press start to translate: This is what happens when you let a computer translate a video game?

press start to translate is about the time Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin Google-Translated all of Final Fantasy IV. As expected, the computer's translation made almost zero sense. This book chronicles the worst and most hilarious translation mistakes, all while trying to explain why the machine translator made the choices it did.

You don’t need to be a fan of Final Fantasy to enjoy it – the focus is on all of the silly translations and what went wrong.

What makes things especially interesting is that Clyde did this project just as Google was updating its translation system to use fancy neural network A.I. By sheer luck, he wound up with two separate translations of the game: one before the Google update and one after. Both translations are covered in the book.

• 224 full color pages
• 9" x 6" Paperback
• Dialogue, cutscene, and name mistranslations + what caused them
• The history and original purpose of the project
• The technical development process and the challenges behind the project
• All the real-life surprises that happened after the project went public
• What happens when other games and media get this same treatment