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Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

polygon.com

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Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#21

Post by klodolph »

Razengan wrote: post #18
cbhl wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't super technical burdens to speech synthesis in games; for example, Jackbox Party Pack 7 runs just fine on the Switch and contains a speech synthesis engine for "Blather Round". I imagine it's mostly a licensing/cost thing (since a "voice" for a speech synthesis engine still requires hiring an actor and doing a recording session).

> since a "voice" for a speech synthesis engine still requires hiring an actor That's what I'm talking about. Surely we can do away with that if we try, just as we don't need real people to build 3D models -from- if we don't want them.

I’m not sure what you mean when you say we don’t need real people to build 3D models. If we want 3D models, someone has to make them. That person might be a traditional modeler working in Blender, or a sculptor in ZBrush, or might be someone with a 3D scanner doing photogrammetry. The tools are changing, but it is still people using the tools.

Just like how we invented an “automatic programming” system where the computer will do programming for you, and it turns out that once we’ve made automated programming we have more programmers and not fewer. The tools for making 3D models are getting better and easier to use, and as photogrammetry is being used more and more, we see larger teams of modelers, not smaller.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#22

Post by drosan »

> why does Nintendo bother to dub it?

Yellow press at its best - discussing topics they didn't even bother to research properly. "The gibberish" is being made by voice synthesiser, very simplistic one; it was the same way back on Animal Crossing New Leaf on 3DS and even previous ones (DS, Wii, GC).

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#24

Post by zerocrates »

klodolph wrote: post #21
Razengan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since a "voice" for a speech synthesis engine still requires hiring an actor That's what I'm talking about. Surely we can do away with that if we try, just as we don't need real people to build 3D models -from- if we don't want them.

I’m not sure what you mean when you say we don’t need real people to build 3D models. If we want 3D models, someone has to make them. That person might be a traditional modeler working in Blender, or a sculptor in ZBrush, or might be someone with a 3D scanner doing photogrammetry. The tools are changing, but it is still people using the tools. Just like how we invented an “automatic programming” system where the comp…

They're comparing making a bespoke 3D model of a character as opposed to scanning an actual person, saying similarly you could just create a voice from scratch rather than record a real one.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#25

Post by SftwreEngnr »

oooooooooooow wrote: post #16
vimy wrote: post #8

Reminds me of a song from 1972 by an Italian comedian. The song is called "Prisencolinensinainciusol" which means...well, nothing. It's gibberish. In fact, the entire song is nonsense lyrics made to sound like English. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8&feature=emb_titl...

Adriano Celentano is a singer songwriter, actor, director, screenwriter, composer, film editor and TV author[1]. He definitely has humor and used irony throughout his career, but wouldn't call him a comedian by any stretch. [1] Taken from wikipedia

Thanks for your contribution to this discussion.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#27

Post by marcan_42 »

It was never supposed to be nonsense. To anyone playing in Japanese or presumably other phonetically consistent languages, it's obviously a sped up, slurred/somewhat mangled version of what the text is saying. I guarantee not a single Japanese player didn't notice this, or otherwise thinks it's pure gibberish. Japanese is not my native language and I noticed immediately; any native would have too.

The problem is that English is a phonetically inconsistent language, with a massive number of rules required to even begin to approximate the mapping from text to phonemes (and zillions of exceptions). So this kind of really dumb TTS not intended to be actually intelligible doesn't work at all in English. And so it sounds like actual nonsense.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#28

Post by erikpukinskis »

Razengan wrote: post #13

Instead of the constant focus on graphics graphics graphics, why don’t companies improve other tech like speech synthesis for a while? That would bring about a new boom (pun) of creativity by allowing indie devs to write complex stories with spoken dialogue without having to worry about hiring actors and immutable recording sessions.

Most companies are too dysfunctional to employ any strategy other than “do an okay job at all the same things everyone else in the industry is doing”.

It’s actually pretty rare the company that can do its own thing and survive at it.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#29

Post by resu_nimda »

marcan_42 wrote: post #27

It was never supposed to be nonsense. To anyone playing in Japanese or presumably other phonetically consistent languages, it's obviously a sped up, slurred/somewhat mangled version of what the text is saying. I guarantee not a single Japanese player didn't notice this, or otherwise thinks it's pure gibberish. Japanese is not my native language and I noticed immediately; any native would have too. The problem is that…

It did work in English though. Maybe not as well, but I do remember noticing in the original Animal Crossing that there was some correlation between the sounds and the text. Even if it was just the timing and intonation, it could definitely be understood that the lines were actually being spoken in some form. I don't think it was TTS because it was too accurate in a really subtle way.

Or maybe it was and they tweaked it well enough to work. It's been a while, my memory could be off. I don't know if it would have been prohibitive on the GameCube to have audio of every line (there were a lot), but I wouldn't put it past them to have done so.

Re: Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese

#30

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

marcan_42 wrote: post #27

It was never supposed to be nonsense. To anyone playing in Japanese or presumably other phonetically consistent languages, it's obviously a sped up, slurred/somewhat mangled version of what the text is saying. I guarantee not a single Japanese player didn't notice this, or otherwise thinks it's pure gibberish. Japanese is not my native language and I noticed immediately; any native would have too. The problem is that…

That is assuming they tried to write their own TTS instead of just taking an existing, working English TTS and speed it up and distort it. Why would they do that?

To me it does sound exactly like that too in English.

I'd wager it's more obvious in the Japanese version because Japanese is the exceptional language. There are only 44 syllables in Japanese (English has about 16,000) and one would probably still notice this in otherwise unintelligible distorted speech.

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