Metal Gear Misconceptions?

[NateDog]

The Coma problem:

English language versions of Metal Gear Solid 1 (and I think, all languages other than Japanese?) contain dialogue by Liquid where he claims that Big Boss was cloned while he was comatose following combat injuries.  This led to much confusion when MGSV's coma plot was revealed - since it happened a few years after the cloning had already happened.  As it turns out, in the original Japanese version, Liquid says nothing at all about a coma, merely that Big Boss was sterile and could not have children naturally.

While this line was apparently the invention of a very - inventive - localization process, this does raise further questions.  The Twin Snakes was given a fresh translation.  Indeed, there is no Japanese VO for that version at all, it's in English even in Japan (much like the Integral version of MGS1).  While the script is allegedly much closer to the original (some nice additions like Wolf's "love letter" line are gone), somehow the coma line is still in there.  Did Kojima mandate that the change be retained?  Or did the Twin Snakes team get lazy and copy from the original version?  I don't know if the Japanese subtitles for Integral or Twin Snakes reflect the coma line or not.

When Skull Face muses about English being akin to a parasitic infection - in the same game that features Big Boss in a coma - I can't help but wonder if there's some meta symbolism going on.  The idea that the English translation was so prevalent (and indeed, I think most non-Japanese versions use the English script as their basis?) - that the very lore was altered by the translation process is kind of interesting.  Maybe? Possibly?

All I'm saying is - if Delta went to the trouble of correcting Volgin's "Australia" to "Austria,"  if any future MGS1 releases retain the coma line, it's retroactively canon.  Otherwise, it's an error perpetuated by almost all official releases of the game itself.

This is a good one. I remember reading a deep dive into the MGS1 translation story (not sure if it was Eurogamer, feels like the type of article they might have done around the time) and the liberties that the person behind it took and how much of an issue Kojima had with it, resulting in him personally overseeing it in all future works if I'm remembering it correctly? 

It's a difficult one as clearly extra things were thrown in there than should have been, but at the same time translating is a difficult process. MGS1's dialogue feels very different to every other game in the series, to me it feels more natural in the spoken word compared to all future entries and that's a huge part of translating, making something sound as if it had been written for the language it's being translated into. But adding in their own bits and pieces to the dialogue and altering others in ways that deviate from the source material isn't something that should have happened and is clearly what Kojima had such a big issue with. I can understand it of course, but his desire to stick so closely to the Japanese text after that point soes result in some very clunky wording in places.