This policy mainly concerns how to deal with content from Ace Attorney games that have not been released outside of Japan. Because the Ace Attorney games are heavily localized, with characters receiving mostly English names and the setting purportedly being Los Angeles rather than a nameless town in Japan, a clash occurs when content from Japan-only games mixes with other content.
Possible solutions[]
Different video game wikis have taken different approaches to this problem. The Aselia Wiki uses Japanese terms in paragraphs and sections discussing Japanese-only games and Japanese-only releases of games. In contrast, WikiBound fully uses the English terms used by the unofficial translation patch of Mother 3. Different people will have different attitudes toward fan translations and how to treat them with regard to mixing information about them with information from official content. The appropriate action to take can be based on the probability of an official localization, or the developers' awareness and/or approval of the fan work, or the continuity of the franchise canon itself, or other factors. Hard stances that do not sway under any nuances do not help very much because it is difficult to get every possible editor to agree on such positions.
Case study: AAI2[]
With regard to Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Gambit, the Ace Attorney Wiki attempted an approach similar to the Aselia Wiki's, at least for episode articles. The main problem was that the Ace Attorney series deals with a single continuity, making the switch between English and Japanese terms violate the in-universe perspective that pages are supposed to have. At the same time, unlike Mother 3, none of the stances of Capcom or the developers of Prosecutor's Gambit were known concerning fan translations. Moreover, even if Prosecutor's Gambit did not have an official localization, localizations of future games could have localized some otherwise non-localized elements of the game, potentially in conflict with fan translations. Eventually, after several years, the wiki ended up using the names from the unofficial translation patch, as trying not to acknowledge them at all had become a failed and pointless gesture.
To help address this unique situation, the following template was used:
| This article contains information from the unofficial English translation patch for Gyakuten Kenji 2. | |
|---|---|
 Owing to the lack of an official translation of the Japan-only Gyakuten Kenji 2, the information and names in this article come from the unofficial English translation patch known as Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth: Prosecutor's Path. More information on this can be found here. If you have personal experience with the item of media in question, you can help the Ace Attorney Wiki by improving on this article. Please heed the manual of style when adding information. | |
Character names: the placeholder treatment[]
From August 2014 to November 2018, the Ace Attorney Wiki adopted a "placeholder treatment" of non-localized character names. In short, the Japanese names were used as placeholders for hypothetical localized English names. The Japanese names were referred to in content pages the same way as they would be if localized English names existed. As an example of the implications of this treatment, here is an example sentence:
This is an example of the clash between localized canon and original Japanese canon that results from this treatment. As awkward and "wrong" as this sentence looks, in the context of the placeholder treatment it is completely correct. In the present day, one could imagine "Amelie Fenn" being where "Ami Aizawa" is.
Other non-localized content[]
For consistency's sake, translations of names that could be translated were encouraged to be derived from the localization patch. Quotes could be translated in any manner, but use of the localization patch or the YouTube translation was preferred. The main things to watch out for were names already in English. For example, the name of the Grand Tower in Japanese is literally "biggu tawa" written in katakana, indicating that it is supposed to be the English words "Big Tower".