Trails Fans Criticize NISA Over Controversial Translation in Trails Beyond the Horizon
The Trails series has a very complicated relationship between fans and translators, because for years fans have complained about incorrect or exaggerated translations that do not exist in the original text but that translators love to “add.”
Recently, fans noticed what they consider a kind of “attack” in the newest game in the series, Trails Beyond the Horizon. The line in question is spoken by the character Nadia.
In the original Japanese, she simply says:
“Their choice of words is really strange.”
Meanwhile, the English version translated by NISA has the following “translation”:
“Yeah, I get you. In my experience, modern slang can really hit certain people the wrong way.”
There is a long history of disputes between players who want a more faithful translation and dislike the fact that NISA’s translators (the company responsible for localizing the game) insert slang into the game or distort what characters say. But it doesn’t matter—more and more slang keeps being added, and there are several Reddit threads with people complaining about this.
I haven’t played any games in the Trails series (yet), but I see this kind of thing happen with many games. I always prefer to set the audio to Japanese when I play something and keep the text in English (since I still struggle to read kanji), and I often notice huge differences between what the text says and what the character actually says—and it gets irritating.
Let’s read some reactions:
“I’ve always really wanted to start playing the Trails series, but man, those ‘lolcowlizer’ videos are absolutely awful.”
“NISA is the worst localization group out there, no exceptions.”
“I still haven’t forgiven them for what they did to Esty’s name in Atelier Rorona.”
“Real-time, efficient AI machine translation can’t arrive soon enough so we can finally get rid of these clowns.”
“Don’t buy the game.”
“You don’t hate lolcowlizers enough. These parasites are the reason why everyone is rooting for the manga industry to start using AI.”
“How do these clowns still have jobs??”
Apparently, as long as the Trails series remains in NISA’s hands, it will continue to cause friction between translators and fans.