Note: I meant to have this post completely ready by today, but I've had a few job and other real-life matters to which to attend over the close of December, and I have a few celebrations to enjoy at the end of the year. I'd rather take the time to commemorate the stuff that meant a lot to me this year properly instead of rushing it to meet a 2024 deadline. This post, then, will have to be a work in progress for several days. When it's complete, I'll post a notification here.
At the start of the year, bonbonbunny above pointed out that enjoying games nowadays encompasses more than playing them firsthand - it also includes enjoying when people you like are playing them, or enjoying content produced about them. This really struck home with me, reading it as I watched Jeff Gerstmann play a bit of NES Dragon Warrior, and though I did manage to play a good amount of games this year, I indeed found that much of my enjoyment of games came from sources outside of playing them directly.
Translating (Professionally):
My professional translation career experienced a number of landmarks in 2024. First, there was the release of Sand Land, the open-world, vehicle-heavy RPG based on the Akira Toriyama manga. It was an incredible honor to work with Toriyama's characters—I love you, Rao—and I was super happy to be part of this project. It was a joy to watch it from pre-release work to the announcement to it coming to market - the first time I've ever been part of a single-player title release this big.
Second, I've been working for much of the year on another title based on a manga from one of the field's most venerable and globally-popular artists. This title hasn't been announced, so I can't say more - other than the game genre is a change of pace for me, but offering plenty of character in which to sink my figurative teeth. It's an honor to work on this property, and it's been a pleasure to spend time with the game's cast, which has, after these many months, come to feel like a second home.
Third, I was fortunate enough to be appointed (it's a supervisory role! I'm using "appointed"!) to an editing position on an RPG in one of the genre's foremost franchises. One of those franchises on which you dream about working when you first join the craft. One of the franchises. The title's still under wraps—shh!—but I'll be sure to let everyone know in an extremely tiresome manner of my involvement once the cat's out of the bag.
These jobs, though, delivered joy not only via the prestige and the work itself, in the ability to be part of bringing these stories to audiences, but in the substance of the stories. There are a couple moments I encountered in translating text that were some of the most potent of the year for me - even though I experienced them solely in text and stage directions - that I was hoping to discuss here but can't, because the relevant games haven't been released or, in one case, even announced yet. I'll come back to this post in however many months it takes for that to happen to share my thoughts properly.
One moment, though, I can discuss: the closing questline of Sand Land, which involves the chance discovery of a long-lost song by the late wife of one of the main characters, with the party then becoming the vehicle of a grassroots idea from a few fans to share the song with the world's newly-reunited populace. I got to translate that questline, and I felt it was a beautiful coda to the game. The group finds some part of civilization, of happier times, surviving in a pocket of the world where it's been loved in a smaller scope and has been bringing joy to others, that is rediscovered to bring a message of joy and hope to a larger, reborn world, bringing unity to a society that's long lacked it - and a small reminder of love to a man who's learned to go without such things but deserves one nonetheless. This wasn't labeled as the final questline when it was handed to me, but its role in wrapping the game up in a beautiful bow was shiningly obvious regardless. A glorious way to commemorate the survival and reflourishing of this world.
(I will be the stereotypical persnickety translator here for a moment, though. When the party finally hears a proper recording of the song and has an emotional response, one of the group asks after their comrade Rao, the late singer's husband, wondering if he isn't upset to perhaps have a wound reopened. (His wife died as part of a tragic mistake he made decades ago while working in the service of a corrupt military endeavor.) His laconic response was, in my translation, "My tears all dried long ago." I see from watching a video of the quest that this was edited to "My tears all dried up long ago," which is literally a two-letter addition, I know, but to me connotes a different emotional reaction, one less involved and more dismissive. I feel the original communicates that Rao's had his tears, but that he's come to a point of...not acceptance, quite, as the situation is not one that can be accepted, but of acknowledgement and coexistence with the past and the way things are, good and bad, that seems at the core of Rao's character. The edit (my tears have dried up, it's impossible for me to have an emotional response to this anymore) seems to dismiss the possibility of tears at all, to dismiss what's happened, to be about stuffing emotions down and denying them in a stunted way. Editing has to happen, but I feel this was a loss nonetheless.)
Translating (Hobby):
There have been ups and downs with The Project That Has Consumed Me, but I'm grateful that I have the help of folks who know what needs to be done on the technical side and am finally within what might be generously called the homestretch - even if, in the process, I discovered that, due to version differences and formatting considerations, I basically had to translate the entire goldang game again. Again, thank you for your patience.
