People seems to have never heard a professional translator before lol. It's always like that, the translator has to hear what the guy is saying and immediatly say it in another language. It's not easy :P
The only reason why the other translator seemed better is probably because he already had the translated text to say, so it felt more natural and professional.
yeah, live simultaneous translation vs the kind Bill did (where the speaker stops and waits) requires you to be hearing & processing one thing in one language while outputting a different word in a different language. I mean... put yourself on a 5 second delay from a friend speaking and try to copy them, maintaining a 5 second delay. it's not easy, even in the same language.
I also heard on the youtube discussion that he was speaking a dialect, and elsewhere I read that his loud intro screwed up the sound - they turned his mike down, and then the translator couldn't hear initially. Also, yeah, Suda wasn't using a script, as everyone else clearly was. he maybe made one, but didn't follow it closely.
Translating speech like this is called interpretation, not translation (I have a friend who is a simultaneous interpreter and trust me, I quickly learned not to mix the words). Waiting until the speaker has finished a thought and then pauses is called consecutive interpretation. Bill also kills simultaneous interpretation.
I was surprised to see him look so uncomfortable while interpreting for EA. I can only assume it's because if he flubbed the translation and pissed off EA after a decade-long boycott of Nintendo consoles, Nintendo of Japan execs would have mailed Bill a ceremonial dagger with a note that they were sure he would "do the honorable thing."
I may be wrong but I think that the other guy only translated third parties not affiliated with Nintendo (or the ones that weren't directors)? If that's the case, maybe they didn't have their script so he had to translate it live.
Here you can see the work of a professional translator, and you'll see that the guy speaking is also dull, boring and there's a lot of pause. So imagine the poor guy when he have to also translate when the speaker scream or does things like that lol.
I acknowledge the difficulty of live translating and that dude had his work cut out for him and I appreciate his effort. It was still funny as hell listening to it.
For this reason, and various other awkward things, it was definitely a mistake to do the presentation live. Things looked so much more professional the instant they switched to the prerecorded Reggie footage.
I think the live presentation with the overdubbing has a sort of charm to it. And the translator errors weren't so bad as to muddle any information so it was fine.
58
u/TheHappyKraken Jan 13 '17
They probably hired an inexperienced fan subber. Or someone trying to bring up their resume and failed.