Projects: Melty Blood

I started doing some of the character stories mostly due to wanting know what was going on myself. I would definitely say that I was not as experienced with translating or even Japanese at the time. It took a significant amount of time and guidance do these at first, but I was satisfied with the results. After translating them, I posted a recording from the PS2 version of Melty Blood and used annotations. As I got better at it, I was able to use more complex software for the subtitles, and it became less time consuming to simply translate the Japanese. I could focus more on the individuality of the characters.

Characters are hard to translate. You cannot just translate what is being said, you have to "translate the character."  You need a good idea of "who this person is" when you translate dialog. Dialog is not static. We all have individuality and experiences that change who we are. This of course influences how we talk in general and even how we talk to certain people. There are over 30 individual characters in Melty Blood, and most of them vary in how they talk and act when alone and with others. What is harder is translating characters that are well known in their respective communities. Melty Blood is based on a fairly popular visual novel, Tsukihime. I need to make sure that I also match the character's manner of dialog to the vision of what people already have and expect of them.

Calm down Matt

What I needed to keep in mind for most of these is, "how do people see this character already?" I can't have an established smooth talking, fancy characters talking like B-Boy from 5th street. It throws the reader off. Admittedly, this mistake is in a lot of my earlier work.

KnK reference to Sōren

On the subject of fancy, many character have highly embellished abstract speech models. I'll talk more about translating "complex/fantastic" works later, but the writers for Melty Blood, Type-Moon, often fall into this category. Japanese is a wonderful language for expressing feelings and imagery... and like a 2 frame mashable jab, they abuse the hell out it, for lack of better words. This poses a problem... how do I express these abstract visions in English? Thanks to this I feel I have a fair amount of experience with the kind of classic dialog found this type of media.

As for research, I needed to brush up on characters that I was not familiar with. I needed a good idea of their personality. I have a good idea about most characters, but I did need to have a look at some. For example, I needed to take a look at Kara no Kyōkai in order to understand some the references and Ryougi herself.

I think that these all went pretty well for the most part. I still cringe at some of my older work but I find them passable for the most part. I will definitely keep the personality and speaking habits of each character in mind should I do another one in the future. 

It's been a while since I've done a Melty Blood character story, but it's definitely on the list of things I would like to get to. My ultimate goal is a localized version, or at least fan translated version of MBAACC. We will see what happens from here though.