[1] IEEE 1394 — FireWire.
Closest Norwegian equivalent to getting burnt I can think of is "å få lang nese" which translates into "to get a long nose", e.g. you get a long nose when someone tricks you. So in that case the cable should be called IEEE 1394 — LongNose.
Translation is difficult..
One interesting one is we had translations for status indicators (Red, Amber, Green) The real translator had translated these to the Japanese versions of Red, Yellow and Green but google translated had picked the word for "fossilized resin" rather than the color.
Since google translate is not using any context it has no way to know if I meant the color or the material.
As an alternative, https://jisho.org/ is super easy to use and hasn't let me down yet.
The thing with my Japanese skills is that my grammar is excellent, but my vocabulary is limited, so a gloss of the kanji in a sentence is _massively_ useful to me (and kanji is a double-edged sword: I recognize far more words in hiragana (or when spoken) than in kanji, but kanji is pretty much necessary for a dictionary to have any decent idea of what the word is).
I'll have to give Jisho a try though.
This is something I assume translators would be able to catch that would be much more difficult for translation software.
Not quite the same thing, but another consequence of the person creating the final dialogue not having access to context, and there's really no excuse for that. Even if the dialogue is only available as a spreadsheet, the writer should have included context cues and stage directions.
It's a good read. They also were working with massive spreadsheets, but also with a huge franchise that required a lot of internal consistency.
[0]: https://kotaku.com/the-curse-of-kiseki-how-one-of-japans-big...
Given how context-heavy Japanese is, it was nearly impossible to translate exactly what was going on as the Google Sheets only contained the additional content and not the full game script. Even if I did have the game script, there are still certain contextual things which are only realized when seeing what was happening to the characters on the screen.
I ended up watching an entire "Let's Play" of the series in order to get the gist of the story, get the character names correct, and see how the original translators localized everything. I took cues from their localization and did the best take I could at the time in order to translate it while balancing heavy workloads at school.
I'm both somewhat proud of the translation and somewhat disappointed in it. I feel as if I could do a much better job if I had more free time to update it, but localization is kinda like an art. Very few people will translate the same content the same way - even the same person might translate the same lines differently at different points in time.
I do something completely different these days and don't get to utilize my Japanese nearly as much, but I'd definitely be up for another game translation again. While you may be bound by certain external forces (pre-localized content you need to mesh with, author's wishes, censorship, etc), there is still a lot of freedom and liberty in localizing. After all, it's your job to retell this story as best you can to your target audience, and it requires both knowing the source material's culture, as well as your own. In fact, it probably requires knowing your target culture even more so, and it's this type of creative challenge that really got me excited back in the day.
In her talk, she stressed the importance of actually playing through the game while translating, but said that the finished game often wasn't available and that deadlines or low translation rates could make that unfeasible.
I was a freelance translator myself at the time, mostly doing business-related texts, and her talk did not make me want to go into video game translation.