Okay, look. Just about anyone can tell you that Fate/stay night is a masterpiece. It's been around for twenty years; you hardly need to hear it from me, and despite the utter lambasting I'm about to give it, I still recommend this game. However, it pains me to inform you that the English translation on display here can only be described as an outright disaster. It stems from one core issue: this game had a lot of translators. That's hardly a surprise, considering its length. While "one" is the optimal number of translators for any project, real-world constraints don't make that feasible for larger texts such as this. If a single person were to do this entire game, it'd take years just to get a first draft out of them. But when you have multiple translators on the same project, coordination and ruthless quality control are paramount, and it's evident from the very beginning that these were largely absent from this game's workflow. Due to the structure of the game, several scenes occur multiple times. Their text is exactly identical in the Japanese, but translated differently across their appearances in English because the translators weren't properly coordinating. The most noticeable examples of this are in Saber's summoning (the game's cold open vs. the actual scene on the third day) and the church scene on the third day (whose translation differs between the Fate and Unlimited Blade Works routes). This made me suspect that no sort of translation memory software was used in the development of this translation - which would be a pretty sloppy, boneheaded, and stingy decision - but I later saw evidence to make me wonder otherwise. This being a piece of otaku media, characters often make little grunts, groans, and so on, often consisting entirely of punctuation in the source text. As far as I can tell, each of these grunts was translated exactly the same way every time it appeared, regardless of how much sense said translation made in context. As a professional translator myself, this strikes me as only plausible if those lines were autofilled from translation memory, and the people working on those scenes couldn't be bothered to interrogate their worth. And yet some of the more important things lack this consistency! The name of Sasaki Kojirou's sword is given in Romanized Japanese within the game's text, but translated in the Weapons menu. The epithet for Saber's true Noble Phantasm is translated within the text, but Romanized in the Servant menu. A certain Servant's True Name is rendered normally within the text, but in all caps in the Servant menu. Romanization rules are arbitrary - why are long o sounds spelled as such, but long u sounds suppressed? - and while honorifics are largely scrubbed from the work, some are bizarrely retained. Shirou still gets to call Taiga "Fuji-nee," and Rin may be "Miss Tohsaka" in Sakura's eyes, but Shirou still gets to be "Senpai." You get the idea - this is an embarrassing lack of polish. This lack of polish extends to the regular prose, too. I'm of the surprisingly rare opinion that a professional work should not contain any typos, grammar mishaps, punctuation errors, and so on, but even if you have a more accommodating view, the preponderance of these sloppy mistakes in this game will undoubtedly test the patience of even the most forgiving reader. I don't know how much proofreading this game received, but it wasn't enough. These mistakes appear to trace back to the specific translators working on any given scene, since they appear in chunks. Some of these translators appear to have a solid handle on how punctuation works, while others have clearly never seen English prose in their life and are blatantly faking it. When you see one misplaced comma, you can expect to see a hundred more crimes against punctuation before the scene is over. And let me be clear: these translators that don't know how to write English... Well, they don't know how to write English. Even were their spelling, punctuation, grammar, and so forth perfect, it wouldn't fix the root of the issue. They can't write appealing prose or dialogue, and when translating, they often miss the forest for the trees. They go on autopilot, religiously making substitutions like "kuyashii = vexing" or "shikata ga nai = can't be helped," regardless of how much sense they make. They introduce mistranslations due to not having the game open while they work, so they miss context provided in the visuals. At least at my job, I don't have the visuals when I translate because they haven't been made yet. This game has been around for twenty years. There is no excuse. The majority of this game's translators make every rookie mistake in the book, from having people talk to each other in the third person to failing to think of how dialogue would sound when spoken aloud. Some get their tenses mixed up, adding some past-tense narration where they should've used the present tense. Some use all caps for emphasis, despite having italics available as an option (which, thankfully, nearly every translator in the game makes use of). There's one who tries to differentiate Shirou's thoughts from his narration through the use of italics, as you might in an ink-and-paper novel, but he largely fails because in a VN with first-person narration, the distinction between narration and thoughts is blurry at best. This use of italics is distracting - all the more so because it wasn't a consistent endeavor across the entire text. And yet, a select minority of the translators who worked on this game actually somewhat approach competence. Their spelling, punctuation, and grammar is pristine, and it's clear they put a lot of thought into the elegance of their prose. One of these translators can be identified by his habit of making Lancer call Rin "lassie" or "lass." When I see one of those words, I can be sure the ensuing scene will be at least an adequate reading experience. Mercifully, the good translators seem to have been entrusted with a lot of the most important scenes, such as the Fate route's church basement scene or the big confrontation on the penultimate day of the Unlimited Blade Works route, so it's possible the project coordinator was at least somewhat aware of the disparity in skill between the people working on the translation. Then again, a pretty bad translator got his hands on a certain intimate Rin scene near the end of Unlimited Blade Works, so it's hard to say. But for every part of the text with a decent translation, there's at least a dozen that are unbearably bad. You can watch Shirou eloquently debate his ideals of heroism with various characters one moment, then open the Servant menu the next and see that the Servants' skill descriptions are utter word salad by comparison - or by any standard, frankly. As I said above, quality control on this translation seems entirely nonexistent. Nasu is widely considered to have excellent prose in Japanese, and having read his work for myself, I can attest to this. Unfortunately, this translation of Fate/stay night doesn't represent his talents in the slightest. This translation cannot be appreciated for any sort of artistry; you can only rely on it for its literal meaning, and even then, that's only in the parts done by people whose Japanese is good enough to prevent mistranslations. Allow me to conclude this review by countering a likely rebuttal. Yes, this translation is leagues better than the fan translation by Mirror Moon. Mirror Moon has produced the worst translations I've ever had the displeasure of reading; surpassing them is not a difficult accomplishment. That doesn't make this translation good by any measure. Any game would deserve better than the translation we got here - a masterpiece like Fate/stay night, even more so.
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