、ミュータントでもないしスタンドを出せる訳でもない…

Official TL: I mean yeah, I have hobbies and stuff I like to do, but it’s not like I’m a psychic or mutant or whatever. My Rough TL: I don’t have any particular hobbies or aspirations, nor am I a mutant or a Stand User.

This first line we’ll look at, as early as the introduction, actually serves as a pretty good example of what I am and am not looking at overall, because there are two things that jump out here. First and more importantly, the first part of the sentence was misinterpreted and turned a negative into a positive, reversing the meaning entirely from ‘I don’t have hobbies’ to ‘I do have hobbies.’ It was supposed to be a further statement about how Makoto is unremarkable in every possible way, from the relatively average to the supernatural and absurd, but the official TL makes it sound more like he’s saying he’s just a normal guy and not a freak.

The second thing is changing the part about ‘Stands’ to ‘psychic.’ For those not in the know, a ‘Stand’ is something from the manga/anime Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, where they’re like psychic power manifested into magical beings. There are any number of reasons they might have changed this, maybe simply because they thought it was too obscure, though I feel like the game later references Jojo anyway. My main problem is that this bit in Japanese was amusing because of the specificity of what Makoto said, and that’s lost when it’s just ‘psychic.’ You could have said, I don’t know, ‘I can’t conjure up a Patronus’ or some similarly dorky thing that even Ultimate Normie Makoto would know, but that requires a bit more creativity.

The first of these two points is why I picked this line out, because it’s inarguably wrong, but there are many, many more instances like the second point that I’ll have to pass over unless they’re attached to full-on errors. Much of the inane repetition of the English script is because these bits of character were glossed over. That’s not to say that there’s no repetition in the Japanese version, but it was certainly exacerbated. Of course, this is all subjective, and some may even want to argue they like it better this way, so I don’t want to linger on these types of issues too much.

Anyway, a few errors are probably inevitable when you’re translating a game this long, and this is innocuous enough that I’d give it a pass if this were the extent of the problem. But it only takes a few seconds to reach more.



The line in the message box here is fine, but there are a couple things I want to point out about the comment thread in the background.

Comment 3:

Japanese: 今年超高校級のアイドルが入学するって聞いたけど、誰？

Official TL: This year’s Ultimate Pop Sensation is gonna be going there.

My Rough TL: I heard they have an Ultimate Pop Sensation enrolling this year. Who is it?

Comment 4:

Japanese: 超高校級の野球選手もいるって聞いた。あの人だよね？

Official TL: Yeah, the Ultimate Baseball Pro’s gonna be there, too.

My Rough TL: I hear there’s also an Ultimate Baseball Pro. You know who that’s gotta be.

For the sake of simplicity, my TLs are going to use the terminology set by the official TL such as ‘Ultimate’, though I’d address problems that terminology may create if it comes up. The terminology seems to be the one thing that has been extensively argued about elsewhere. Anyway, it’s pretty clear in Japanese that people don’t know precisely who each of these titles refers to, and that they’re speculating over it, at least at the beginning of the thread we see here. The translation often acts like the students were already known as The Ultimate *Whatever* before they were ever invited to Hope’s Peak Academy, when it seems to be a title given by the academy, as we see in the letter that they send Makoto. But in the official translation, Comment 3 and Comment 4 become these definitive statements where the Ultimate Pop Sensation and the Ultimate Baseball Pro were already known figures who are now going to attend Hope’s Peak Academy.

The translation of Comment 3 also mistakenly thinks ‘This year’ is a descriptor for ‘Ultimate Pop Sensation’ and implies there are yearly Ultimate Pop Sensations, when it’s just ‘This year, this thing is happening.’ I wonder if this confused the translator, considering that if there was one previously decided Ultimate Pop Sensation this year, there’d be no need to ask who it is, so they just omitted that part. The rest of the comments are fine enough, other than how they sound like no online conversation I’ve ever seen, but this confusion over the ‘Ultimate’ titles pervades the entire translation. I imagine that hardcore fans of the series may already know the minutia of how this all works in-universe, but the official translation certainly doesn’t make it clear.



Japanese: 恐ろしい事に、日本最大の暴走族の総長で、全国のヤンキー連中から尊敬と畏怖を集める男らしい。

Official TL: The scary thing is, he’s the de facto leader of every biker gang in Japan. Gangs everywhere love the guy…

My Rough TL: The scary thing is, he’s the leader of Japan’s biggest biker gang. Punks nationwide respect and fear him, apparently.

There’s a pretty big difference between ‘every’ and ‘biggest.’ Funnily enough, they get this correct in another line I’m going to show later. I have really no idea how this one happened, I guess it’s just a simple mistake nobody noticed. There are obviously differences in the second sentence here too, but they aren’t especially important.



Japanese: …と、思うと少しだけ勇気がわいてくる。我ながら情けない性格だ。

Official TL: That thought was kind of encouraging. I mean, I know I don’t have much in the way of personality.

My Rough TL: …Which does encourage me a little. I have a pathetic personality, I have to say.

This is Makoto’s reaction to possibly not being the only talentless person at the school. The second part is supposed to be him remarking on how sad it is that he feels this way. In the official TL he remarks on his lack of personality seemingly out of nowhere, in a way that doesn’t really connect to what he just said or what he says next.

If I was translating this for a release of the game, I might go with something like ‘I have to admit I’m pretty pathetic’ and omit the ‘personality’ part because it sounds more natural and there’s little difference between calling yourself pathetic and calling your personality pathetic, but I’m leaving it in to illustrate where ‘personality’ came from in the official TL. Everything else in the official TL looks made up, as if the translator understood one part of that sentence and tried to come up with something that made sense around it. I can’t say whether that’s exactly what happened here, but it’s not uncommon to see, particularly in fan translations. Of course, you should hope for better than that, but there’s going to be much more of this.



Japanese: 会話はストーリーを進める基本となりますので、お忘れなきよう…

Official TL: Each conversation is important to the overall story, so keep track of how they go.

My Rough TL: Conversation is the main way to progress through the story, so please don’t forget this.

An error in a tutorial, that’s always good. The line in Japanese is a statement about how talking to people is typically the way that you move the story along. The official TL’s claim that every conversation is important to the story is both incorrect as a translation and not especially true within the game. This is another one where the translator seemed to know some of the words (Conversation and story at least), but didn’t exactly understand how they fit together, so they made something up that could have fit.



Japanese: まさに、”超高校級の文学少女”と呼ぶに相応しい、天才女子高生作家… Official TL: Which is why she’s come to be known as the Ultimate Writing Prodigy. My Rough TL: The title “Ultimate Writing Prodigy” is definitely apt. She’s a brilliant high school-aged author.

I’m mainly pointing out this one to reiterate the issue with where the ‘Ultimate’ titles are coming from. The official TL makes it sound like she just came to be called this naturally. Many of the other character introductions in this section have a similar line with the same problem, but I’m not going through all of them. The second part of this line was actually moved to the next message in the official translation as you can see below, which is fine.



The line in Japanese here is something like ‘…Isn’t she?’ This isn’t really a big deal to take out when Makoto starts questioning this in the next line anyway.



Japanese: すごい被害妄想だ… 作家としての豊かな想像力が間違った方向に働いただな… Official TL: Wow, talk about an inferiority complex. I was waaay off about what a successful author would be like… My Rough TL: That’s one crazy persecution complex. Here’s an example of an author’s vast imagination being used totally the wrong way.

I won’t bother much with the inferiority/persecution complex part, she could just as well have both anyway. The second sentence is 100% wrong, though, where the official TL turns a mildly amusing observation about her character into a generic and very obvious one that the player probably already made during the conversation that just happened. Again I can only assume the translator didn’t understand the line and quickly came up with the most obvious possible thing that could have fit there as a replacement.



Japanese: 高校野球の頂点に立った人の言葉とは思えない。世の中の野球少年達には、絶対に聞かせられないな…

Official TL: I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I never imagined I’d hear something like that from a baseball all-star…

My Rough TL: It’s hard to believe this is coming from high school baseball’s biggest star. No way can we let the aspiring baseball players of the world hear this.

This is pretty similar to the previous example with Toko, where the second line is inexplicably replaced with ‘I can’t believe this person’s not like I imagined……………..’ And he’s already saying he’s shocked by what Leon said in the first sentence, so now it just looks like Makoto is repeating himself.

I notice that the messages in this game never seem to go over two lines and my translation for some of these lines wouldn’t fit, even though it looks like there’s space for a third line in the message box in the English version. The Japanese version uses only two lines because Japanese can say more in fewer characters, but a programmer could have added an additional line. I’ve worked on plenty of projects where the company doesn’t care to do this and just gives the translator some absurd character limits to work within, though. Judging by NIS America’s body of work overall, I’m guessing a lot of the problems fall on their management and expectations rather than the translator(s) for this particular game. It’s less of a problem with the translator when some lines are truncated, but I’m still not going to excuse translations that are wildly off.



Japanese: 今やオリンピック候補生にも選ばれた”超高校級のスイマー”だったな。 Official TL: She’s even been chosen as an upcoming Olympic cadet. She is, without a doubt, the Ultimate Swimming Pro. My Rough TL: Now she’s even been chosen as a candidate for the Olympics. She’s the Ultimate Swimming Pro.

What is an Olympic cadet? Well, the word 候補生 (kouhosei) here is usually used in military contexts in the same way we would use cadet, where officer cadet/candidate is 士官候補生 (shikan kouhosei) and so on. It’s somewhat of a broader word than cadet, though, where it could be applied to candidates or people training for things outside the military or the police force. Incidentally if you look at the popular Japanese-English dictionary jisho.org , the only translation it’ll provide for this word is ‘cadet,’ even though their definitions don’t exactly match up. You should never completely trust word-to-word dictionaries like this, and instead actually look at a Japanese dictionary when you need to look a Japanese word up.



Japanese: 日本最大最凶と称される暴走族に、２代目総長として君臨する人物…

Official TL: He’s the current leader of the largest biker gang in Japan.

My Rough TL: Japan’s biggest and most brutal biker gang has him as its second ever leader.

Alright, they fixed the bit about him being the leader of the biggest biker gang here. Now they miss the part about him being their second leader, though, a detail that turns out to be important in his backstory. They say he’s the ‘current leader’ and you could draw that there were previous leaders from that, so maybe this is borderline acceptable if you really want to stretch it.



Japanese: 大神さくら…通称”オーガ”は、霊長類ヒト科最強に最も近い女子高生だ。

Official TL: Some call her Ogre; some even think she’s the closest known relative to the primates–the famed missing link.

My Rough TL: Sakura Ogami, otherwise known as Ogre, is the schoolgirl closest to being the Strongest Hominid.

I accidentally clicked past the English line when I was playing these side by side, which is unfortunate because this is maybe the worst translation in the prologue. For full context, 霊長類ヒト科最強, which is something like the Strongest Hominid, is a Japanese nickname for MMA fighter Mark Kerr and most probably what they’re referencing here. The translation seems to be confused by this mention of hominids, but contrives something around that and the word ‘closest’ to come up with something completely different and incredibly bizarre.



Japanese: 俺はハタチだべ。実際、色々あって３ダブしてんだ。

Official TL: Oh, I’m actually 21. I’ve been held back a few times, see, and… well, it’s a long story.

My Rough TL: I’m 20. See, some stuff happened, and I ended up getting held back three times.

This is clearly an intentional choice, but I thought it was amusing enough to include. The legal drinking age in Japan is 20, but to adhere to American drinking laws, they changed Yasuhiro’s age to 21 just for this line. The game still takes place in Japan, though, so this seems like a bit of a misguided localization choice. There are other half-assed instances of localization too, like money being dollars instead of yen. If they aren’t going to go full Phoenix Wright and change the setting entirely, these changes come off a bit strange.



Japanese: 参加者全員の全財産を奪い合うという、究極の裏ギャンブル”キングオブライアー”で優勝し…

Official TL: They say she entered and won an underground gambling tournament, earning the title “Queen of Liars.”

My Rough TL: There’s a tournament where the participants fight over all of each other’s wealth, the ultimate underground gambling game called “King of Liars,” and she was the winner.

The translation mistakes the name of the competition with a title Celeste receives for winning it. This is apparently supposed to be a reference to the manga Liar Game, but I don’t know anything about that. I think that this comes up in Celeste’s character events, and they correctly refer to the tournament by this name there, but I’m not sure. If so, this is another case of sloppiness.





These two go together. These two go together.

Japanese:

と、葉隠クンが言った直後だった。

ボクらが”普通じゃない”光景を目の当たりにする事となるのは…

Official TL:

Hiro was right.

But in a way, that just emphasized how completely *not* normal all of us were.

My Rough TL:

Right after Hiro said that…

Something abnormal happened before our eyes.

This is in response to Hiro saying how this is probably just a normal opening ceremony, and these lines are immediately followed by the animation for Monokuma’s first appearance. The official TL would make no sense in any context, considering how extremely average Makoto considers himself, but it’s especially jarring when this random aside is the lead-up to Monokuma’s introduction. Again, it doesn’t seem to fit if you stop to think about it at all. This is another one where the translator must not have understood what they were reading. It’s hard to even tell how it happened aside from the ‘not normal/abnormal’ part.



Japanese: うぷぷ…こんな脳汁ほとばしるドキドキ感は、 鮭や人間を襲う程度じゃ得られませんな…

Official TL: Puhuhu. I bet *that* got your brain juices flowing! Beats the heck out of a human catching a salmon, huh?

My Rough TL: Puhuhu… Now that gets the brain juices flowing. You can’t get this kind of excitement from attacking salmon or humans.

Most of the rest of this scene is okay, thankfully, since this is where the entire premise of the game is explained. But here you have a botched bear joke. “Beats the heck out of a human catching a salmon” sounds like a strange non sequitur, but he’s supposed to be talking about attacking people or salmon, as bears are known to do.



Japanese: でも、期待に胸を膨らませてやって来たこの学園は… Official TL: This school, which had come out of nowhere to raise my hopes so high…

My Rough TL: I was filled with anticipation when I came to this school, but…

Last one, near the end of the prologue. The official TL is confused about who or what is doing the coming. Not much else to say. It sure isn’t the worst thing we saw here.

IN CONCLUSION (IN CASE I NEVER CONTINUE PAST THIS):

Well, that’s the prologue, maybe an hour or so of the game, if that. This would be, I don’t know, a tolerable number of such errors for the entire game, but all of that in an hour is pretty bad. It’d be cool to go through the entire game if this garners much interest, but even getting this far took a good while. We haven’t gotten to a mystery yet, and the devil’s really in the detail then. I didn’t even get to the crane story, but maybe some other time.

Translation standards in this industry have never been great, and at least some of the bad rap Japanese games as a whole get is a consequence of that. Danganronpa is no masterpiece of writing in any language, but it sounds far shoddier in English than it should. Many of the good qualities of the game come through in spite of the translation, and you shouldn’t feel bad if you liked the game regardless of all this, but it would be nice if there were some accountability for poor translations. Obviously I’m really late to the party on Danganronpa, but NIS America continues to release work of similar quality.

I don’t know exactly what the solution to this would be, though. You can’t accurately assess a translation without painstakingly comparing each line like this, and the target audience for a translation is someone who doesn’t know the original language and wouldn’t have the ability to check for themselves. Even in classic literature with multiple translations thanks to being in the public domain, it can be hard to find a good one, but retranslations for video games almost never happen either once there’s an official release. I don’t know that fans are going to pass on ever playing a game in any form just because of the translation, so it’s difficult to put any financial incentives on companies to produce quality work. I do think a broader audience could be reached if the writing sounded better, but that’s hard to prove.

Oh well.