This SJW shit is so widespread and insidious, this is disturbing.
Cultural imperialists would be a better term imo. These people have no respect for any language and culture they're partaking in, in spite of their public virtual-signaling on Internet. No respect for the authors and consumers either, they make their disdain and dishonesty quite known. Those people are miserable but they want everyone else to be dragged down and wallow in misery as well
English translators, and in particular editors, really suck at their jobs to faithfully translate japanese games. Something that keeps happening in recent TL'ed games in english:
-every fucking game subsidiary branch in America is doing this "don't name sex/gender/normal human being" shit
-anything that define women (in a good or bad way regardless, like complementing them for their looks or making them the butt of a joke) is outright altered
-also somehow downplay the gay connotations originally present in the japanese script (it kinda surprises me considering the 'current year' climate in the West)
-can't help but shove memes and slang at every opportunity. They're unable to maintain casual, polite, formal (and honorific) speech forms, which show how barely literate localizers are.
"She's more interesting than I first thought, that gyaru kid."
"That's really not funny."
Considering a lot of japanese games have been (and are still) translated only in english, this is kind of infuriating.
At this point just learn the language and be content with all media from before the gamergate schism because this is absolute insanity
It's obviously the best alternate option available to skip all the bullshit but learning a foreign language does take time, dedication/self-discipline and some form of skill that is not up to everyone. I can also understand that it's not in someone's priority list to learn a foreign language if it's just to consume only a few pieces of media.
The largest obstacle first encountered often in learning japanese is to find proper reference materials, and I personally couldn't run into anything good in my native tongue. They often shy away from teaching the hiragana/katakana characters from the get-go and mainly rely on romanji (latin characters) to spell out words & sentences.
Another common mistake that could lead to bad habits for a beginner, is trying to teach japanese the same way they would in english or latin languages, such as imposing the specific order of a basic sentence structure ([Subject]>[Verb]>[Object]) while japanese is entirely versatile thanks to particles (which recognize the grammatical function of a word no matter where it is placed in the sentence). Or complete sentences can also be used to modify nouns like descriptive "adjectives" to create more detailed and complicated sentences in japanese.
Personally, my learning references ended up to be Genki, Tae Kim, imabi, jisho and Kanjidamage. Anki (a learning build deck) is often recommended to others although i've personally never used it, I simply wrote down character with their definitions on paper.
The main problem in the conversation about censorship is that it adds cases of legit censorship (like not showing a 14 year old's nether regions) or just bad translation (changing dialogue for outdated memes)/overly creative translation (the Cold Steel admittedly funny sword comment). Even cases of correct translations are added because they weren't literal enough despite the literal being clunkier ("I like you as a girl/more than a friend").
Now if it was just trimming the text a bit so it could fit inside a text box, that would have been understandable at least. Although I sincerely doubt technical limitations are remotely the same as they were in much earlier vidya generations. But fact is that there are way too many instances of english localizers removing things in modern japanese games for simply being "offensive" / "not politically-correct" in [current year]. Like it's painfully obvious they have a problem with anything that could point out femininity and women's roles in general.
And the whole "literal translation is bad and clunky" is a meme (successfully) perpetuated by those mediocre translators of low skill. They do not understand the words they see and use. In German, if I say "ich habe nach kaufhaus morgen gehen", it literally, keeping the word order, says 'i have to the store tomorrow to go', but you will translate it as 'I have to go to the store tomorrow". That's still a literal translation. Assuming that literal translation automatically means something to "GRUG GO STORE NOW" level of writing is stupid.
This makes the subject a particularly shitty hill to die on since I just don't want politically motivated changes and less meme translations but I need to share the stage with lolicons.
lmao
