Yesterday, a localizer for the publisher XSEED took a dramatic stance on what he saw as potential censorship, asking his company to remove his name from the credits of the upcoming JRPG Akiba’s Beat after the developers removed a controversial phrase involving the KKK from the game.
“I wanted to make a statement,” localization specialist Tom Lipschultz wrote in an e-mail. “I don’t think it’s right to make any change, no matter how minor, for the purpose of ‘sanitizing’ a game.”
Akiba’s Beat, a JRPG developed by the Japanese studio Acquire, will be out in North America next month. XSEED is handling publishing and localization in the west, which means they have a staff working to translate the game from Japanese to English, edit that text and determine how best to present it to an English-speaking audience. That also means tweaking the game so some Japanese phrases or jokes aren’t lost. For example, a character whose Japanese name is “Futoshi Futoi,” or “Fatty McFat,” is “Chunk Widebody” in the English version.
Localization gets thorny when certain cultural themes don’t make sense in other languages—or, worse, when they’re too controversial. Akiba’s Beat’s “most egregious change,” Lipschultz wrote in an XSEED forum post, had to do with a parody of the Japanese light switch company NKK Switches. A sign in the original Japanese version of the game read “KKK witches,” a play on the phrase. He wrote on XSEED’s forum, “I personally felt ‘KKK witches’ was pretty funny for its shock value, but when I mentioned it to my coworkers, they... were not as amused.” Lipschultz has long been an advocate against what he sees as censorship in localization, and he says his priority is retaining as much of Akiba’s Beat’s original meaning as possible.
What a crybaby. It's not supposed to be a KKK reference. ---