India is home to more than a billion people who speak hundreds of different languages and dialects. Almost 75% of the population can read, write, and speak in their native language, and a significant percentage prefer voice-based interactions. These communication barriers present challenges for many in accessing online services, including those services and schemes offered by the Indian government for the masses. Cognizant of this, the Indian government announced the National Language Translation Mission was announced, in the Union Budget 2021-22 and aims to develop next-generation, voice-based government apps, and websites that will be operable in all Indian languages. This move has strongly underlined the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to solve many challenging problems and creates great scope for cognitive AI, speech recognition, and language translation services in a multilingual market like India.
Demand for language services in India
Language services have been around for a while, and we experience some of them in everyday life. Translator apps use end-to-end Deep Neural Network (DNN) models to provide a translation in over 90 languages and dialects. Then there’s Cortana, Alexa, and Siri – all of which are based on speech recognition technology enabling speech-based services deployment across many industries.
Yellow Messenger recently transformed its voice automation solution using AI Speech Services and Natural Language Processing tools, to help enterprises across various sectors enhance the consumer experience. In India, some of the leading telecom operators and e-commerce players have introduced the “voice search” option on their apps, which users can avail in English or Hindi. Meanwhile, some banks have deployed AI-powered multilingual voice bots, which can support Indian language dialects. India’s local language needs are fueling the demand for, and innovation in, language services and enabling them to play a big role in unlocking India’s future growth.
Growth drivers and impact of AI-based voice and translation services
Millions of internet subscribers in India access the internet through their mobile phones. The easy availability and growing affordability of smartphones, especially in the entry-to-medium price range, along with attractive data plans offered by telecom operators, such as Reliance Jio, are helping drive the adoption of mobile internet further across the length and the breadth of the country. The country is rapidly getting digitalized and the adoption of smart devices like set-top boxes, media streamers, smart speakers by consumers has been rising steadily in recent years. On the business front, an increasing number of organizations are turning to Cloud-based solutions to improve productivity, efficiency, security, and ultimately, business outcome.
India continues to build its capabilities and enhance its reputation as a global hub for IT services and R&D efforts. Buoyed by strong government support, technology innovation, and digital adoption, India is advancing at a rapid pace. National missions like Digital India and Make in India have sharpened the focus of businesses on developing technologies that address not only India’s challenges but serve the global market as well. Voice and translation services will be an important feature for most of these technologies.
AI-based voice recognition and language translation solutions can have a far-reaching positive impact in areas such as governance, healthcare, education, agriculture, retail, e-commerce, and financial services. Text-to-speech services enable one to convert text into human-like synthesized speech that can be customized to suit the service or a brand. Today, there are tools available that enable users to input text in Indian languages for internet searches or translations, and even have email addresses in multiple languages. DNNs are being used to develop language models for translating complex Indian languages and addressing language nuances such as gender, politeness, and word type.
Organizations are increasingly leveraging AI speech and translation models to automate their contact center queries, build intelligent voice assistants, and enable voice interfaces for smart devices and apps. Others are employing neural text-to-speech services for natural-sounding speech to enable users to interact with voice assistants. Language services can help businesses understand what their customers think about their products and services and yield insights that can guide them in taking steps to enhance trust and engagement. Such services could include elements such as sentiment analysis, opinion mining, and key phrase extraction. AI solutions are thus shaping the customer experience and engagement with companies and brands.
Today, there are apps, websites, and portals that leverage translation, transcription, and transliteration services in some of India’s widely spoken languages including Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. With their help, users can interpret real-time conversations, menus, street signs, websites, and documents. What we need is to make such translation, transcription and, transliteration features available on all important apps, websites, and, portals – especially those that are meant for the masses.
Humans derive a sense of comfort and trust from the familiarity of their native language. And in a multilingual, developing country like ours, there are many for whom their spoken language is the only medium of expression and interaction with the world. It is thus clear that AI-based voice recognition and language translation technologies will empower digital inclusion in India as more and more people get online. Overcoming language barriers will bring people and organizations into the technology fold and help them achieve more – realizing the vision of a truly digital India.
It was in the eighteenth century that the British felt the want of a good dictionary to know their language in more detail. Dictionaries were there with lexicographers making tremendous efforts at corralling the entire language. One of the greatest literary figures of all time, Samuel Johnson created “A Dictionary of the English Language” which has remained ever since, a portrait of the language of the day in all its majesty, beauty, and marvellous confusion. With such illustrious predecessors, the monumental OED took birth in 1857, which took 70 years to complete. Simon Winchester, a geologist and globetrotting correspondent and writer tells us in his fascinating novel the genesis and journey of the great dictionary that symbolises everything English. “The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary” is the story of the strange collaboration of two men to produce the definitive of all guides to the language that for good or ill has become the lingua franca of the civilized modern world.
The two protagonists of the tale are, apart from the dictionary itself, the great philologist editor of OED, Dr James Murray and an American army surgeon, William Chester Minor, a murderer incarcerated at an asylum for the criminally insane, who made the dictionary possible with their magnificent obsession for words. Murray is a towering figure in British scholarship who had an impassioned thirst for knowledge and believed in ‘vita diligentissima’ – nothing is better than a most diligent life. Murray after an interview with a formidable committee was appointed editor of OED. While Murray was of humble origin, Minor graduated from Yale Medical School and applied to the army during the civil war. Born in the serendipitous island of Ceylon, to missionary parents, experiencing the beauty of the island, he had access to a good life.
The exposure to the war and its horrors resulted in a mental condition that made him unfit for the army. He left for London in a disturbed condition with his books, easel, water colours, his paranoia and delusions. In London he took up quarters in Lambeth, a disreputable suburb and ended up killing, pursued by a psychotic fantasy, a man he had never known or met, George Merret. Dr Minor on trial was found not guilty on grounds of insanity but would be detained in permanent custody as a criminal lunatic.
To go back to the dictionary, the prodigious efforts of dictionary makers in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were merely stepping stones to the stellar efforts made for OED. The new project wanted every word of the English language with its evolution, meanings, shades, and nuances spelling and pronunciation, every illustrative citation from every English author. Since this titanic task was not possible without ‘crowd sourcing’, an appeal from Murray went out to volunteers to find words, supply quotations and definitions. This appeal was enclosed with books and journals, to shops and libraries. Meanwhile, stricken with remorse, Minor reached out to Eliza Merret, the widow of George Merret, with financial offers. She accepted the gesture, came to see him, collecting books on his behalf from London. It is in one of these books he found Murray’s appeal. After a decade of imprisonment Minor’s self-worth began to re-emerge. He responded and Minor’s contributions were remarkable with 12,000 quotes furnished with astonishing accuracy and detail. Unaware of Minor’s condition, Murray undertakes a journey to meet him. Amazed at finding the truth about Minor a firm friendship began with mutual respect and love of words lasting twenty years.
However with time, Minor’s health deteriorated, he was allowed to leave for an asylum in Washington and subsequently shifted to a hospital for the elderly insane in Hartford Conn and died at the age of 85 in 1920 in obscurity. It is sad and ironical that his very insanity and incarceration has granted us the dictionary. Murray with OED still incomplete died at 76 in 1915. Both men earned their redemption through the dictionary. But most unsung of all the players in the drama is George Merret to whom Winchester magnanimously dedicated his novel.
The OED was completed on New Year’s Eve 1927 and was announced on the front page of the New York Times. The work was done and the alphabet exhausted. The newspaper called it “one of the great romances of English Literature.”
Welcome back to #TripwireBookClub. If you recall, the last book we reviewed was The Ghidra Book: The Definitive Guide, a book that I thoroughly enjoyed because I’m a huge fan of everything Chris Eagle writes. This time, we’re looking at Crypto Dictionary: 500 Tasty Tidbits for the Curious Cryptographer. I am by no means a cryptography expert, so I’ll share the thoughts of the rest of my team shortly. I will briefly give my opinion first.I love reference books. I have a shelf that contains TCP/IP Illustrated (the box set) next to the Intel IA-32 Architecture Software Developer’s Manuals (all 6 volumes). On my desk, I have RTFM, BTFM and PTFM. So, in some ways, it feels like Aumasson wrote Crypto Dictionary for me. I love that I now have a crypto reference guide that I can pick up and check. One issue with looking these terms up online is that you have no idea if they are accurate or who the source is – after all, anyone can edit Wikipedia. Knowing who Aumasson is and the rigor of every No Starch Press book, I can trust the information I find in this book. I had only one complaint and only because a colleague pointed it out to me. Cryptography says “See Cryptology” and Cryptology says “See Cryptography.” I did not see the humor in this and would have liked to have seen a valid definition, especially for those new to the field that may pick up the book. I will say, however, that my favorite definition was Cryptid. I won’t share the definition here, but I feel like the book is worth the purchase just to read that one.Here’s what others had to say about the book:Crypto Dictionary 500 Cryptographic Tidbits for the Curious by Jean-Philippe Aumasson offers a quick explanation of crypto terminology. Aumasson’s book is written with a dictionary layout. This book has crypto terminology sorted in alphabetical order. This book can feel like you are reading a dictionary. However, the author provided a few ways to reduce this feeling. The author offers a few tongue-in-cheek definitions. This provides much-needed humor while going through the material. Furthermore, the additional details for some of the crypto definitions allowed the book to not feel exactly like you are reading a dictionary. Overall, I would say that this book offers a quick rundown of the crypto terminology that it contains, but additional resources will be needed if you want to learn more about a particular subject.Rating: 3.7/5– Andrew SwobodaSenior Security ResearcherTripwireHaving previously read and reviewed Aumasson’s last book, Serious Cryptography, I was excited to have the opportunity to do the same with Crypto Dictionary. As the name implies, this is a much different type of book, focusing on breadth rather than depth of technical content. It is in fact styled as a dictionary although with a distinct lack of formality. The preface bills this as a book where the reader can open any page at random and more than likely find something new, interesting or at least entertaining. It achieves this with a wide assortment of entries including topics of not just technical but also cultural significance (see Cryptonomicon). Technical content is also broken up a bit by entertaining entries like for Twitter or the word ‘suck’ as defined by Matthew Green.While this is arguably less serious than, Serious Cryptography, it should not be discounted as an entertainment-only book. Mixed in with anecdotes of ridiculed cryptography (see MAGENTA) and tongue-in-cheek definitions (see mining), there are many useful technical terms with plainly worded and useful definitions. The definitions shed light on these topics and provide vocabulary and context for the reader to pursue further mastery of a topic. A lot of the terms are things I had not heard of before or things I may have heard before but without context. Reading entries for topics with which I’m already familiar would also occasionally enrich my knowledge of the technology even in cases where I have had more than a little experience.In terms of usefulness, I think Crypto Dictionary has definitely earned its place on my bookshelf next to Serious Cryptography. I can confidently say that I will be coming back to Crypto Dictionary over time as a starting point for researching “new-to-me” concepts in cryptography. I would highly recommend this book to anyone with a general interest in cryptography or needing a basic guide to ‘translate’ crypto jargon to English.Rating: 5/5– Craig YoungPrincipal Security ResearcherTripwireCrypto Dictionary was a unique read. It wasn’t a standard book about cryptography that had a “read this at point A to get to point B” approach. If I had to sum this book up, I would say it was a giant appendix of random but usable information on cryptography. As I read through it, I found myself seeing acronyms that I use or read about every day, but with some interesting backstory or funny quips attached to them. I will give the author credit, I wasn’t bored reading a dictionary all about cryptography. He made the read through interesting in the aspect of giving good metaphors to relate to certain ciphers and attacks. He also brought me back to my college days when I was taking several cryptography classes by reintroducing me to Alice, Bob and Eve.I felt like the author put a lot of thought into his definitions, descriptions and examples that not only simplified and made the concept easier to follow but also had great placement of humor to keep me interested while reading. I actually learned a lot about past encryption methods and their predecessors, which I found very interesting in how they shaped what we know and use today in modern cryptography. Overall, I found Crypto Dictionary an enlightening book that has a good balance of education mixed in with some humor. I encourage anyone who is curious about cryptography to give Crypto Dictionary a read, not only because it gives you a massive amount of information in 138 pages but also because you might find yourself laughing more than you think throughout the read. Rating: 4/5– Matthew JerzewskiSecurity ResearcherTripwireThe Crypto Dictionary is only a dictionary in the sense that it is an alphabetical list of crypto terms. What comes after each crypto term varies greatly. If you pick a term at random, you could get a highly technical and mathematical explanation of an encryption technique, or you could get the author’s commentary on the usefulness of the term without any real explanation of it. You could also get just a reference to another term elsewhere in the book that’s related but not quite the same thing. Reading this book from beginning to end was a bit of a wild ride due to the various different approaches to ‘defining’ a term. However, much like an actual dictionary, I don’t think this book was intended to be consumed that way. It isn’t intended to be reference manual for looking up a term and getting an informative explanation. You might, but you also might not. What the Crypto Dictionary is good for is exposure to a wide variety of Crypto terms that can be used as a starting point for piquing your curiosity for further research. There are plenty of historical, niche and interesting Crypto things to learn about in addition to basic terminology. Open to a page at random, and find something new to learn about.Rating: 4/5– Darlene HibbsSenior Security ResearcherTripwireAs with The Ghidra Book, I’m with Craig in giving the Crypto Dictionary a 5/5.Overall Rating: 4.34/5Much like the last review, we don’t have any other reviews planned at this time, so if you have any suggestions, let us know on social media with #TripwireBookClub.
New Delhi: In a bid to help build better translation systems, Facebook has open-sourced FLORES-101, a first-of-its-kind, many-to-many evaluation data set covering 101 languages from all over the world.
For the first time, researchers will be able to reliably measure the quality of translations through 10,100 different translation directions — for example, directly from Hindi to Thai or Swahili.
For context, evaluating in and out of English would provide merely 200 translation directions.
The ‘FLORES-101′ tool enables researchers to rapidly test and improve upon earlier multi-lingual translation models like ‘M2M-100′.
“We’re making FLORES-101 publicly available because we believe in breaking down language barriers, and that means helping empower researchers to create more diverse (and locally relevant) translation tools — ones that may make it as easy to translate from, say, Bengali to Marathi as it is to translate from English to Spanish,” Facebook said in a statement.
‘FLORES-101′ focuses on what are known as low-resource languages, such as Amharic, Mongolian, and Urdu, which do not currently have extensive data sets for natural language processing research.
The data set contains the same set of sentences across all languages, enabling researchers to evaluate the performance of any and all translation directions.
“I think (FLORES) is a really exciting resource to help improve the representation of many languages within the machine translation community,” said Graham Neubig, Professor at the Carnegie Mellon University Language Technology Institute in the School of Computer Science.
“It is certainly one of the most extensive resources that I know of that covers so many languages from all over the world, in a domain of such relevance to information access as Wikipedia text.”
For billions of people, especially non-English speakers, language remains a fundamental barrier to accessing information and communicating freely with other people.
“The AI research community needed an open and easily accessible way to perform high-quality, reliable measurement of many-to-many translation model performance and then compare results with others,” Facebook said.
Localizing a game to a specific region is never an easy task, and that goes double for a game like the upcoming The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, which takes place in the historic 19th century of Japan. Bringing a game to the West that’s so drenched in Japanese history and so reliant on dialogue is no easy feat. Keeping the references understandable for a Westerner would take double the research and even more translation work. This prequel spin-off of the Ace Attorney series — originally released in 2015 — was once upon a time a Japanese-exclusive title, thanks to undisclosed localization issues. Thanks to the talent at Capcom, such as the localization director Janet Hsu, it is finally being brought over to the West.
Janet Hsu has been on the localization team of the Ace Attorney series since Justice For All, and since then has gone on to passionately work on each sequential game. She’s also delivered her voice to the prosecutor Franziska von Karma in the English and French versions of the games. She talked to Polygon about her experience with translating the Japanese gaming experience over to Western audiences.
Capcom employee Janet Hsu (pictured)Photo: Capcom
Polygon: What are the hurdles in localizing a game series that’s as full of Japanese culture asAce Attorney?
Janet Hsu: The biggest hurdle for me is making sure that the puzzles and mysteries are solvable for a Western audience. That’s always my first and biggest concern at the start of each project. Unlike less interactive forms of entertainment like books and movies, you can’t finish a game that you can’t solve. A number of the puzzles in Ace Attorney rely on Japanese wordplay or some nugget of common cultural knowledge that would completely stump those not familiar with those traditions or conventions. So deciding how to localize something and then making sure the decision doesn’t impact anything major in the story or the series’ established lore, along with carrying that localization through to the end consistently, is probably the biggest hurdle.
The charm and humor of the series as conveyed in each character’s personality and lines is another key element, since what different cultures find funny is highly subjective. However, there are ways to craft jokes that don’t involve any specific cultural knowledge or even pop culture references. In The Great Ace Attorney, we primarily relied on the myriad of situations Ryunosuke finds himself in and styled the game’s humor around characteristically British dry witticisms, along with the usual absurdist and double-act comedy humor that are the hallmarks of Ace Attorney, in order to not make anything feel too anachronistic for the setting.
While the otherAce Attorneygames take place in more modern times and may have easier work-arounds when it comes to translating for another culture,The Great Ace Attorneytakes place partially in 19th century Japan. Has this added any new difficulties?
Back when I was working on the Japanese version of the second title, The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve, I had dreamed of localizing the duology into Victorian British English, as I wanted the game to feel like something of that era. To that end, I’d collected a number of dictionaries from the late 19th century, namely the OED from 1888 and a different Oxford dictionary from 1912. So perhaps this was more of a hurdle I created for myself. However, the Japanese is written in a sort of “faux-Meiji Era” style, so I felt it was my duty to at least bring an equally “faux-Victorian” flavor to the English localization.
“What different cultures find funny is highly subjective”
But it was tough to stick completely to period words, as even words like “(to) backstab” had not come into common enough use to be included in dictionaries, while words like “(to) snitch” actually existed in British English back then in the way we use it today. American English words and slang were also out, and it was eye-opening to see how many phrases we use today are American in origin or only came into use in the last 100 years. It was also hard to decide which words had changed in meaning too much to convey what we wanted to say correctly. After all, the English we used couldn’t be so incomprehensible or obscure that it required the player to look up the word in a Victorian dictionary!
Image: Capcom
Oddly enough, conveying British culture to an American audience was another part of the whole localization puzzle. Aside from the usual confusion around “first floor” meaning something totally different in British English versus American English, the original Japanese dialogue contains a lot of references and knowledge pertaining to the late Victorian era (as many Japanese players would’ve been unfamiliar with such details themselves), and it was interesting that even the British translators and I had to do the occasional bit of research to get our facts straight. In some ways, this title is a celebration of both British and Japanese social and literary culture at the turn of the 20th century, as represented by the inclusion of real-life author Soseki Natsume, among others.
Speaking of Soseki, one of the issues the translators and I worried about was making sure that he came across as lovable as his Japanese counterpart, since Western players do not have a pre-existing cultural attachment to the man. Even though the Soseki of The Great Ace Attorney is more colorful than his real-life counterpart, Japanese players would at least know who he is because he is required reading at school, and some older people even grew up seeing him every day on their 1,000 yen bills. So there’s a level of “built-in” fondness from the get-go that we didn’t have to work off of when we were building a unique speaking style for him in English.
“This title is a celebration of both British and Japanese social and literary culture”
What would you say was the largest obstacle in localizing the new game?
“Authentic, yet accessible” was my mantra during this project, and keeping to that was very hard at times. However, it was also a large part of how I kept the text going down the right track. Translating things too authentically sometimes can lead to the text becoming inaccessible in some cases. This applies not just to Japanese cultural elements, but also things like using more obscure Victorian Era-words or even hardcore Britishisms that, while authentic, would’ve been completely confusing to people unfamiliar with those words and phrases. So while we stuck to natural British English dialogue writing, we never did it in a way that would cause a player to get stuck or make a puzzle unsolvable due to a cultural or grammatical misunderstanding.
Image: Capcom
Authenticity also drove how I decided we would bring across the main characters’ thoughts and feelings. The story and perspective of The Great Ace Attorney is heavily tied to the protagonist’s identity as a Japanese national, so I felt it was important to convey his and Susato’s immigrant experience where it appeared in the game. Drawing on my own experiences of being an immigrant, first to America and then to Japan, I thought it vital to keep their reactions to each new discovery they made in Japanese. Anyone who’s travelled to another country can likely attest that it’s natural for people to compare new concepts, objects, and experiences with something more familiar. But how do you do that without making the player look up what each word means, or having Susato explain to Ryunosuke something he should already know as a Japanese man? For example, Ryunosuke refers to some passenger flying balloons as “temari” in the Japanese version, as that’s what their colorful designs and round shape reminded him of. In this case, we decided to keep “temari” but provided a definition by following the word up with “handball,” which is a common practice in translated texts. In other situations, we worked to make sure the Japanese object or concept could be understood through the surrounding character banter or just the context alone.
“The story and perspective is heavily tied to the protagonist’s identity as a Japanese national”
Another huge obstacle has been the amount of programming/scripting involved with this particular title. The Great Ace Attorney really aimed to bring each character to life through animations and dynamic camera work. This led to animation changes in the middle of nearly every line of dialogue in some places. The game’s visuals are also a departure from the mainline Ace Attorney games in that there are connecting animations between each animation. Because we couldn’t change or rearrange the characters’ animations, we would first translate the game as naturally as possible and then adjust the translation as necessary, so that each animation could play out as they were meant to without causing any unintended bugs because a line was too short, for example. In addition, the Japanese version was very carefully crafted to create a sense of speech through a custom scripting language that can dictate a whole range of elements such as the display speed of each line, when and for how long pauses in the text and sound effects should last, and even the speed at which animations should play for comedic effect. So re-creating that “being read aloud” feel and making sure the comedic timing was just right in the English version as well was a monumental task.
And lastly, due to the ongoing pandemic, it was a small miracle we were able to record an English dub at all. But everything fell into place somehow, and I have nothing but thanks and appreciation for everyone – especially our amazingly talented actors who worked so hard to make it happen.
Image: Capcom
Would you say that the increased awareness in the West of Japanese pop culture has made the localization process easier?
It’s a bit of a “yes and no” situation, since Ace Attorney appeals to a rather broad range of players. While I believe most players today are more aware of Japanese pop culture than those from a decade ago, it still breaks the flow of the game if something causes a player to stop playing to go look it up. And conceptually, no one should be expected to do research in order to play this series, so some of the more obscure things would still need to be adapted or explained in-game, including puzzles that rely on Japanese cultural conventions to solve. So in the end, the actual work of having to think through each line of dialogue or puzzle element and decide if and how much it needs to be localized remains relatively unchanged.
I will say though, one thing a greater familiarity with Japanese culture did help with is that it allowed us to add another layer of depth to the localization through the use of honorifics like “-san” without needing to explain what it means. In The Great Ace Attorney, we decided to have Ryunosuke and Susato speak in Japanese to each other in the privacy of their office, but converse in English when they’re out and about in public. I felt strongly about this decision from the beginning. Drawing again from my own experiences in America and Japan, there’s a sort of unspoken cultural norm whereby speaking in a different language in a mixed group can sometimes seem awkward at best, and confrontational at worst – especially with people you don’t know. Given the time period, I felt that Ryunosuke and Susato would almost certainly experience something similar. So as fluent English speakers, I felt they would make an effort to speak predominantly in English once they’d arrived in London, but allow themselves to speak in Japanese in private. The Japanese version of the game doesn’t make this distinction, since it would be somewhat awkward to do the same thing and take considerably more characters (and precious on-screen real estate) to write “Mister” in katakana than “-san”, but in the English version, we’ve gone with “-san” and “Mr.” and “Miss,” etc. as a way to distinguish when Ryunosuke and Susato are speaking to each other in Japanese versus English.
Image: Capcom
What was your reaction when the original decision was made to keepThe Great Ace Attorneya Japanese-exclusive title?
Personally, I was saddened because like every Ace Attorney game, I wanted to share this amazing title with fans around the world. However, I held on to the hope that someday it might be localized. Needless to say, I was so thrilled for everyone the night The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles was announced that I couldn’t sleep a wink – I was too busy trying to keep up with all the excited fan reactions!
Have older localization choices for the series, such as changing the setting from Japan to Los Angeles, presented issues in other titles?
Not particularly. I don’t think that changing the setting has really created any issues that wouldn’t have been present in the course of localizing an Ace Attorney game. What I mean by that is, even if we had kept the setting as Japan, the dialogue would still have required some localization changes since the humor would still need to be conveyed, and the graphics would still have needed modifications for people to be able to solve the cases.
“I was so thrilled the night The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles was announced that I couldn’t sleep a wink”
In the second game, Justice for All, I made the decision to keep certain elements Japanese which meant fewer localization changes were required for the tricks behind the mysteries. For example, the karuta cards in Spirit of Justice obviously had to be localized in order to solve the mystery, but the trick itself is still the same – a dying message spelled out in cards with a twist. Furthermore, the structure of the mysteries themselves works on a series of premises, none of which could be changed without causing a complete re-write from the ground up. So in terms of the story itself, I don’t think the localized setting has had that much of an impact. In fact, it helped make the localization less awkward in some situations while preserving the story. For example, it would’ve been odd to explain what rakugo is to a cast of Japanese characters, but since the characters were American, it became a far more natural way to deliver that bit of cultural information to the player. And that karuta trick certainly wouldn’t have worked if I couldn’t change certain things...
Image: Capcom
I think the two issues the location change does create, however, are the need to maintain an internally consistent world with each subsequent title, and a greater need for players to suspend their disbelief. The latter issue is more of a personal one, as each player decides for themselves if they want to accept the in-game world as presented. I do find it interesting that some people insist that the English localization is somehow less “real” simply because it’s Japanifornia, when the very fact that the world of Ace Attorney includes real spirit mediums makes it an alternate universe to ours.
By the way, the change in location didn’t impact The Great Ace Attorney at all, since this game is set so far back in time that there’s a few generations in there that fans can fill with headcanons.
Ace Attorney is famous for the pun-filled names of the characters, both in the Japanese and English versions. Do you all ever find yourselves stumped when finding punny names in translation?
Oh, all the time. We go through rounds and rounds of names together in search of the one that best reflects the original Japanese in tone and feel. But sometimes when we had to get going on the translation, we’d use a temporary name to start and then keep working to come up with something better as we wrote. Still, we usually lock down the names we want to go with beforehand to avoid having to do a lot of re-writes.
Image: Capcom
What is your favorite character name in the series? Are there any you came up with yourself?
I’ve come up with quite a few myself over the years. For The Great Ace Attorney, the translators and I worked on all the names together. Bif and his little twin brother, Tchikin Strogenov, will always bring a smile to my face.
Do you feel that the way you’ve all gone about localizing theAce Attorneyseries has helped the series attract a broader audience beyond those interested with Japanese games, anime, and things of the sort?
I do, for sure. I feel that not requiring a player to know a great deal about the nitty gritty of Japanese culture helps a broader spectrum of people get into the series. As an example, some people have certain visual aesthetic preferences (anime-style is not everyone’s cup of tea, after all). But sometimes, people can set those preferences aside if something else about the game catches their interest, such as a relatable story or character. In that sense, I feel the heavier localization might have allowed some of those players to focus on just the mystery and detective work aspects of the games as they slowly got sucked into the world of Ace Attorney. From there, they might be inspired to dive deeper into Japanese culture in general.
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles will be released on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PC on July 27, 2021.
CORRECTION: The original version of this article misidentified the first game in the Phoenix Wright series that Janet Hsu localized.
I present this with apologies to Ambrose Bierce, who published the original Devil’s Dictionary with occasional revisions between 1881 and 1906. All these terms have become prominent in popular culture recently. If you are unsure what they mean, you won’t find much genuine help here. Our mission is to define them afresh with no tedious reference to how they are actually used.
Wokeness. The degree of consciousness to the outside world exhibited by an undergraduate at a 7:30 a.m. Monday sociology class after a weekend spent testing the boundaries of commonsense on all available fronts, but especially in relation to regulated beverages.
Hybrid learning. The branch of eugenics where smart people are required to intermarry with other smart people until the children are so brilliant that they realize almost from birth what a mess the adults have made of things.
Cancel Culture. A cocktail of chemicals one can add to one’s yogurt to prevent an excess of pro-biotic effects, particularly in the face of lactose intolerance. Highly recommended on long car trips when service stations are few and far between.
Blursday. Initially, the feeling that one day has become indistinguishable from the next. For our purposes, the result of not having your eyeglass prescription updated for a year and a half because the last thing you want to do is stick your immobile chin in that silly machine and have your optometrist breathing on you from six inches away. The first choice is always just about indistinguishable from the second choice anyway.
Transgender. Short for “transportation gender,” it means to temporarily change one’s sexual identity, as expressed in clothing, in order to discourage the unwelcome attention of males, usually sailors, in the interest of facilitating a more pleasant maritime transportation experience. Usually limited to broadside ballads in which plucky 19th century maidens dress themselves in men’s attire to cross the Ocean Blue in search of their beloved Sweet William who was foolish enough to accept the King’s shilling at a portside pub. The term, along with the blue jacket and white trousers, are discarded as soon as they reunite, marry, and sire a complete soccer eleven with a son named Reggie as the goalkeeper.
Cisgender. The self-identified gender preference of one’s biologically female sibling. Should be received with love and acceptance regardless of content in the firm understanding that we are all equal before God and its nobody’s business who one loves anyway.
Mask-shaming. The abuse one is likely to encounter for either wearing a mask or not wearing a mask depending on whether your location is rural, urban, North, or South. All mask-shamers should be dismissed as uncouth idiots. Everyone needs to make their own decision as to what they are comfortable with and ignore all the noise. Remember that quasi-political organizations, like the CDC, might have an agenda that is not the same as your personal needs.
Intersectionality. The quality of fearing an unseen large fast-moving object coming at one from the left at a ninety degree angle and capable of flattening one’s humble vehicle like a discarded can of pop. Most often experienced at key locations like 45th and Bell.
Critical Race Theory. The thinking of both political parties when soliciting money. It holds that the fate of the known universe depends on the party’s success in the next election, even if it is an off year and there is no contest more significant on the ballot than the race for Town Dog Catcher. (A tip of the hat to the superlative Lisa, our Animal Control Officer here in Canyon. Her way with canines is like Robert Redford in that Horse Whisperer movie years ago. I’d vote for her in an instant if the opportunity ever arose, but I believe the position is appointed.)
Super spreader. Websites like Gab.com. Indicative of their considerable reach and the similarity of the quality of their products to what I put on my tomato beds in anticipation of a fine harvest. Requires just the right blend of meanness, dishonesty, and elementary school computer skills.
Pog/Poggers. Originally, an indication of delighted bewilderment as expressed on the face of a character named Pepe The Frog. We prefer Persons of Olfactory Guilt. Poggers would then be people who, with a somewhat callous attitude to their immediate family members, decided they could go another day or two without a shower during the recent Covid lockdowns.
Doomscrolling. Originally, spending way too much time reading bad news dispatches on social media. This is very bad for one’s mental health. Alternatively, being an assistant professor of history who has decided that your field of research interest is the work of Nostradamus.
Dr. Richard Rose is the program director for instructional design and technology at West Texas A&M University. The comments here represent his own opinions and not those of WTAMU.
When Pope Benedict visited Auschwitz in 2006, he delivered a speech, with death camp survivors present, that hit all the right notes. Until the Bavarian-born pontiff brought himself into the narrative, describing himself as “a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness”.
Joseph Ratzinger was a teenager in postwar Germany’s school of hard knocks, where no one discussed why voters elected “criminals” to power. The main moral dilemma was not why Germany murdered six million Jews, but the moral rights and wrongs of looting for food and coal. For many ordinary Germans, reflecting on the past meant pointing the finger of blame at true believers in the SS and Gestapo. Others suggested that Hitler had “abused the German capacity for enthusiasm”.
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