So, you think you know FF7?

[Nightingale]

Before we begin, I wanna address two things right off the bat:

1) It's been far too long since I played this game last to accurately remember how much the following hinders gameplay. I'm guessing you just work around it, since I don't remember myself ever trying to murder other people nor myself our of frustration. That's good

2) These aren't actually my screenshots. They were taken by a hilarious Spanish blogger who goes by the name of Akusoft. I'd normally ask for her permission before doing anything with the material, but she hasn't logged into her account in roughly eight years now and I just don't see that changing. I'd strongly recommend looking her livejournal up, however... she does amazing stuff with subtitles and broken English in media that I'm sure would make your day (it certainly did mine).

Now, with that out of the way: Let's embark into the incredibly confusing, poorly-executed and unintentionally hilarious trip that's Final Fantasy 7 in its Spanish version.

Honestly, the way they went about translating the game to the Spanish language is so bad, it's kind of unbelievable. You'd be forgiven for thinking that they just fed the script to a late 90s version of Google Translate, but... no, not really. The kind of mistakes that are present in here aren't what your typical, run-of-the-mill automatic translation software would do. They go off the rails, sure, but they don't put non-existent words in there, which is something this game does fairly often.

Just think about it... it was someone's job to grab a dictionary and do literal translations from the source language to Spanish without actually having much of a grasp of the latter. Reminds me of when I tried to translate Etoile Garde A Vous from French to Spanish using a Sony Ericsson early app... with eerily similar results to be obtained.



Using "y'all" to refer to one individual. Nice.

Also, the name of the soldier isn't capitalized in neither FF style (SOLDADO) nor in regular style (Soldado).



Using the same word (materia) thrice for maximum redundancy. There's also the very puzzling usage of a especial character in there, which would work given this is trying to be neutral Spanish, but it's simply out of place there regardless. There's also a missing space, which they didn't bother to correct, rendering the entire phrase in poor shape.



"This is the very famous [POINT] save!!".



"They say flowers and plants don't grow in Midgar (lowercase name, sure). But for some reason, flowers do grow in there".



"Oh, this isn't fun!"

Which tries to be "Oh, isn't this fun?".



That's the correct word for describing the job of a Mayor in English, but this is a Spanish translation and therefore it should have been "Alcalde".



Tifa -and half of the characters from now on- has the wrong gender on this quote, referring to herself as a male.



"... The worst in history. But thanks to the rapid reaction of the of the authorities, there hasn't been any civilian victims".

That's simply wrong xD



It is basically telling you to make a party of three in here. But "partido" ain't the word for it and the game would eternally mess it up, changing words around but never getting the right one.



It most of the dialogues, Sephirot is referred as such, but in some scenes his name is changed to "Sefirot". 



"Have another go" and "later!" are translated as "podemos ir otra vez" y "màs tarde"... as in "we can go again" and, well, "later". 



"If you want me that bad" is something like "if you don't like me..." here.



Sure...



Waterpolo B xD



"Hey you, are you making fun of the Army?"

"What if I'm doing it?/What if I'm doing it". Those are literally the same two responses, but with different wording.



"How to save someone/how to save the game".



"Are you getting bored?"

"Not so much".

"Yes, we are fighting quite a bit".

So... I really am bored, aren't I?

And many, many more examples.

What are your thoughts on it? Amazing, right? xD

[Maniakkid25]

I've heard the German translation is legendarily pretty bad, too, so I'm not surprised by this. I haven't investigated it myself, mainly because I don't know much German. BUT, that is what I've heard. Then again, what with things like "This guy are sick", it's not like the official English translation is smelling like roses...

[Mr EliteL]

Yes, those are quite messed up. Getting two of the same response, and made up words, completely wrong phrasing is bad. What is the (don't know the correct symbol above) "nac nac nac" one? (as I have not played FF7)

[Nightingale]

I've heard the German translation is legendarily pretty bad, too, so I'm not surprised by this. I haven't investigated it myself, mainly because I don't know much German. BUT, that is what I've heard. Then again, what with things like "This guy are sick", it's not like the official English translation is smelling like roses...

Really? That's interesting about the German language (man, it feels as thought they had a really hard time figuring that out in the late 90s). One example that immediately comes to my mind is Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within... the game doesn't use broken German, just isn't very good at using the language.

Like, there's a part in which a doctor keeps referring to himself as "herr doctor", which really isn't what you are supposed to do. If I understand correctly, "herr" is an acknowledgment, meant to be used by other people. Putting it simply, calling you "herr Maniak" would sorta work because it's me that's doing it, but calling yourself "herr Maniak" would make me wonder what's wrong with your ego

The game is litered with stuff like that.

Credit where it's due, though... they really made a fine use of the U-Bahn system within the game (subways).

Yes, those are quite messed up. Getting two of the same response, and made up words, completely wrong phrasing is bad. What is the (don't know the correct symbol above) "nac nac nac" one? (as I have not played FF7)

It's using the "Ñ" letter, and it's meant to be an evil laugh of sorts... but it's really something a kid would say.

It's really that bad xD

Hands down, one of the best cases of language-killing on the game:



There's no pizza to speak of (at least, I don't think there was) in the original context. "Ahé" isn't even a word, and that censorship is seriously off-putting.