XSEED didnt even make the change. The developers made it after it was brought to their attention. If people want to cry about artistic freedom then I don’t understand the problem with letting the original creator change it how they see fit. The devs realized it made an unintentional reference and changed to not make…

Precisely. Correct localization is to remove the KKK, as that wasn’t the intent. And doing so does in fact “aid the player’s comprehension,” as the player won’t get confused by subtext that isn’t intended/is irrelevant.

A sign in the original Japanese version of the game read “KKK witches,” a play on the phrase.

Doesn’t seem that dumb if the creators didn’t originally intend to reference the Ku Klux Klan with their parody of NHK. Something like DEF(to parody ABC) would work better.

Do I agree with him? Yes. This change is dumb.

I’m sorry but this guy seems like the biggest myopic idiot on the planet. Taking a stand...hah. Company decided they had a different aesthetic taste than his for a situation in game, this is not a situation in which “taking a stand” is called for. Like, did this guy go directly from the womb to this job or what?

Acquire wrote it as “KKK” without intending to make a reference to the American KKK, changing it from that is actually a good localization choice. To keep it “KKK” would have introduced a meaning to the phrase that wasn’t in the original language and that the original developers didn’t intend.

Lipschultz knows that the removal of “KKK witches” from Akiba’s Beat is “insignificant,” and indeed, one might wonder whether this is really the place to take such a stand. But, he says, his dramatic gesture was inspired by the well-trod Evelyn Beatrice Hall quote, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to…

XSEED (sans Lipschultz) e-mailed Acquire asking what originally inspired the sign. Ken Berry, XSEED’s executive vice president, helped explain what the letters meant in the U.S. “Acquire immediately responded that they had no idea the sign could be taken that way in English,” Berry told me in an e-mail.

This is a stupid hill to die on.

I think a lot of claims of censorship could be boiled down to people not accepting that they’re not as funny as they think

I think I lost a few brain cells reading this. It’s not like the game was even making a joke about the KKK that was being censored. It was literally just an unfortunate acronym that has different meaning here. Hell, leaving it as KKK and giving the joke a different meaning actually changes the vision of the game…

But he was the one who made the joke. The Japanese did not make the joke involving the KKK, the translator did. They’re saying “no, you can’t make that joke based on your interpretation of the translation.”

Yeah but, he might have thought KKK witches was funny, but that wasn’t the original intent of the Japanese version. It was just a way to avoid a copywrite.

A localizer is mad that something got localized? I, ah... got... nothing.

Good grief. That’s why it’s called localization and not translation. Though translation is in fact involved, localizing something for a different market or culture usually requires some degree of change due to things being seen or understood differently by different groups of people.

“I wanted to make a statement,” localization specialist Tom Lipschultz wrote in an e-mail. “I don’t think it’s right to make any change, no matter how minor, for the purpose of ‘sanitizing’ a game.”

This sounds less like censorship and more like a translator taking liberties that he happens to find funny. And then getting upset when other people didn’t agree with him.

Well at least the weebs will have something different to cry about other than molesting/undressing/romancing underage anime girls.