Why burn?
>>11101135Why not?
That puzzled me for a long time until I figured out that it's engrish for wyvern.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzrDpj6M1ig
>fight mud golem>"Mad Man"I can't find a screenshot because they're erasing our culture
>>11101135The solution to this is to have the monsters' pictures available as you are translating them. Load up the bestiary in a JP copy of the game if you have to.>t.fan troonslator who knows
>>11101957Maybe, but a lot of these people in the early days had no knowledge of mythology or fantasy anyway. They were businessmen trying to make a buck reselling gook toys to kids.
>>11102581is this supposed to be Rafflesia? lol
>>11102581La Fleshia… caramba…….
>went for years not realizing that "Laglace" was supposed to be "LaGlace">thought "Laglace" must have been something else in-universe like a flower or something and pronounced exactly as it looks, lag+lace and not "la glass"
>>11102615also me:>dekinai me unaware of common Japanese mis-translations and mis-transliterations thought that "x Blessing" sounded cool>never even crossed my mind that it was supposed to be "Breath"During my own translation work now, I am sometimes tempted to keep a list of interesting "wrong-but-sounds-cool/interesting" shit like this to do something similar on purpose, though it would gnaw at my soul a little.
>>11102631>I am sometimes tempted to keep a list of interesting "wrong-but-sounds-cool/interesting" shit like this to do something similar on purposeI unironically keep a list of cool-sounding Engrish phrases, for the same reason.Like you said, sometimes translation/transliteration errors end up sounding weirdly cool. Also, Japs have this thing where they name things by combining random English words that sound cool together - doesn't matter if the result makes sense or not. Some of that stuff is absolute word diarrhea that only sounds cool to Japs, but some of it sounds weirdly cool to fluent English speakers as well. If western developers adopted that kind of mindset and freedom then there would be a lot fewer games out there with forgettable, generic titles.
>>11101140wtf
>>11103083sovl… lvdo…
>>11103083This one's correct.
>>11101135It's a Monk
>>11101135>>11103083>>11104121FF5 didnt get realeased in the west...?
>>11104127It did on the ps1
>>11102581Lufia 2 has a lot of these:Waiban (see >>11101140), Gorem, Hidora, Jurahan...>>11101963Yeah, if you're not familiar with mythology, I get how you can have them wrong.
>>11101135It was good to burn.
Y naut
>starts appearing after the little girl joins the partyCurious.
>>11104151Not knowing what a wyvern is is like not knowing what a fairy is, it's basic knowledge.
>>11104232To be fair pop culture keeps mixing them up with dragons, eroding people’s ability to know the difference
>>11102631>never even crossed my mind that it was supposed to be "Breath"You think that's bad? FFT mistranslated Breath as Bracelet.I only learned this from an anon here recently. Zeikfried is obviously meant to be Siegfried, but Tuvai is meant to be Zwei, which in Japanese is written as ツヴァイ, or Tsubai. This I can forgive to an extent, being that Zwei is a German word. On the subject of Wild Arms, Homunculus was mistranslated as Helmcross.>>11104242Even if you don't keep track of the difference (even in mythology various terms will be used interchangably) you should still know the word at least. You also get things like "Ogre Mage", which is often depicted as a regular ogre with magic powers, but in D&D where the term originates from, it's the "English" term used to describe an Oni.
>>11104249Katakana mis-reads and misinterpretations are one thing and can happen to anyone, which is why I like to have a friend review long item/enemy name lists as a sanity check so that "translation-blindness" doesn't get the better of me.What's more interesting to look at is legitimate translation errors and figure out how they were made in the first place. Just as with mis-transliterated item/enemy names, sometimes you wind up with some fascinating stuff that, while bad by any objective measure, could be construed as better in its own way despite coming out of nowhere and not being appropriate.
>>11104268Phantasy Star 2 says that Nei can't be revived because they can only revive humans. This is a massive error but still understandable, in the JP version the clone lab grandma says that Nei's body has been so badly destroyed they can't extract enough human matter to cultivate a clone.
>>11104268That's a beautiful font
>>11104528More interesting is that they misinterpreted 大地 as 台地, and subsequently この上 to mean LITERALLY above rather than "at this point..."And the whole bit afterwards where the clone hag acknowledges that Nei lived a short life sounds a bit more personal there (I suppose if Nei spent all 2 years of her life in Paseo, she would know her and Rolf's situation at least a bit, hm?), where the English version skips out on it and makes the whole exchange sound like a "cheer up pal!" with a pat on the back, as if the clone hag gives no shits and is just sending them out the door. Maybe she really doesn't give a shit and is just saying whatever, but at least her Japanese version has some semblance of humanity abouther.
>>11104574Fucked up my screencap collection though, here's a corrected English side.>>11104568Camelot were the only ones based enough to roll with nice looking italic pixel fonts for some reason, and it's a shame.While not italic, PS1-era Lunar 1 and 2 use a very pleasant serif font that is much nicer on the eyes than MS Mincho and variants. It looks to be perhaps a modified version of Times New Roman, but there are enough significant differences that I think it's bespoke.
>>11104578And to keep the post on topic while providing an example, here is a moment where Vic Ireland/Working Designs actually tried instead of inserting memes and dated jokes.As a translation word-for-word it is still a failure, BUT it's a great approach to the ○○まで construction common in Japanese, which you see fumbled and awkwardly rendered all the time just about everywhere else.
>>11104249Probably the worst (and to be honest, kinda understandable) one to me is the weapon "Figgoru" from Lufia 2 because for the longest time I had no idea just what the hell it was supposed to mean and be.Turns out it's a combination of "Orgel" and the game's confuse spell called "Fig" and the translator probably just went "fuck this shit" and gave up.The fan retranslation went with "Confusic Box".
I'm sure most are aware of this, butBastard Sword -> Buster SwordBarrier Suit -> Varia Suit
>>11102631Dullahan's is funniest>Fulminous Edge is translated as "Formina Sage"
>>11104875Nah, Buster is correct in the sense of "destroying". Buster is written as バスター while Bastard is written as バスタード.
>>11105012He probably thinks Rockman's weapon is the Rock Bastard.
FFV Succubi are a bit different.How does something like this even happen? The enemy's supposed to be called Wyrm (ウィルム ). There's not a single succubus-type enemy in the game so it's not like they got its name mixed up with something else either.
>>11105675Translator must've REALLY liked green dragons
>>11101135This one wasn't Woolsey, right? Didn't he start a rough translation when there were plans to release FF5 as FF Extreme or whatever?
>>11105981Not sure if there's actual hard proof that it is the Woolsey scrapped script, or if it's just something people assumed to be true and pulled out of their ass. But it's the prevailing theory at the very least.
>>11101140But there's enough character space to spell wyvern though.
>>11104249speaking of bracelets>van burace
>>11107814The translator didn't know the katakana meant wyvern or didn't know wyvern was a word.
>>11107814There was enough space for Tonberry too, and yet >>11103083
>>11107848Most people believe wyvern is pronounced "wivern" is the likely problem.
>>11107862Considering how wivern is one spelling of it and how wyrm is pronounced it doesn't surprise me.
>>11107872The thing is, Woolsey had no trouble with Wyvern in FFVI SNES.I suspect that what Woolsey had his hands on, if anything, was only the main scenario text, and other text such as enemy names/item names/skill names and so forth may have been handled by someone else after the fact, as quite often these are in separate areas of the ROM and are handled "in bulk."
