Speculation: English Localization Issues?

[MGWSpike]

Thanks for posting this. I remember reading an article on MGS1's translator and Kojima's falling out with them after release as he was unhappy with the "changes" he made. I can understand Kojima's position on it

Kojima can adopt a really hard stance on translations. I remember when his blog was translated into English and there was one article where he wrote something along the lines of "Now my thoughts are chewed on, digested and spit back in English".

Metal Gear Sold 1's coma line is perplexing indeed.  I can accept that the change was made for dramatic effect the first time around.  However, the line was retained in Twin Snakes, despite having an (allegedly) more accurate translation.  Indeed, many lines that were inventions of the original localization were deleted.  But why was the revisionist notion of Big Boss's coma retained?  Did Kojima actually like that detail and insist on keeping it?  Did the Twin Snakes' translation team get lazy and copied from the original translation?  As that game never had a Japanese audio track, it's harder to know for sure.  Perhaps a very patient bilingual person can read TTS's Japanese subtitles for that scene to verify?

Of course, by the time we actually do see Big Boss enter a coma in MGSV - it's certainly well after the cloning had already happened.  So it still doesn't align with what Liquid says in the English dialogue.  MGSV also features characters that posit that the English language itself is parasitic.  That that game of all games would depict an event similar to one introduced in the English localization of a Japanese game - that can't be a coincidence can it?  It's quite meta.  Spurious information introduced by a translator 'infected' the canon later on.

IIRC Marc Laidlaw (who translated Policenauts in English and acted as a co-translator for Ground Zeroes and Master Collection Vol. 1) explained that the original Japanese line is something like "But an injury father sustained in combat left him unable. So they created us from his cells… " It's implied to mean "unable to procreate" (= sterile) but Jeremy Blaustein understood it as "unable to do anything" (= in a coma).

There's also another possibility: Jeremy Blaustein was given a series of files (character biographies, artworks, ...) by the dev team to help him translate the game. These files contained info not found in the game itself. For example, Big Boss being a 3rd generation Japanese-American was mentioned in these files as well as in the official guidebook. So it's possible a coma event was mentioned in these and Blaustein thought the line was alluding to it.

There's also the Shalashaska misromanization (it should be "Sharashka") that gets a fix in the English dub of TPP.