Talk:Ted Woolsey

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A partial list of games Ted Woolsey is credited with can be found at:

http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,40944/

Contents

[edit] Final Fantasy Legend III?

I seem to recall reading in an interview with Woolsey that his first project with Square was in fact Final Fantasy Legend III (aka SaGa III), the B&W Game Boy game.

Here we are; it's the Gamasutra article. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/column_index.php?story=6361

69.70.158.197 17:14, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Interview with Ted Woolsey

Please listen to this interview for information on the translation before insulting Ted Woolsey. Episode 16 (it's at the end of the episode). --Corilof 00:14, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Mistranslations

It might be worth mentioning a few of Woolsey's mistranslations of katakana. I think the most notorious is the "Ultima Weapon" of FF6 becoming the "Atma Weapon". There's even a joke referring to this in FFX-2 (in Shinra's Database). I don't know if these mistranslations were accidental or because of space limitations though.

It's worth mentioning, but it should be done carefully, IMO. Mentioning the differences is valid, but without sources we shouldn't speculate on the reasons. – Seancdaug 04:43, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
Vying for the most notorious bad FFVI translation is when "dinosaur" was translated as "frightful dragon" (which is what the Japanese word for "dinosaur" literally means). And don't forget that 1/144 ship which is really a 1/144 scale ship. (Not sure if the number was 144 here) Ken Arromdee 04:25, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

I think a lot of names were purposely changed because, at the time, Final Fantasy wasn't mainstream yet, so they didn't really think they needed to preserve the cross-references. For example, "Soul of Thamasa" became "Gem Box" (and was subsequently mistranslated as "Samantha Soul" in FF8), "Three Stars" became "Economizer", and "Tonberry" became (ugh) "Pug". Still, given the times and the situation, I can understand why they translated FF6 the way they did. It's only in hindsight that people look at Woolsey and see him as a "bad" translator. In fact, I think few people realize the good work that Woolsey actually did. Viltris 19:36, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

There's a difference between a change and a mistake. Translating dinosaur as "frightful dragon" (particularly in a game where you're searching for dragons), or the 1/144 ship, are mistakes, not changes. Atma Weapon was more than likely a mistake too--he just didn't recognize that its name was supposed to be something understandable in English. Ken Arromdee 13:37, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
I actually can't remember "frightful dragon". Can somebody post a screen shot or a link to a script to remind me? Viltris 21:50, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
I would rather hypotesize that Atma Weapon is an artifact of a 10 or 11 byte limit for the item name lengths. UltimaWeapon requires 12; it doesn't fit. --Bisqwit 12:57, 19 September 2006 (UTC)
Then it would have been shortened to UltimaWeap, UltmWeapon, or Ult.Weapon. The only reason one would use "AtmaWeapon" is if he didn't realize that the original katakana meant "Ultima Weapon". 87.11.3.46 19:52, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
One of Woolsey's more famous mistakes was not recognizing Biggs Darklighter being the companion of Wedge Antilles in Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger. This was notorious enough that it was one of the few mistakes corrected in the PSX port of those games. I feel that some of his random name changing affects repeated themes in the games, hiding the equivalence from English-speaking players. For example, FF6 had Cait Sith, and Midgar's Orm, the snake near the chocobo farm in FF7. Ted also made weird decisions, like in Breath of Fire 1 how Myria/Miria was arbitrary changed to Tyr even though that is a Norse god not goddess. -- Myria 05:06, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Somebody might want to include the information included in this podcast at some point--among other things is an interview with Ted Woolsey.

[edit] Add maintenance category

Per Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2007 March 21#Category:Missing middle or first names, Category:Missing middle or first names has been added to this talk page.—DomBot / ChiDom talk 09:13, 1 April 2007 (UTC)