When it comes to the original PlayStation version of Final Fantasy VII, we've often heard it said that the German version of the game was among the worst translations of the epic RPG.
Of course, being non-German speakers ourselves, we can't exactly judge whether that's exactly true or not, but what we do know is that German fans have since gone through the lengthy process of retranslating the entire PS1 game in the intervening decades, finding a ton of mistranslations, spelling mistakes, and awkward terminology in the process.
This includes the phrase "sewer pipe" in the original Japanese version of the game being translated to "Erdflöte” (or "Earth Flute") in the German version, the German for attack "Angriff" being misspelled as "Angreiff" in menus, and Barrett's informal "Don't trust ya" from the opening section of the English version being translated rather literally to "Trau Dir Nicht" (or "Don't trust yourself"), among other examples. This seems to indicate there was probably, at the very least, some room for improvement.
If you've been reading Time Extension for a while now, you may recall that earlier this year we spoke to the former Sony producer Martin Alltimes, who led the localization efforts for the European versions of the PS1game. In that interview, he gave us a little more context about why the German version (and the other European versions led by Sony) ended up turning out the way they did, citing his inexperience in leading localization projects at the time and the lack of time and testing before the product had to ship to store shelves. He also told us that "the s**t" apparently hit the fan at some point causing Alltimes and a group of translators to have to travel last-minute to Square's offices in Japan.
We wanted to see whether we could dig up a little more information about this trip. So, a couple of months ago, we reached out to one of the game's German translators Karin Pfetzer with a message asking for more information, and fortunately, for us, she replied.
According to Pfetzer, translating Final Fantasy VII "was a race against the clock" and basically saw her and six other translators (for the various European versions) looking over strings of English text in Microsoft Word or Excel.
As she told us, the translators typically had no idea what these phrases related to in the game, but were simply asked to convert the chopped-up sentences into the chosen language and then send them over to Japan for them to be implemented. This explains why the translation takes a rather aggressive approach to modifying all the existing text, going so far as to even translate in-game terminology like "SOLDIER" to the German "SOLDAT", "Materia" to "Substanz", and so on.
Pfetzer says, "Japanese, English, and German sentence structures differ and so do word lengths. On-screen text often comes with character count limitations. For this game, we had an approximate guide on word lengths (different for different on-screen elements). German tends to have rather longer words than either English or Japanese. As translators we are/were quickly aware of the lack of context, chopped-up-ness of phrases, as well as the length limitations and we used appropriate strategies to work with these limitations as best as we could.
"Given the speed that we were working at, though, we couldn’t check every single string in the English game," she tells us. "So, for sure these facts would have led to some awkward phrasings in the translations. We, including the developers, were aware of this at the time, but we were content that we did the best we could in the time available."
Given the speed that we were working at... we couldn’t check every single string in the English game. So, for sure these facts would have led to some awkward phrasings in the translations.
As for the trip to Japan that Alltimes mentioned, Pfetzer was among those who accompanied the producer, along with a representative for the French and Spanish translations, and does have some memory of it. She recalls it had to do with some last-minute tweaking of the game, such as "finding and translating any strings that had not been previously extracted for translation" or "shortening those that were too long and ran across graphics or were cut off". She doesn't remember there being much drama, calling the trip itself a "wonderful opportunity", but she does state that it took a considerable amount of work to drag the European translations across the finish line.
She tells us, "I remember working crazy hours, travelling from the hotel to the office on the train in the morning, sitting with the testers (who whizzed through the game with us until deep into the night), then the engineers implementing the fixes, for us to test the next day. For me, including the challenges that the time pressure, the amount of text, and the way it was made available for translation posed it was an absolutely amazing experience working with the other translators on the team, the engineers, and the testers."
In the time since the original PS1 translation, there have been a couple of other versions of the game in German, including the 1998 EIDOS PC release, and a newly tweaked version of the script for Steam and modern platforms. Nevertheless, we still occasionally see people express a fondness or a distaste for the original online, with the original being a small yet fascinating part of the game's larger mark on pop culture.