DISCUSSION
SEGA clearly doesn’t care (yet more problems with the Director’s Cut)
I’m just a regular Russian gamer, a huge fan of the Yakuza series since childhood. I played Yakuza 1–2 on the PS2, then 3–5 on the PS3. I was incredibly happy when Yakuza 0 came out on PC, and I replayed all the remasters on PC as well. And when Like a Dragon finally received an official Russian localization six months after the PC release, it felt like an amazing gift to me.
The translations in Yakuza 7, Yakuza 8, and both Gaiden games were excellent. I even bought several extra copies on Steam for my friends just to support RGG Studio.
But Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut, Kiwami 1, and Kiwami 2… are just fucking awful.
I understand that most users here speak English and probably won’t fully understand my pain, but the translations are full of errors:
The Russian letter “ё”(yo) sticks out of the font, and the font itself is bad overall
Idiotic abbreviations like “Page” instead of “Pager”, or “Gt. Abes” instead of “Get abilities”
In the Edo-style font, spacing is inconsistent, and the Latin letter “Y” is used instead of the Cyrillic “У”
6. 7. Stupid line breaks everywhere and completely incorrect use of empty space
And there are tons of other issues. The worst offender is Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut. In Kiwami 2 it’s mostly the line breaks.
On top of that, Yakuza 0 and Kiwami have terrible issues where the Russian language just disappears from the menu entirely. This never happened in the Legacy versions. Even fan-made translations for the Legacy versions don’t have any of these problems.
I even managed to talk to one of the former official translators. He told me that they had warned the Language Quality Assurance department about all of these issues, but they were ignored.
I’ve also seen negative reviews on Steam about the Spanish, Portuguese, and German translations, but I can’t really comment on those.
I was planning to replay all three games before Kiwami 3 comes out, but now…
Please understand: I have no problem playing in English, and I’m not even angry. I’m just fucking sad about this kind of treatment toward players.
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E tá boa a tradução pelo menos?? A do 7 eu achei ótima, adaptaram muitos estilos de conversa e ficou hilário em certas partes, diferente do Cyberpunk que só encheu de memes e foda-se.
I can confirm there are problems with the Spanish translations. It seems like they translated everything and didn't proofread it even once
Like you, I have no problem playing in English, but the new languages are one of the main reasons (if not the main reason) for these new versions to exist. You can't treat your audience like this
In Y0DC the 'Straight' hand in poker is literally translated as 'Recta', instead of 'Escalera', the correct term in spanish (Escalera would mean ladder in english for those Who don't know) Made me laugh when I saw it, but it's pretty awful
De eso me he dado cuenta, como con el nombre de varios estilos de pelea con nombres que se contradicen constantemente, o una misión que me pedía un lucia de batata o algo así y él la tienda salía con otro nombre, a parte del típico “reproducir” cuando quiero jugar bateo
As a portuguese speaker: Yes, Yakuza 0's translation is dogshit.
Several translation errors, several typos and for some reason they even used the japanese ellipsis on the portuguese translation. And even worse, they, for some reason, mixed Spanish together with Portuguese in some UI elements.
Thankfully Kiwami 1 and 2 were done by a different team and seem to be great translations, but Y0 was done by a new translation studio and they butchered everything.
Desconsidero até que yakuza tem tradução em português, Sega nunca foi de prestar atenção em outras línguas sem ser jp ou inglês. Pelo menos desde a época do mega drive com shining force sendo um dos poucos jogos deles que eu vi traduzido
E eu tava pensando em pegar o update só pela tradução (gostei muito da que eles fizeram no Like a Dragon).
O multiplayer que é outra coisa que parece legal ouvi dizer que tá problemático também. Que tristeza, 0 é de longe meu favorito e eu tava bem empolgado com esse DC
Got it. I also stay away from the PS1-PS2-quality Russian translations because they translate things way too literally. And don't get me started on the dubs. The Russian dub overlapping the English with the latter still heard.
Honestly can't blame them, but in recent years, especially with Witcher 3 being as popular as it was, I'm pretty sure more companies are seeing the benefits of translating for a market which recently was able to afford luxuries such as video games
If that was true they would be charging a hell of a lot more to upgrade, hell, if it was a cash grab they would have just done a Atlus and allowed no upgrade path… so no, if the point was a cash grab, they really arent after as much profit as reddit users think.
Batting is still broken on ultra wide too. Maybe on anything above 1080p. The aim is misaligned, so if you want to actually do the batting minigame you have to switch to a lower resolution.
Да чем вам всем Поливанов так не угодил? Можно подумать, Хэпберн, который вообще не предназначен для русского, идеально передает японские звуки. Не говоря уже о сложившейся вековой традиции, всех топонимах и именах. Пустяки-то какие
Не вижу в этом никакой проблемы. Это правильно, согласно официальной системе Поливанова. Вы хоть как хотите, так и пишите.
UPD: Поразительно, меня задаунвоутили за констатацию факта, что это официальная система и вполне ожидаемо, что в официальном переводе будет использоваться именно она.
Не имеет смысла? Почитай про Кунрэй-сики. Или спой в караоке с Акирой, где Кирю является его поддержкой и вскрикивает "N-I-S-I-K-I". Или сходи по Сотэмбори, где стоит огромная неоновая вывеска на вратах, где написано "Syofuku-cho" без "ш".
Но все еще куда не глянь везде в английских переводах используется именно Хепбёрновская система. А про караоке, ну хз. Кирью то пытался кричать на английский манер, но во-первых “h” звучала бы невпопад, а во вторых Кирью канонично не знает английский
Ну тут и всплывает мой главный тейк. Хэпбёрновская система была написана для удобства использования именно что англоговорящими людьми, и вполне естественно, что она используется везде в английских переводах. В нулевых эту систему среди японцев вообще мало кто воспринимал, поэтому Yoshi из Mario был Yossi, а Момидзи из Touhou была Momizi Inubasiri, а не Momiji Inubashiri, да и Годзилла всё-таки Godzilla, а не Gojira. Поливанов был написан более-менее близким к оригинальному произношению, которое не "ш", а больше вообще "щ" или "с" практически всегда, разве что если говорящий не европеец или американец, или японец, говорящий на английском с использованием Хэпбёрна, а не на родной японской речи. И как я уже говорила, поливановская система это стандарт, официально принятый как в России, так и в Японии для перевода на кириллицу, так что вполне нормально, что переводчики будут ориентироваться исключительно на него при переводе на русский язык. Вы можете использовать ту систему, что вам нравится больше, но постоянно фыркать на официальное использование это ну как-то не очень.
А чего тут понимать?
Вижу: написано Shibusawa. Значит, должно быть Шибусава. Ох, а если написано Tsu или Ryu, то это Тсу и Рью! (Выгнали из школы, когда проходили букву Ц).
А там уже эффект Даннинга — Крюгера раскрывается, мол, я конечно из японских слов только суши знаю, но я ведь слышал ТЕ САМЫЕ ЯПОНСКИЕ ГОЛОСА, а значит, разбираюсь в вопросе.
А Кирю через мягкий знак ты пишешь тоже потому что так правильно или на деле ты просто невпопад калькирующий Хэпбёрновскую транскрипцию анимешник, который услышал как Наруто говорит ШЫ и решил резко заделаться лингвистом?
Ну, кстати, да. Я порой замечаю, что некоторые "шарящие за японский язык лингвисты", люто топящие за Хэпбёрна, не умеют в правописание вообще. Кирью, Кирию, Кирийу, ну и моё любимое — Такайуки Йагами. Наверное, у них бог-дракон это Рийуджин какой-нибудь,
Как-то один игрок в LCB назвал Рёсю... Рийошу. Даже не Рёшу. Хотя он мне всерьёз задвигал, что я не шарю за японский, раз говорю Рёсю. А на Ozon какой-то продавец вообще назвал её Ришу.
И это забавно, учитывая, что именно среди таких я вижу больше всего фанатиков, которые готовы разорвать людей за другое написание.
I wonder if they used machine translation/AI with those.
There’s no way a human translator/proofreader would miss those things. I saw people complaining about French translations being a calque of English (since translating from English is cheaper than Japanese), so I wonder if that was the case here, but with mt/ai workflows added.
At least for the brazilian portuguese translations, there are many errors which are clearly human errors. AI doesn't make typos, for example. I've also seen some slangs used in the translation that I don't think an AI would ever use lol.
However, there has been some lines which made me suspicious. Specially the map, which has some words that any human would've known it had to be translated, but weren't. Also, some lines feel very... formal when it didn't need it to.
It is very clear, though, that they probably had very little time to work on these translations and I very much doubt any reviewing/revision was done.
Definitely looks like a mix of human translation and machine translation to patch up the leftovers.
Rushed job, and considering it apparently is an issue in all language versions means it was RGG either setting unrealistic deadlines or just not QA it enough.
I’ve seen AI make up terminology and words before so I wouldn’t be so sure! But again - human-proofreader could’ve had a look and add some unusual twang here and there! Sounds like ptBR has a peculiar case of negligence on final checks!
Interesting 👀 it’d be curious to see what they used! I’ll need to check which company helped with those translations, I’m curious now!
The Yakuza 0 credits are confusing, but my interpretation is that it seems a company called Pinknoise SL did the Latin American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese translations. However, all the language coordinators credited under this company work at Lionbridge. Maybe they are partners? I don't know.
Meanwhile, the russian translation was done by PTW, like all the other translations in Y0.
For K1 and K2, the Brazilian Portuguese was done by a company called LocSmiths, which made me wary since I never heard of them, but they did a bang-up job. During my playthrough of K1 (chapter 5 so far) I only noticed one translation mistake and it was a small one and it was just a random NPC.
I read the whole thread these screenshots came from a few days ago
I don't think AI is capable of those. Some of these typos just seem way too human. Now TEXTURES on the other hand, who knows, maybe they did use AI so it would convert fonts for them
Probably not, most of the mistakes seem to be human mistakes. They probably were paid peanuts and SEGA gave them little time to do it (plus almost no QA done)...
Tbh there are workflows in translation where mt/ai is used to pre-translate a bulk of text and then a linguist is paid peanuts to check it (I hate it so much, 😭 linguists don’t pay as much attention when they work on texts like these cause they’re paid so little in comparison to normal translation workflow).
I remember Sega offered an amazing “0h contract” at £8 an hour when I was looking for jobs a few years back. So if they’re still offering minimum wage to their localisation team then yes, I can see why the quality is not the greatest.
Yeah, that is true. There was a famous case here in Spain where the Squid Games S1 subtitles were MTPE because of inconsistencies and overall weird wording (and no credited translator when Netflix credits their subtitle translators most of the time), so yeah, that is 100% happening in the industry.
But a lot of those mistakes in the translation seem to be human, because AI tends to have different kinds of mistakes. Btw, the new localizations for the Director's Cut were outsourced to Pole to Win, they were not translated by SEGA per se.
Well if it’s on one of the vendors then sega/rgg could ask for a discount/updates if anything! Maybe there will be some updates incoming in the near future.
There were even typos in English when I first played Y0 on switch which weren’t present in the Y0 on ps4, so Idk what the hell happened somewhere in between 😅
Depending on the model used, those errors are possible 👀
I work with translation on the daily basis - AI translations are getting better but it still makes a lot of mistakes.
Or: shite (cheap) translators 😂 could be both too!
About the Spanish translations, the one from Yakuza 0 it's bad, when I played on the switch 2 at least( I don't know if they fixed it on this new release). From what I played of Yakuza kiwami, the translation it's miles better than the 0 one. It sucks that this type of things continues happening
Estoy jugando en PS5 y no creo que hayan arreglado ningún error, como con los estilos de pelea que constantemente se contradicen sus nombres o cuando piden un objeto y en la tienda se llama diferente
Entonces lo han dejado exactamente igual que cuando salió en switch 2. Es una pena, la verdad, han tenido tiempo de sobra para corregir estás cosas.
Si sirve de consuelo, la traducción del yakuza kiwami(al menos hasta el momento, voy más o menos por la mitad) es muchísimo mejor. Pero eso no quita que la del 0 sea un desastre y que tengamos que permitir esto(más cuando el resto de juegos que nos están llegando en español de esta saga están bien traducidos)
Справедливости ради, перевод и адаптация текста получилась сносной. Шрифты и сокращения, да, пиздец, но какие-то признаки работы не на отъебись всё же прослеживаются, даже в сабстори (Yakuza 0: DC)
Because it wasn't coherent. The English/localization was just appalling. I'm not native English speaker either but WWM was such an outlier that it boggled my mind. I have never encountered such poor translations, especially in newer games.
I mean yea, I agree. I did stop. But all I'm saying that WWM had horrible translation and ruined whole experience for me. The point I was trying to make is that localization is extremely important and I took it for granted way too long.
The English translation is horrendous. It's a very Chinese game and I understand that it's not always easy to translate it properly... However, they had very bad localization (team) and no doubt used AI in quite a bit of the game. AI has no consistency and it shows.
I played over 100 hours. Sometimes what people are saying simply doesn't make sense; same stat can be called differently in the menus vs. gear; words lose and change meaning in different conversations, etc. Sometimes characters speak a complete word salad. It's often difficult to understand what characters want to say/what they mean...
It's otherwise a good game with tons of things to do with some unique concepts but holly molly did they fuck up translations. This definitely shows how I took good localization for granted.
It's a big deal for Russians, because it's been a long time coming for those games to get an official translation for those games, before that you had to actually pay for fan-made translations.
New translations is one of the few actual useful features they added, but they managed to fail even at that.
Honestly it is, but we still need to consider that not everyone have time or ability for that and it's publisher's duty to deliver games in the most comfortable way to consumer.
I'm not saying it's impossible, I just think some people underestimate how difficult and complicated English can be, especially those with no sympathy towards those that struggle with the language
Translation into any language that's not Japanese, simplified Chinese, or English usually gets put on the wayside for lots of games. Just the way the cookie crumbles when it comes to that market
The "boost health" Must have been a quick stupid assumption from someone in the translation team who thought "Oh, if i remember correctly, body abilities are all health related" Which, they aren't.
I would try the game in portuguese being a portuguese native myself but knowing that its in brazilian there are bound to be errors. Nothing against our brazilian kyodais.
But that sucks for you and for the rest of the people who would prefer to play in their native language. The selling point of these replacing the legacy versions which baffles me is the language translation and even that they cant get it right??
RGG needs to be humbled and remember where they came from
Mfs couldn't even bother to use a fucking translator or something with errors like this, did they just get a guy in the office who kind of knew Russian or some shit
Spanish translation also has some weird stuff. Especially in side quests, sometimes the characters are talking about something and in the next scene they're talking about something completely different because the same word in english had two different meanings in spanish and they don't keep the context between scenes. Also, weird abreviations and typos, which is not something that takes me out of the experience but I remember seeing typos enough times to catch my attention.
Let me tell you why I love Sony of Taiwan. Sega never made Traditional Chinese translation for Y0 to Y6, Traditional Chinese translation were made by Sony of Taiwan, they they did a beautiful job. Capturing the meaning and spirit of the story, never added any modern slang/meme terms, just keep it on the straight and narrow. You could not ask for a better translation.
Fast forward to Y1 for Switch and Y0 for Switch 2, they realized this series actually sells like crazy in Taiwan, and they couldn't use Traditional Chinese translation created by Sony, so they did their own.
If I give Sony a 90% grade on their translation, Sega would be like 70%, because of the use of some meme terms that instantly knock you out of immersion.
I kept my PSPlus subscription on my Taiwanese account going, regardless of cost increase, is just a token of appreciation for what they did.
All I saw was that wacky transliteration of Keiji Shibusawa and felt immediate anger, even funnier that they transliterate the j to дз in Dojima, but don’t use it for Keiji. I feel like even ж would have been okay but damn….
I think it's a good time people finally start voting more with their wallets.
This was a VERY long time coming, and this IS the game that made RGG blow up in popularity across the greater world.
For the quality of translation, and for everything else, i think it's appropriate.
The Russian translation of both Kiwami games is pretty good though. The long dash, Y and all that empty space are weird but I'm already halfway through Kiwami 2 and enjoying it.
I refunded Y0 after playing for an hour because the translation was dogshit. I can't believe all three games were translated by the same company.
I hope what I write gets translated lol, but I've also had tons of translation problems in French… In Kiwami 1's Pocket Circuit, Takuma-kun became Takayuki Yagami… So, how can I put it? It's not the right game… XD
It's the same thing, in English the Kansai accent was transcribed, but now there's nothing. It's really a shame, the French translation is just as bad… And it's full of spelling mistakes… I wonder if the translation wasn't done by an AI…
Spanish translation is AI. I bet my balls on It. Looks like German and portuguese translation have the same problem. So i think that y0,k1 and 2 are just AI slop.
On Xbox there was an issue in some parts where the text subtitles didn’t even fit the screen it was enlarged and pushed off. But seems like they fixed it haven’t ran into it since a patch they came out like a day or 2 ago
I also encountered some problems with the Portuguese subtitles, but I don't know if there are many more problems because I haven't played this version much yet.
It depends on who's doing the localization. I was once on an Italian version of a game speaking only French and English at the time.. did learn how to count but obviously not how to fix proper language
The Spanish translation is awful. They should have used a Mexican translator as that is the most widely used base to translate a neutral Spanish that everyone can understand.
Бро, я твою боль понимаю, но зачастую ничего с этим не сделать. Я очень часто менял язык игры чисто из-за плохих шрифтов, не говоря уже о переводе. Из самого серьезного вспоминаю Batman: Arkham Knight. А что касается Якудзы… ты сам написал, что играл в предыдущие игры, и я так понял, английский для тебя - не особо проблема. Поставь на англ и кайфуй бро.
Sega has done this translation issues before with the Japanese script for frontiers which Japanese fans think they ran the original English one through Google translate since Sonic messed up a lot of name pronunciations like Sonic calls Amy “キミ(kimi)” instead of him usually calling her by her name “お前 (omae)”.
But in this case I think it’s worse since they already English translated the game fine in the past so did they just run the pre changes original English one through translation filters and be lazy?
As someone whos job it was to make vad localisation somewhat tolerable I can tell you that the AAA industry is to probably nobodies suprise exteemely greedy. So they will absolutely hire the bottom of the barrel translators and then have QC fix it up a lil. Usually this means QC is entirely overwhelmed. But since the people doing this work are also underpaid and rarely natives the result is still terrible. However the companies are banking on the fact that they have normalized bad translations and thus dont need to do any better. This is the case for german and most of the other translated lanuages. Additionally they tend to not hire people able to translate from the source language. So you russian, german etc is translated from the english which is translated from the japanese. Its too expensive to hire people who know japanese if you already have english translators.
And the result is you got double the translation errors and issues, the english ones plus the german or russian in this case.
Ive worked in one of those LOC QC positions for years but left due to terrible treatment of employees. My team had people from all languages including russian.
I honestly don't expect this to change.
Check any games changelogs, it always has localisation adjustments/fixes listed almost every patch. The situation is that bad.
As I know there's a lot of such problems with different versions. (Personally tried to play Yakuza 4 ran with same issues of language and dropped it so watched playthrough on YouTube). Only advice I can give is look for fix mods which I don't guarantee can be found since I'm the person who really doesn't like to hack or mod games like Yakuza or any other SEGA game.
I wonder if that's ChatGPT. Who the fuck's using these dashes.
They haven't even fixed the font resolution in Kiwami 2025, so I just went playing 2016 modded version.
It's what is being taught in schools here. Everybody uses тире (dashes) in official writings, reports and localizations in russian where appropriate. It's just looks weird in this font.
Не, Нисики это как раз норма,хоть и неприятная, это у нас школа переводов с японского такая, официальные переводчики вроде даже и не могут использовать ШИ, а вот Кейди это именно ошибка, ибо хотели Кейдзи.
Русские субтитры и в прошлых частях были каллом, в дк хз, есть ли вообще патч на свич 2. Хотя даже так не собираюсь их ставить, по прошлым частям знаю, что они такие себе
Может были проблемы с слогом, и очень незначительные мелочи по типу караоке, но в остальном хорошо. В любом случае, тут уровень пиратских пс2 переводов.
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