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Honestly, the line kinda sounds out of place in the Japanese, if I insert it into the dump where I find the "Oh, this is..." line; although my dump may have things out of order.

It's not out of place in the scene. In this scene, Locke's just told Edgar and company he knows that the Empire is poised to attack because he's got Celes with him. He starts to say that she's an imperial general, and only says half of the Japanese word for 'general' before he stops himself--as though he's realized that's not wise to say.

Immediately after, Cyan starts slinging insults at Celes, identifies her as the person who led the attack on Maranda, and appears to set up to attack her. Locke interposes himself and says the bit about not abandoning someone he's promised to defend. Terra identifies herself as a former Imperial, and Edgar makes a point about the Empire being bad, but that this doesn't apply to all its people. At that point, Sabin jumps in and says this line--so in that context, he's asking Cyan not to follow through with that intent and defer to Edgar as leader, i.e., to listen to Edgar and take the ladies at their word.

Perhaps "Oh, this is..." might be an attempt on Woolsey's part to set up an introduction of Cyan, but it doesn't fit the situation, and there's no reason I can perceive not to finish it up: "Oh, this is Cyan; he's from Doma, etc., etc."

Naturally, you can headcanon any of this any way you prefer, but the Japanese line makes sense in the context of the scene in Japanese. Slattery also restores the scene to general sense-making in the GBA release, though we don't get some of the nuance in the Japanese line:

Quote (Slattery)

Locke: Celes here was one of the Empire's gener--
Cyan: So it is her! I thought she looked familiar. Sir Gau, step aside!
Cyan: The infamous General Celes... The woman single-handedly responsible for the decimation of Maranada... Stand and meet thy judgment, Imperial b--
Locke: Wait! Celes has promised to join the Returners! She's fighting on our side now!
Cyan: Be that as it may...!
Locke: I promised I'd protect her, and I won't give up a woman I've sworn to protect!
Edgar: Locke... You still haven't gotten over that, have you...?
Terra: I was also an Imperial soldier.
Cyan: WHAT!?
Edgar: The Empire is evil, but that doesn't mean that all of its citizens are.
Sabin: I'm going to have to defer to my brother on this one...

As to how the text is arranged in a ROM dump, I wouldn't know, but as it stands, the script itself flows well.

This post has been edited by ChickenFriedChocobo on 1st June 2014 05:11

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Zephir, to be honest most of what you wrote went over my head. I've never really studied linguistics, so my knowledge of languages comes mostly from personal experience. I would respond to one thing you said though:

Quote (Zephir @ 31st May 2014 20:46)

Most of what you'll read in textbooks, by the way, is an effort to standardize the language, and often comes down from second speakers of the language. 

With certain languages, like Spanish and French, the standardization of the language comes from formal government sanctioned academies, like the Real Academia Española. English and, to my knowledge, German don't have an equivalent institution.

Quote (ChickenFriedChocobo)

Do you see the casting pose that Sabin assumes there, with his hands/fists together? I'm going to field a guess that this is intended to be him putting his palms together, or a similar gesture, which is Japanese body language for...pleading?

Really?! Because that sprite pose, IIRC, is the one he uses when defending and preparing to attack. I've always associated it with a battle pose. Which is why in that scene, when he says "Oh, this is..." with no other context, I always assumed he was getting ready to defend Celes if Cyan decided to attack her.

Quote (MetroidMorphBall)

Really?! Because that sprite pose, IIRC, is the one he uses when defending and preparing to attack. I've always associated it with a battle pose. Which is why in that scene, when he says "Oh, this is..." with no other context, I always assumed he was getting ready to defend Celes if Cyan decided to attack her.

It does indeed seem to be his casting sprite. The 'ready for battle/prepare to attack' sprite seems to be different, as seen here.

On the seventh row, the "in battle"' section, the first sprite is neutral battle formation. The second is, IIRC, the prepared-to-attack sprite, and the third is his casting sprite. So it would seem to me that, since this scene uses his casting sprite and not his prepared-to-attack sprite, he's not assuming a defensive pose. Rather, he's doing something like what the sprite suggests: putting his hands together, which could be interpreted as Sabin pleading with Cyan or otherwise asking him for a favor.

That's what I gather, in any case, and that will naturally shape my interpretation of the scene.

As a kid, I tried to figure out what "Oh, this is..." meant, and the best I could ever come up with was that Sabin was trying to say something like, "Oh, this is just ridiculous." But in consideration of the Japanese line, I really do favor the pleading gesture idea. Naturally, nobody's obliged to agree with me, but it is what I see there, for the reasons I outlined.

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Quote (ChickenFriedChocobo @ 1st June 2014 21:47)

As a kid, I tried to figure out what "Oh, this is..." meant, and the best I could ever come up with was that Sabin was trying to say something like, "Oh, this is just ridiculous." But in consideration of the Japanese line, I really do favor the pleading gesture idea. Naturally, nobody's obliged to agree with me, but it is what I see there, for the reasons I outlined.

I'd always tried to interpret Sabin's line as something akin to "oh, well this is awkward", as a result of having no additional knowledge to work from. Knowing what I now do from this thread about the Japanese text and the context which I may not have clocked originally, I think I'm very much in agreement with this pleading theory. That being said, Woolsey's translation to "oh, this is..." is utterly atrocious at conveying this sentiment, to the extent that I'd argue he misinterpreted the whole scene.

Quote (Zephir @ 1st June 2014 05:46)

The truth is that what they taught you in school is only correct in that it's the way it's taught; you're not beholden to those rules in order to be clearly understood.

Whilst it's abundantly clear that my linguistic knowledge is vastly inferior to yours - I've only got passing abilities in more than my native tongue and sadly my teachers weren't as hot on the linguistic or grammatical elements as I'd have truly liked - I'm struggling to accept some of your assertions. I understand your point that even if you muddle the SVO ordering in a given sentence for most languages, a fluent listener will still comprehend your meaning; but I can't see that such comprehension allows for the muddled attempt to be correct.

To me it seems like you're saying speaking broken English is as correct as speaking fluent English, as long as the meaning can be inferred. Yeah, sure, it'll do (which is why I get by in German), and only an arse would be obstinate enough to feign a lack of understanding; but surely it's still incorrect, technically?

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Quote (Stiltzkin)

I'd always tried to interpret Sabin's line as something akin to "oh, well this is awkward", as a result of having no additional knowledge to work from. Knowing what I now do from this thread about the Japanese text and the context which I may not have clocked originally, I think I'm very much in agreement with this pleading theory. That being said, Woolsey's translation to "oh, this is..." is utterly atrocious at conveying this sentiment, to the extent that I'd argue he misinterpreted the whole scene.

This and several other places in Woolsey where the ball isn't just dropped, but seems to be absent entirely, left me puzzled as a kid. Like Relm's complaining about being hot in Thamasa after the big scene with Kefka is over. It's not about Relm: it's, as Slattery correctly assigns the line, about Locke and Celes. Relm is being Relm and, like the kid she is, blurting out an observation while the two heroes in question are having a moment but trying to keep things subtle. The awkward reaction the other characters give is directed at Relm's faux pas rather than any reaction to her complaining about the temperature. But for whatever reason, Woolsey seems to have translated the line literally.

From what I have read, Woolsey translated the script from a ROM dump, and he claimed that text was out of order and de-contextualized in places there. This would appear to lend credence to what Zephir said about the fact that when he plugged the correct line for Sabin at Narshe into his dump script, it didn't seem to line up. However, I've never looked at a ROM dump script before, so I can't say. Woolsey, however, did claim, according to one source I read some time back, that this was the source of the awkward pronoun swap on Shadow in one scene or another--that is, since Japanese only very infrequently uses the equivalents of 'he/him' or she/her,' he had nothing to go on in the line and made a guess, since the English line did require a pronoun.

Regarding sentence structure and word order, it seems Zephir has his opinion. I tend to disagree, in that an exception--or a variety of exceptions--being valid or comprehensible does not, insofar as I'm aware, negate the general presence of a standard or the utility of having that standard. If that were the case, English, being the bastard child of the language world that it is, would have long ago been declared unlearnable and unteachable.

There are variant Englishes in the Anglophone world where certain patterns do deviate, and whether these are wrong or just variants or dialects is a source of a great deal of debate. During my MA, we debated the concept a lot, as there has been a tendency toward approaching English writing instruction in terms of right and wrong. Standard Academic English is its own peculiar subset of the language, and really, nobody talks like an English paper--not even we recovering English majors do so.

But as it's accepted as a standard and codified in a variety of style manuals, it's used as a yardstick by which to judge what people write. My approach with folks who were having a hard time with it was typically to explain it as a standard in the name of maximum comprehensibility: you've got people all over the world who speak English. Local variations may not carry over between populations, so to make sure you're widely understood, it's useful to know this standard. Whether the standard became a standard ethically (considering that it was, largely, the writing and speaking style of the ruling class and, in the case of colonized places, of the conquering power) is entirely another debate. That's not official explanation as far as I know, but the 'think of it as a tool in your toolbox and don't feel obliged to use it where it wouldn't be useful' approach seemed to be successful in helping students with their work in the sphere of academia.

As to word order itself, it's worth considering that English nouns do not change in form to indicate whether they're subjects or objects, except in certain cases like pronouns, which can vary depending on whether they function as subjects (performing an action) or objects (having an action performed on them) in a sentence. For instance, he does things, but things are done to him. Most other nouns, regardless of subject or object status, don't change, so word order is important in understanding which noun in a sentence functions in which capacity.

For instance:

The cat ate the rat.
The rat ate the cat.

In this case, 'the cat' and 'the rat' function as both subjects and objects in the same form. It's also impossible to discern, without additional context, whether one of these sentences might be inverted (say, object-verb-subject) for poetic effect. Thus, we have to rely on the word order, so we know that in the first sentence, the cat performed the act of eating, and the rat was eaten. In the second, however, the rat performed the act of eating, and the cat was eaten.

In languages where subjects and objects are marked, some switching can be done without confusion. In Japanese, this is most often done for emphasis. Back a few posts, where MetroidMorphBall asked me about a line from Zyuranger, the object of the sentence was presented before the subject, but both were clearly marked by marker particles. The direct object of the sentence (the rangers) was followed by を (wo; pronounced o), which identified it as a direct object. The subjects of the sentence (Tottopatto and Bukkubakku, the monsters) were followed by, IIRC, the particle が (ga), which, along with は (ha; pronounced wa), can be used to mark sentence subjects when they are not understood (and therefore omitted). In that case, there was no need to add to the sentence to clarify the relationship, because a combination of marker particles and sentence order made it clear.

English doesn't have such marker particles, nor do most English nouns change depending on usage, so to get the same effect, we have to change the verb around a bit in the translation or shuffle the word order or content to make the meaning clear, so (to broadly paraphrase)...

The rangers are gonna get defeated by Bukkubakku and Tottopatto! (Get defeated by, as opposed to defeat, makes the relationship clear.)
Tottopatto and Bukkubakku are gonna defeat the rangers! (Word order is changed to clarify relationship.)
We're gonna defeat you guys! (Nouns changed to pronouns and word order changed to clarify.)

...and so on.

So while there are indeed exceptions to word order rules, comprehension in large swaths of the language does rely on them, so I respectfully contend, linguistic credentials or no, that the presence of an exception does not invalidate a pattern. YMMV.

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Quote (ChickenFriedChocobo @ 2nd June 2014 01:49)

Paragraphs on word order

This is pretty much what I was trying to express, though obviously without the benefit of having taken my linguistic studies to degree-level. So, um, yeah...what ChickenFriedChocobo said...

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Quote (Stiltzkin)

This is pretty much what I was trying to express, though obviously without the benefit of having taken my linguistic studies to degree-level.

I thought we were probably on the same page. And FWIW, I'm not credentialed in any way in linguistics. My only formal training in that area was one class in the fall semester of 1999. Through work, though, I've spent a good deal of time working with ESL/E2L tutoring and instruction methods stuff, so I have a bit of experience in seeing common errors that are made because, say, someone attempts to transfer his or her knowledge about one language over to another, or because things that would normally help the learner understand how a word functions in his or her first language are different or not present in English.

And certainly people are going to have varying opinions on things. I thought Zephir brought up some good points, and I learned some things I didn't otherwise know, of which I'm quite appreciative. I just disagree with him here based on my own studies and experiences. But that happens all the time with academic subjects. Even the most supposedly cut and dried things are, more often than not, not far removed from a barroom brawl behind the scenes. (Just a very...dignified brawl, with fancy words and long bibliographies )

Maybe it's not unlike fandom in that regard?

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Quote (ChickenFriedChocobo @ 1st June 2014 12:47)

It does indeed seem to be his casting sprite. The 'ready for battle/prepare to attack' sprite seems to be different, as seen here.

Huh, looks like you're right. It's a subtle difference but that looks to be his casting pose. I guess in that case it would be more an attempt at pleading. I never could understand why Sabin was putting his fists up and getting ready to fight Cyan, and now I know why...he wasn't! Like you said though, not much in the range of motions with the sprites. It's remarkable Square was able to make them as emotive as they did though, especially in comparison to other spirte-based games at the time.

Quote (MetroidMorphBall @ 2nd June 2014 16:45)

It's remarkable Square was able to make them as emotive as they did though, especially in comparison to other spirte-based games at the time.

That's one of the things I've long enjoyed about VI: despite the significant limitations on what the sprites could do, there was enough range that a lot of emotion could be, if not directly expressed, at least suggested in a way that was easy to pick up on. It's surprising what something as simple as a downward look, a blink, or a glance off to the side can add to the dialogue.

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