I really have to hand it to the translation of Mother 3. I do know that playing a game with an English translation is, for all intents and purposes, the same as watching a fansub video or reading a scanlation print.
But, I gotta hand it to them. Translating a work is not easy. I remember the preface to Oedipus Rex I read in my high school English class. It said that the works of Sophocles must first be translated from Ancient Greek to Modern Greek, then to Modern English. Translation, the preface said, is like music. Say you have a piece of music that's intended to be played on a keyboard. But now you wanna play that same composition on a saxophone. A saxophone does not sound exactly like a keyboard. However, a skilled artist can make the saxophone rendition sound close to the keyboard rendition. It's like that.
The unofficial translation for Mother 3 is like that. The 'fansubbers' didn't throw in a bunch of swear words just for the hell of it. Oh wait, excuse me, I meant just for the fun of it. They left the original message intact. Granted, some cultural changes were made. Not everyone in the English-speaking parts of the world is intimately familiar with Japanese culture. Some changes had to be made for that, but it turned out effectively. It's like this; if you played Mother 3, not knowing it was of Japanese origin, you would swear the game was originally written in English.
Unfortunately, not all translations for foreign games are so faithful. The now-infamous DeJap translation for the SNES version of Tales of Phantasia is a good example. Now, I love TOP, and I realize that, since I'm not interested in the GBA port, that I don't really have any other way of playing the game, because I don't wanna have to keep referring to a Japanese-to-English dictionary just to understand the text. On the other hand, I don't like what they've done with the dialogue. The "adult" humor is sometimes funny, but also portrayed some of the characters out of character. Klarth (Clause in the "Official release) is a mysoginistic asshole, and Arche is a borderline slut in the DeJap patch. AND SHE'S ONE OF MY FAVORITE GIRLS OF ALL TIME! HOW DARE THEY PORTRAY HER IN SUCH AN UNFLATTERING LIGHT! You see, this is what I mean.
I can only think of two other really professional fansubs; one, the patch for Cave Story. Lucky for us that game is freeware. The other was this, those episodes of Eva I watched? Fansubs. Though I suspect the fansubbers took the remastered episodes from Japan before it was released here in America, and just copied and pasted the text from the older AmericanDVD release from 2000 for the text. It read exactly like an actual, professional subtitling job. I've seen a few other fansubs that were decent, but had spelling and/or graphical errors. And others? Others are just horrible. After all, I was subject to godawful fansubs of Inuyasha and Fruits Basket as a teenager, and I refuse to watch fansubs of Gurren Lagaan for a reason.
So thank your translators, sometime, readers. If they do a good job, give them a pat on the back. They deserve it.
