I recently discovered an academic article about Brazilian fan translations of Chrono Trigger, with reference to both Ted Woolsey's and Tom Slattery's "official" translations, as well as to Kwhatzit's translation (hosted here at the Compendium).
Here is some pertinent information for any interested readers.
Author: RAFAEL MÜLLER GALHARDI
Author profile: RAFAEL MÜLLER GALHARDI is an English into Brazilian Portuguese translator and holds a master in Translation and Accessibility. He has recently defended his masters dissertation about Chrono Triggers fan translations in Brazil and has been working with game translation and localization for the past two years. He first started as an undergraduate student interested in analyzing fan translations, then took part and presented his projects at two editions of Fum for all: International Conference on Video Game and Virtual Worlds Translation and Accessibility in Spain and also at other scientific events in Brazil. Meanwhile, he also has become involved in many translation projects ranging from Facebook games to Multiplatform ones.
Article: "Video Game and Fan Translation: A Case Study of Chrono Trigger"
Reprinted in: FUN FOR ALL: Translation and Accessibility Practices in Video Games (ISBN 9783034314503)
Abstract:
Nowadays, video games are not restricted to a specific context or demographic group but instead involve an entire global entertainment market, in a similar manner to the film industry. Certain video game genres -largely RPGs (Role Playing Games) and strategy games-also rely strongly on textual components. Together, these two factors have generated significant demand for linguistic transference and differing degrees of adaptation to many specific markets — a process also known as localization. However, for many locales, the localization industry has not yet reached its full potential, leaving the door open for amateur attempts at translating games. This article provides a descriptive analysisof the Brazilian fan translations of Square Enix's Chrono Trigger, which were based on the first official English translation (1995) carried out for Nintendo by Ted Woolsey, as well a comparison of these with another translation developed by Anglophone fans. The attempts at translation by these fans were possibly the motivation for a second official translation for the porting of the game to Nintendo DS (2008), which in turn generated yet another Brazilian fan translation, totaling a final group of six target texts. In order to conduct this research, Mangiron and O'Hagan's transcreation model (2006) was used in order to analyze topics such as: dialogue additions and omissions; the recreation of play on words; the renaming of characters and terminology; censored items; the deliberate use of regional expressions; and even the modification of a character's speech style, in addition to any other challenges that Chrono Trigger presented to the fan translators.
Conclusion extract:
Galhardi concludes that "Through the analysis of fan translations of Chrono Trigger, we have shown how fans can either follow very similar procedures to those of official localizers [i.e. Woolsey or Slattery] or utilize a 'foreignizing' [i.e. Kwhatzit] approach. In the case of the former, they adapt the game to reflect their own cultural reality [...] in the case of the latter, they keep the game as faithful to the source version as possible, such as was the intention of the Chronocompendium [sic] translation."
