Forum:Fan Translation Coverage on the Wiki

Forums: Index > Rin's Travel Agency > Archive > Fan Translation Coverage on the Wiki

I'd like to bring up a discussion concerning future fan translation coverage on the wiki. When this wiki was starting in the early 2000s, the current staff decided to cover fan translation patches due to them still being one of the popular methods to play some of the older titles and some of the official localizations for said titles at the time were kind of bad. These fan translations are the 1999 fan translation of FF3, RPGe's FF5, and the NeoDemiforce's FF2 which was inspired by the beta translations for FF2DSOP (which was never released mind you).

Now fast-forward a near 15 years later where Square-Enix translates almost every FF game in existence, I feel that it is perhaps time we stop listing these on our translation pages and mentioning them in articles as if they are official translations. These are the following reasons:

• The latest releases of the Pixel Remasters have the official status of translations of their original titles.
• There have been several other popular translation patches by Chaos Rush and others for the games mention that correctly translate them more than older fan patches. A lot of these are for Final Fantasy III and II, but FFV has two as well iirc.
• To add to a portion of the previous reason, RPGe and NeoDemiforce's patches are not entirely accurate to the original game and take too many liberties in the naming.
• And the most important one, these are not official translations released by Squaresoft or Square-Enix.

We kind of need more room on our translation pages to cover the Pixel Remaster translations eventually, as they do have several changes present within the titles in some fashion, specifically FF2, 3, and 5. So I figured the best way to make space is to remove the fan patches imo. To avoid confusion, the only exception would be the coverage of FF2's DSOP beta stuff for historical purposes.

Is there anyone in agreement or disagreement? I'd like to hear from you all. If it isn't fine and we still want to cover them, cool beans, I'll refrain from touching them lol. --Miphares (talk) 17:21, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

I thought it was already decided a long time ago to axe fan translations! They're probably just hanging around in places that most people don't edit.

(I think Square Enix is spelled without the hyphen; it's just in their url)Keltainentoukokuu (talk) 18:10, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

Was it? Holy smokes, when did we decide on this? I know it was brought up almost a decade ago once on the forums and the staff at the time decided to keep them still due to popularity of the fan patches.

Also as to "Square-Enix", it's a force of habit of me to spell it with the hyphen because of url and file naming at times, it's a hard habit to drop despite knowing it's Square Enix, not Square-Enix. Sorry for that constant mistake! ;w; --Miphares (talk) 18:25, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

Huh, maybe I don't know what I am talking about. I know they were taken off the enemy pages! They used to say, enemy such and such, called such and such in the RPGe fan translation... Maybe the translation pages were made exempt, though why should that be. In any case, fan translations should be on a separate page if they are kept, in my opinion. Someone knowledgeable could write [[Fan translation]], too.

I just notice the S-E because I didn't know which way I correct, having seen both ways, and had to look it up, lol. (Also, apparently I have been pronouncing "Enix" wrong...)Keltainentoukokuu (talk) 19:11, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

personally, I wouldn't sweat a little thing like a hyphen in the company name lots of folks still do it. As to the matter at hand, I'm going to say drop the fan translation unless it's significantly different or unique against the official. Looking back, it seems a lot of these were pet projects that only lasted a few months and never quite got to fruition as evidenced by the amount of bugs that are still present. Swordzmanp236 (talk) 20:34, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

As I recall, way back, there was a decision to keep the RPGe translations for FF5 because for the longest time that was the only way to play the game and it was still considered significant, both due to tenure and for the fact it was done by a notable pro translator. On the other hand, these days it's probably easier to find FF5 literally any other way. Otherwise, I don't think any real exceptions were ever agreed upon. The same rough thing could be said for FF3, but I don't think a full NES translation was actually completed until after the DS version came out. As of right now I'm only aware of maybe 2 full translations for it and one of them piggybacked off a popular, but incomplete previous effort. I don't know if either of them meets notability, though at least one of them is roughly as old as the DS version since I found it at about the same time my brother bought it for DS, but by then it was also on Ouya. With the Pixel Remaster version out, it's likely we should accommodate for that as the definitive edition for FF3 2D, unless someone knows more about how widespread the patched NES version was than I do, not being an expert myself. Bluestarultor (talk) 18:01, 27 November 2021 (UTC)

I like the idea of having a page on fan translations, just discussing their importance to the history of the series in the West, with eg IGN's FF5 fan translation story as a source. Legends of Localization might have some discussion too but I haven't looked. Anyways, with the possible exception of stuff that did not reappear in GBA or Pixel Remaster editions (eg bugs) I think it's reasonable to phase out our use of fan translations on translation pages now that we have the Pixel Remasters in play. Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 19:43, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

EDIT: Since people asked when we discussed this matter previously, let me note that we elected to keep in 2011 and 2012 and also elected to have a fan translations page, then in 2015 we elected to keep fan translations if there did not exist "official translation of the product provided by Square Enix in the same medium" (which I guess one could interpret to mean FF3 3D does not displace FF3 2D). So it sounds like we're just rehashing what we decided in 2015. To prevent us from having the same discussion again in 2026, I propose the following change to Project:Translations Pages#Fan-translations:

If a fan-translation exists of a release when there is no English release in the same mediamedium then that is used as per the Fandom policy. A column exists for it like any other. The name of the column is named after the translation project or the translator group, and not after the name of the console. At the time of writing, the Pixel Remasters have made this policy superfluous for all main-series games.

If I have time tonight (I hope I do) I'll write some Fan translations. Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 20:11, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

Fanslations are just that, fanslations. They have no bearing on the series' canon or official releases. As such, I don't think we should even acknowledge them in our coverage at all. A "fan translations" page is fine in the fandom (small "f") section of the wiki, but there should be no mention of them anywhere else, and I'd advocate removing them from translations pages.-- Technobliterator ^T_C 20:55, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

The new policy sounds good, though I do wonder, given the diferences between the original Famicom Final Fantasy III and the Pixel Remaster, about the things that would fall through the gaps if we just covered the latter one. For example Scan is two abilities that the Scholars had in the Famicom version. We could document them as (しらべる, Shiraberu?, lit. Examine) and (みやぶる, Miyaburu?, lit. See Through), to avoid using the fan translation, but I feel that'd end up being clumsy. — Zero-ELEC (talk) 21:08, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

A page dedicated to the fan translations would be fine in my honest opinion, as the FFIII, FFV, and Type-0 have been noticed by the gaming press back in the day, and history of RPGe's version has somewhat of a legendary status in Final Fantasy and emulation history. Legends of Localization's also is good for some background info on some of them iirc, but I may just be remembering my time on Clyde's streams talking about them.

However, like I have stated before, I think the translation names or terms should not be mentioned in articles and translation pages. This includes Doomtrain's patch work for Type-0 also, as SE did cease and desist the head in 2014 iirc, and it now has to be obtained through private filesharing even to be obtained in some fashion.

As to the handling the english terms for the Famicom version, best would be the ACCURATE translation of the ability or use the most notable recurring name in the series at the time - e.g: Analyze (調べるしらべる, Shiraberu?) and Uncover (見破るみやぶる, Miyaburu?); Analyze (調べるしらべる, Shiraberu?) and Assess (見破るみやぶる, Miyaburu?, lit. Uncover). The former is better imo, since those are straight translations of the original Japanese, which can also be found in Japanese textbooks and dictionaries. As long as a person is not using or heavily relying on google translate and coming up with personal motives to provide unique flavor translations, there should not be problems with the former. There are also several other online dictionary sites that can help in this process too. --Miphares (talk) 05:11, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes to all of this, especially to ditching fanslation names in the translations pages.-- Technobliterator ^T_C 06:17, 29 November 2021 (UTC)