As someone who burns bridges on the regular with his critiques, I’m often asked why I only cover what I dislike.
Usually out of concern, sometimes out of interest.
The boring (but most honest) answer would be that I’m unfortunately not easy to impress. There’s no one in particular I look up to in our field.
I’m not exactly the most positive guy - shocker, I know -, but I do like certain stuff. It’s just that most of my followers didn’t exactly come to hear me glaze long gone literary translators.
In effect, that means only the excellent and the horrendous of my particular speciality are worth spending my time and attention covering, and nothing else in the grand valley in-between.
And in this continued absence of excellence, I guess I’ll take the horrendous.
But there’s another reason I rarely mention, a parallel extreme I can’t help but dread falling into—that of ‘toxic positivity’, the horseshoe inverse to my approach to analysis.
I’d define toxic positivity as undue gassing up.
- A: Either because the praiser doesn’t exactly have a refined enough palate to determine what’s impressive and what’s so-so / okay.
- B: Or because the praiser is just going through the motions to please an in-group, a.k.a. ‘virtue signaling’ in less clinical terms.
While not exactly an abstract concept - you’ve thought of a couple of examples, I bet -, here’s a demonstration:
For me, for Arabic loc actually, the most common victim of ‘A’ would be Assassin’s Creed Mirage. A genuinely okay translation marred by an aggressive local pandering campaign, leading to people conflating excellent ‘representation quality’ with excellent ‘localization quality’.
It’s that one game where my immediate impression of someone’s praise for its loc’s depth and richness is thinking “wow, they’d sink in a puddle”.
The go-to pick in top Arabic localizations of all time lists when someone needs to hit a word count quota.
The subject of waaaaaaay too many mini case studies by people who desperately want you to think they know what they’re talking about.
As for ‘B’, the comically bad English localizations of the 90s and early 00s come to mind. You know the ones. The ones where the Japanese script is inappropriately touched until it’s a hollow shell of its former self and/or burgerized to high hell for Western market appeal.
Pretty much everything that could be said about those, good or bad, was said. Probably thrice.
I cannot think of a bigger waste of time than ‘delving’ into these relics of a thankfully bygone localization era to show people you ‘get it’—especially while walking on eggshells, not to upset the possibly still active and possibly still influential old-guard or their devoted followers.
Whatever lane of toxic positivity one falls into, it doesn’t really matter. It kind of just makes your milquetoast takes worthless to anyone whose opinion of them matters.
By Seif Chaib.
Originally posted on Linkedin.