Recently, The Japan Times published an article titled From Japan to the world: how to translate a game. One of the key points of this article talked about how the then-named Yakuza series found its foothold in the West, with quotes from both SEGA of America and the executive producer of RGG Studio.
The article instantly made waves among fans because some of the quotes utilized involved both the localization team at SEGA of America and the Like a Dragon series’ producer, Masayoshi Yokoyama. This naturally caused some vocal fans to make angry posts, some of which were tied to the rather controversial censorship discussion. This led the producer to clarify things on X (formerly Twitter). You can view a translation of his tweet thread below:
Some people seem to be taking [the article] the wrong way, but we don’t change the original (Japanese) content in localization. We do have it checked for unintended derogatory or discriminatory expressions, religious issues, etc., and then we fix those in the original script. In other words, there is no difference between the Japanese and international versions.
There are replies like “Ah, but the localization staff is evil!”, but I’ve never been asked to change the content. Whether character’s name sounds like a local racist term, or the mark looks too much like a real organization, or something like that. Besides, the person in charge of localization is also on SEGA, and we are friends. If you can’t believe that, you can’t make games (laughs).
And the ethics checks on the Japanese side are 100 times stricter (laughs).
ローカライズについて。その①
何か話が間違って伝わってそうですが、ローカライズでオリジナル（日本）の内容を変えることはないです。
意図しない蔑称や差別的表現、宗教的な問題などがないかチェックしてもらい、その上でオリジナル脚本で直したりしてます。
つまり日本版と海外版で違いはない。
— 横山昌義 (@yokoyama_masa) January 31, 2024
