I have recently been reading three books by Clyde Mandelin. Clyde is better known online at Mato. He runs the excellent 'Legends of Localization' web site (https://legendsoflocalization.com).

The two books I suggest are…

• Legends of Localization Book 1: The Legend of Zelda

• Legends of Localization Book 2: EarthBound

[To clarify, when I say "Earthbound", I refer to the game that was released in Japan as Mother 2, with the translated release being called "Earthbound" in the US.]

If anyone wants to make the argument that a real-time translation would work, then I have an additional recommendation:

• press start to translate: This is what happens when you let a computer translate a video game?

You can find all of the above books at https://www.fangamer.com/collections/books/partner_legends-o...

I have technical concerns and non-technical concerns with the idea.

With Zelda 1 that would indeed work; there was not much text in the first place, and the typeface was blocky and easy to detect.

With Earthbound, things are much more complex. Ignoring text that is "baked in" to the graphics, the dialogue was much more interactive. The text was smaller, with thinner letter shapes, and when one of your characters was dead, the contrast between text and background was alot lower. You also have to deal with changes in coloration and highlighting, for example when you are selecting from a range of options.

Earthbound also had another trick: The dialogue system was not static text. Instead, the game effectively became an interpreter: The game didn't open a dialogue window, the script itself included the code to open a dialogue window, which the game would parse and execute. Check out http://media.earthboundcentral.com/2011/04/a-look-at-the-mot... for an example

So, if you were to make a mapping of "untranslated text" to "translated text", you would have to work out every possible expansion of the interpreted script, translating each one individually.

If your text ends up being longer than the Japanese text, you'd have to work out a way to deal with that. Either making your overlay bigger than the original text, or maybe intercepting a controller button-press to advance the text.

Of course, all of those are technical concerns. But I think there is at least one big non-technical concern: At least for me, it would be too jarring.

It's the difference between a "lean-back" experience and a "lean-in" experience. The lean-back experience is something like watching a movie. Translating a movie via subtitles means expending additional "brain cycles" to line up the subtitles with the speaker, but I'm not doing much else, so that's OK. Translating a movie via dialogue kindof looks weird, because the voices do not line up with the mouth movements.

Playing a video game is a "lean-in" experience. I am doing a lot more work, ingesting and processing dialogue and NPC actions, keeping track of information, making decisions, and taking actions myself. Translating the dialogue is possible, because you can "line up the mouth movements" (update the programming) to work with the translated text. If there is something else—an overlay, say, or a separate translation file—that takes up a lot more cycles, makes it harder for me to keep up with the game, and lessens the experience.

Of course, there are exceptions! A game like Tetris doesn't qualify either way. A game like Doki Doki Literature Club is more like a movie, and so subtitles fit.