As a former English teacher in Japan, I love reading Japanese writing about teaching English. So this blog post was a real treat simply on that level.
But it also touches on some of the challenges of localizing English dialogue into Japanese. Just as Japanese has plenty of nuances which can get lost in a slavishly literal word-for-word translation, English similarly is packed with expressions that come across differently in Japanese. This is particularly true with slang.
So I find it interesting seeing here not only how the meaning of these vulgar expressions is explained in Japanese, but also how the actual subtitles used for the Japanese versions of the game differ from the literal meaning of the English expressions. So, for example, the line ”Do you naughty little angels deserve a good spanking?" was subtitled (and voiced) as ”キツくお仕置き しちゃうわよ" (more literally, "You're in for a severe punishment") in order to preserve the English's BDSM nuances. Or, less explicitly explained, Bayonetta's fight-ending one-liner against Balder, "Don't fuck with a witch!" is subtitled in Japanese as, "喰らいな！" ("Eat/take this!"). I remember feeling, as I beat the game on PC recently, that the latter Japanese line felt drier than its English counterpart, but a more literal take (the article offers "魔女をナメるなよ！") wouldn't necessarily capture the English line's venom. This sort of translation has to be a real challenge.
If I remember right, Hideki Kamiya wrote the story and fellow Platinum member J.P. Kellams adapted it into English, so I have no doubt that it's all true to the "original intent" of the work. Given how much we discuss how Japanese media gets translated to Western languages, I don't usually get the chance to think about how things go in the other direction. The blog post's author says she'll continue this series if people like it, so I hope they keep them up!
