6 ms·

How the famous “comfy shorts” quote worked in Japanese Pokémon (2018)

117 points by nafnlj 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
torben-friis 4y ago
It’s funny that this line is considered famous as a borderline mistranslation… it shows that English got it relatively easy. I remember playing FFVII in Spanish as a kid, and I cried with laughter at times. - people talked to Barret using female pronouns half the time. - Barret constantly mentioned he was cold (in the English version he used “cool” as an expression and it was translated literally). - NPCs talked about savepoints as if they were a person called Point Saving. - characters were constantly celebrating things (party was translated as celebration rather than as “your group of people”). - the mayor of a city was called the City’s largest. (Bad translation from “major” I guess).
- anthk 4y ago
  Nowadays you'll find patches to fix that.
- scubbo 4y ago
  > Cloud "Barrett, be careful!" > "Attack while it's tail's up!" > "It's gonna counterattack with its laser."
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  > Barret constantly mentioned he was cold (in the English version he used “cool” as an expression and it was translated literally). Oh no, was the Spanish translation a "retranslation" from Japanese to English to Spanish?
  - rootsudo 4y ago
    Probably, but it's a very basic beginners mistake. If you used a dictionary and are on a time limit, I can see it happening.
  - wodenokoto 4y ago
    That’s very normal. Lots of Manga is translated from German for the smaller markets in Europe.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- astrange 4y ago
  FFVII's old English translation was also very bad; it was done in a week or two by a native Japanese speaker. LoL has only analyzed older games, but there's a long (Tim Rogers, so very long) video series about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCeN2KjRHZk&list=PLsiJPoHlPqEEA07AKMQ2Hm2oRLiGkR_uJ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCeN2KjRHZk&list=PLsiJPoHlPq...
  - atoav 4y ago
    Depends on the kind of translation style. I guess the goal of a game translation like that is not primarily to do a faithful translation, but one that fits the target market. This must not necessarily be bad, and can sometimes be a chance. E.g. the German translation of Donald duck pocket books has so much more depth and literary quality than the english originals that the translator herself has her own memorial and grammatic term in Germany¹. Translations that make things worse are the rule, but it is not impossible to create translations that makes things better, especially if the text quality in the original is lacking involuntarily itself. --- ¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs
    - bombcar 4y ago
      The various translations of the Asterix comics have to undergo similar machinations, because they basically have to invent new puns to replace the ones in French.
      - masklinn 4y ago
        That issue famously occurs for Discworld translation, and very much separates the good translations from the bad ones.
    - masklinn 4y ago
      > I guess the goal of a game translation like that is not primarily to do a faithful translation, but one that fits the target market. An other issues especially for older games was technical limitations: the devs might have squeezed the game content to fit within e.g. cart limits, and the translation would be bound to that regardless of the langage’s “density”. A similar issue occurs with comics / mangas: speech bubbles might be tight fit for the original and require significantly altering font and size for translations to fit. Not to mention sfx.
franciscop 4y ago
I'd add a note or two here about how homogeneous the Japanese society is, where everyone "decent" wears a suit, and it was surely even more 30 years ago when pokemon was released. So someone with shorts on the street was probably considered much more of a rebel (a youngster) than today/in the west.
- fenomas 4y ago
  The NPC here is a little kid, so short pants would be standard both then and now.
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    Yup. Shorts, especially yellow ones, are the standard uniform for elementary schoolers, and this is one reason adults rarely wear them in Japan.
stock_toaster 4y ago
The “smell ya later!” article is good too. https://legendsoflocalization.com/qa-smell-ya-later-pokemon/ https://legendsoflocalization.com/qa-smell-ya-later-pokemon/
- bitwize 4y ago
  "Abayo" is often used in Japanese as a flippant, dismissive goodbye, so "smell ya later" is actually a pretty good translation. The Zuiikin English series famously translated "hasta la vista, baby" as a simple "abayo": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ol4QQuIqS0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ol4QQuIqS0
memco 4y ago
I think I remember this after reading the article. The most famous translation I could think of is Zero Wing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_.... What other ones do people know of with interesting back story?
- icegreentea2 4y ago
  The SNES Final Fantasy games famously had some translation adventures. FF4 has "You spoony bard!". FF6 had a lot of mature edges smoothed off in translation (as well as more typical translation nuances). Here's an article/interview with the original translator for FF6 (https://www.usgamer.net/articles/ted-woolsey-localization-translator-profile-nintendo-final-fantasy-6 https://www.usgamer.net/articles/ted-woolsey-localization-tr...), and here's a piece (in fact a whole website about game localization...) going through different translations of FF6 (https://legendsoflocalization.com/final-fantasy-vi/ https://legendsoflocalization.com/final-fantasy-vi/)
  - fenomas 4y ago
    Besides "spoony Bard" I think the other most famous one is probably the "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets" line from one of the Castlevanias. Personally I like it, but I guess it's pretty notorious. TFA discusses it here: https://legendsoflocalization.com/lets-investigate-a-miserable-pile-of-secrets/ https://legendsoflocalization.com/lets-investigate-a-miserab...
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  It's still a great video https://youtu.be/qItugh-fFgg https://youtu.be/qItugh-fFgg This happened at the height of "photoshopping", almost like a showcase of the state of the art couched in a meme techno song. Wonder if there will ever be a deepfake equivalent?
  - asddubs 4y ago
    We were always a zero wing rhapsody household https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE6emvdmg-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE6emvdmg-M
userbinator 4y ago
The lines look like this verbatim: たんパンうごきやすくっていいぜ！おまえもはけば？ DeepL translates that into: short pants They're comfortable, too. Why don't you wear them? Removing the linebreaks and spaces results in the slightly more amusing "I love how easy it is to move my shorts! Why don't you wear them too?"
charcircuit 4y ago
Localizers ruin everything. It's best to play in the original language to experience the true version of the game.
- astrange 4y ago
  If you think all Japanese games are well written, it means your Japanese isn't good enough. Square-Enix especially, their games almost all have better scripts in English in Japanese. Which makes sense since they have Western settings; if you're in a "pirate city" like Limsa in FFXIV there's no way to sound "piratey" in Japanese. So they just have no character voice. Actually, this very game was a good example too. Gen 1 Japanese Pokemon names were really lazy - Zapdos and Jolteon are called "Thunder" and "Thunders".
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > Which makes sense since they have Western settings; if you're in a "pirate city" like Limsa in FFXIV there's no way to sound "piratey" in Japanese. Japan has a long native tradition of piracy. They're most of the reason China preferred to ship goods over inland canals instead of along the shore. A historian could probably do a good job coming up with linguistic features in Japanese associated with their historical pirates, but I assume nobody would understand what was meant. But that's more of a fact about modern Western pop culture (pirates are their own genre!) than about piracy as a historical phenomenon. It's not a Western thing, any more than highway robbery is a Western thing.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    I don't care about what is technically better, nor do I think Japanese origin means it is automatically good. I care about the artists' original vision. I am interested in the story that they want to tell. Not the story some localization team wants to tell. >there is no way to sound "piratey" Do they need to sound piratey for me, the player, to know that they are pirates? >Zapdos and Jolteon are called "Thunder" and "Thunders". Is that any less lazy than English names like Seel the seal or Krabby the crab? It doesn't really bother me.
raydiatian 4y ago
Generally speaking, if you’re going to video games for the writing, you’re going to have a bad time. I’m not saying that there aren’t those few unique gems out there, but I haven’t played many games and thought “thank god for these cutscenes”
- raydiatian 4y ago
  Also, let’s be real, English translations of Japanese titles are absolutely the worst offenders. I don’t speak Japanese, so I can’t say whether or not coherent dialogue gets lost in translation but like: Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, literally any JRPG at random. Nobody I know talks like they do in these titles, and I still don’t understand why it’s fashionable to write inane character dialogue like they do in these games.
  - astrange 4y ago
    A lot of it is due to: https://legendsoflocalization.com/redundant-translations-in-games-anime/ https://legendsoflocalization.com/redundant-translations-in-... But no, Hideo Kojima and Tetsuya Nomura are just inane writers and there's a lot of pressure to make games unnecessarily long by padding cutscenes out. The recent FFVII Remake I thought had great writing in both Japanese and English though, which is surprising since I didn't expect it out of that staff.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Traditionally it's because Japanese has far more data per character of text, so a whole sentence couldn't fit in a NES cartridge.
    - fomine3 4y ago
      Such games use only Kana without Kanji, so bit per character is like 7bit Alphabet vs 8bit Kana+Alphabet. It's just(?) 14% increase.
- bentley 4y ago
  I don’t think anyone’s expecting the storytelling in a game aimed for 10‐year‐olds to be amazing. This is Pokémon, not Shadow of the Colossus. The original Pokémon does have a strong aesthetic of its own, coming from director Satoshi Tajiri’s fond memories of catching bugs in childhood.
biophysboy 4y ago
I’ve been learning Japanese for a few years. The basic translation here is close, but it still sorta keeps the non sequitur: they’re nice AND ALSO easy to move in. But these are not meant to be independent statements. Part of the problem is that Japanese does this thing where they label whole statements as “good” with いい. To me, he’s really just saying “it’s great how comfy shorts are!”. If you translate it robotically, he says “speaking of moving easily, shorts are good!” But we don’t judge clothes like this in English, so it’s weird sounding
- Centigonal 4y ago
  so something like "when it comes to moving easily, shorts are good!" ?
- fenomas 4y ago
  TFA's version is right. "Shorts" is the topic word (the topic particle after it is implied), and the "easy to move" and "good" parts both modify "shorts". So robotically, "speaking of shorts, they're easy to move in and good" or the like.
- ramchip 4y ago
  That sounds odd to me. If you say このリュックは大きくて便利 it's clearly the backpack that's convenient, not the statement, so why would 大きくていい be different?
  - biophysboy 4y ago
    I see what you mean. I was stuck on the “って”. I think I misread a bit.
    - mahoho 4y ago
      I think you're correct about the two statements not being completely independent, though. In both the shorts and backpack examples the second adjective is meant as a corollary of (or subordinate to) the first. タンパン（は）よくて動きやすいぜ！ or このリュックは便利で大きい both sound unnatural and it seems to me like the logical relationship between the adjectives is lost. The same grammar could technically be used to combine two independent statements, but the context indicates the (pseudo- ?)dependent interpretation. In English we would just say "Shorts are easy to move around in!" and it wouldn't lose any of the semantic meaning, but I do think TFA's "nice and easy" might preserve some of the "feeling" of the Japanese without sounding unnatural like a word-for-word translation would be. I'm not a native speaker though so I could still be completely wrong.
testmasterflex 4y ago
Didn’t even know the name Pokémon was derived from Pocket Monsters. Makes sense.
- somat 4y ago
  I always got a little bit of inexplicable joy out of how the card game was "pocket monsters"(using latin characters) in Japan and "pokemon" in the US. Was it to appear exotic in both markets? perhaps the respective terms were easier to trademark in each domain. maybe they were a small scrappy game company making it up as they went, there was no real motive behind the names. They just called the english translation what the japanese version was known by at that time.
  - astura 4y ago
    You're overthinking this, abbreviation of loanwords is just what is done in Japanese. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_abbreviated_and_contracted_words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_abbreviated_and_contr...
kurthr 4y ago
Apparently, one of the commonly used Japanese words for a logic gate flip-flop (a beach shoe?), can be written as "bird clapper" (one of those bamboo water fountain features you see in gardens). I think this comes from なるこ in the original text, but my Japanese is minimal. That sounds just sort of non-intuitive, but when reading a patent where the accepted US filing used the word "bird clapper" every time a type of logic gate was intended made reading it initially incomprehensible, then bizarre, and finally hilarious. I've briefly looked at USPT and although I can find references to such phrases in patents, the one I'm looking for appears to have been thankfully fixed.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  Those are called sozu. (添水; might mean something like "water accumulators".) Sozu and clappers are both known by the more generic term of deer scare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_scare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_scare https://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic/bam-boo https://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic/bam-boo But clappers appear to be clappers, not a water feature: https://www.japan-talk.com/jt/new/naruko https://www.japan-talk.com/jt/new/naruko
  - userbinator 4y ago
    The mechanical analogue of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxation_oscillator#Pearson–Anson_oscillator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxation_oscillator#Pearson–...
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      I can see how the sozu is analogous to such an oscillator... but sozu aren't called clappers. The energy a clapper uses comes from you shaking it. There's no buildup and no release.
seanhunter 4y ago
No discussion about bad videogame translations into English would be complete without mentioning "All your base are belong to us" from "Zero Wing"[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us
shever73 4y ago
“Congraturation! You Sucsess!” - Stop The Express, ZX Spectrum, 1983
oli5679 4y ago
The first NPC interaction in Pokémon Blue/Red can remember being a source of amusement for me and my primary school friends. Professor Oak: "This is my grandson. He's been your rival since you were both babies. Erm... what was his name again?" Player: types in a silly/rude name Professor Oak: "Yes! I remember now! His name was (silly/rude name)!" I also remember the rival saying "smell ya later". I wonder if this was in the Japanese version and if it was influenced by Milhouse from the Simpsons.
- ejolto 4y ago
  Looks like the author from the OP has an article about that too [0], and it is not "smell ya later" in the original. It is just a causall goodbye, "Welp, be seein’ ya!". [0]: https://legendsoflocalization.com/qa-smell-ya-later-pokemon/ https://legendsoflocalization.com/qa-smell-ya-later-pokemon/

117 points by nafnlj 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

It’s funny that this line is considered famous as a borderline mistranslation… it shows that English got it relatively easy. I remember playing FFVII in Spanish as a kid, and I cried with laughter at times. - people talked to Barret using female pronouns half the time. - Barret constantly mentioned he was cold (in the English version he used “cool” as an expression and it was translated literally). - NPCs talked about savepoints as if they were a person called Point Saving. - characters were constantly celebrating things (party was translated as celebration rather than as “your group of people”). - the mayor of a city was called the City’s largest. (Bad translation from “major” I guess).

anthk 4y ago
Nowadays you'll find patches to fix that.
scubbo 4y ago
> Cloud "Barrett, be careful!" > "Attack while it's tail's up!" > "It's gonna counterattack with its laser."
jonny_eh 4y ago
> Barret constantly mentioned he was cold (in the English version he used “cool” as an expression and it was translated literally). Oh no, was the Spanish translation a "retranslation" from Japanese to English to Spanish?
- rootsudo 4y ago
  Probably, but it's a very basic beginners mistake. If you used a dictionary and are on a time limit, I can see it happening.
- wodenokoto 4y ago
  That’s very normal. Lots of Manga is translated from German for the smaller markets in Europe.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
astrange 4y ago
FFVII's old English translation was also very bad; it was done in a week or two by a native Japanese speaker. LoL has only analyzed older games, but there's a long (Tim Rogers, so very long) video series about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCeN2KjRHZk&list=PLsiJPoHlPqEEA07AKMQ2Hm2oRLiGkR_uJ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCeN2KjRHZk&list=PLsiJPoHlPq...
- atoav 4y ago
  Depends on the kind of translation style. I guess the goal of a game translation like that is not primarily to do a faithful translation, but one that fits the target market. This must not necessarily be bad, and can sometimes be a chance. E.g. the German translation of Donald duck pocket books has so much more depth and literary quality than the english originals that the translator herself has her own memorial and grammatic term in Germany¹. Translations that make things worse are the rule, but it is not impossible to create translations that makes things better, especially if the text quality in the original is lacking involuntarily itself. --- ¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The various translations of the Asterix comics have to undergo similar machinations, because they basically have to invent new puns to replace the ones in French.
    - masklinn 4y ago
      That issue famously occurs for Discworld translation, and very much separates the good translations from the bad ones.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    > I guess the goal of a game translation like that is not primarily to do a faithful translation, but one that fits the target market. An other issues especially for older games was technical limitations: the devs might have squeezed the game content to fit within e.g. cart limits, and the translation would be bound to that regardless of the langage’s “density”. A similar issue occurs with comics / mangas: speech bubbles might be tight fit for the original and require significantly altering font and size for translations to fit. Not to mention sfx.

franciscop 4y ago

I'd add a note or two here about how homogeneous the Japanese society is, where everyone "decent" wears a suit, and it was surely even more 30 years ago when pokemon was released. So someone with shorts on the street was probably considered much more of a rebel (a youngster) than today/in the west.

fenomas 4y ago
The NPC here is a little kid, so short pants would be standard both then and now.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Yup. Shorts, especially yellow ones, are the standard uniform for elementary schoolers, and this is one reason adults rarely wear them in Japan.

stock_toaster 4y ago

The “smell ya later!” article is good too. https://legendsoflocalization.com/qa-smell-ya-later-pokemon/ https://legendsoflocalization.com/qa-smell-ya-later-pokemon/

bitwize 4y ago
"Abayo" is often used in Japanese as a flippant, dismissive goodbye, so "smell ya later" is actually a pretty good translation. The Zuiikin English series famously translated "hasta la vista, baby" as a simple "abayo": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ol4QQuIqS0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ol4QQuIqS0

memco 4y ago

I think I remember this after reading the article. The most famous translation I could think of is Zero Wing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_.... What other ones do people know of with interesting back story?

icegreentea2 4y ago
The SNES Final Fantasy games famously had some translation adventures. FF4 has "You spoony bard!". FF6 had a lot of mature edges smoothed off in translation (as well as more typical translation nuances). Here's an article/interview with the original translator for FF6 (https://www.usgamer.net/articles/ted-woolsey-localization-translator-profile-nintendo-final-fantasy-6 https://www.usgamer.net/articles/ted-woolsey-localization-tr...), and here's a piece (in fact a whole website about game localization...) going through different translations of FF6 (https://legendsoflocalization.com/final-fantasy-vi/ https://legendsoflocalization.com/final-fantasy-vi/)
- fenomas 4y ago
  Besides "spoony Bard" I think the other most famous one is probably the "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets" line from one of the Castlevanias. Personally I like it, but I guess it's pretty notorious. TFA discusses it here: https://legendsoflocalization.com/lets-investigate-a-miserable-pile-of-secrets/ https://legendsoflocalization.com/lets-investigate-a-miserab...
candiddevmike 4y ago
It's still a great video https://youtu.be/qItugh-fFgg https://youtu.be/qItugh-fFgg This happened at the height of "photoshopping", almost like a showcase of the state of the art couched in a meme techno song. Wonder if there will ever be a deepfake equivalent?
- asddubs 4y ago
  We were always a zero wing rhapsody household https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE6emvdmg-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE6emvdmg-M

userbinator 4y ago

The lines look like this verbatim: たんパンうごきやすくっていいぜ！おまえもはけば？ DeepL translates that into: short pants They're comfortable, too. Why don't you wear them? Removing the linebreaks and spaces results in the slightly more amusing "I love how easy it is to move my shorts! Why don't you wear them too?"

charcircuit 4y ago

Localizers ruin everything. It's best to play in the original language to experience the true version of the game.

astrange 4y ago
If you think all Japanese games are well written, it means your Japanese isn't good enough. Square-Enix especially, their games almost all have better scripts in English in Japanese. Which makes sense since they have Western settings; if you're in a "pirate city" like Limsa in FFXIV there's no way to sound "piratey" in Japanese. So they just have no character voice. Actually, this very game was a good example too. Gen 1 Japanese Pokemon names were really lazy - Zapdos and Jolteon are called "Thunder" and "Thunders".
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > Which makes sense since they have Western settings; if you're in a "pirate city" like Limsa in FFXIV there's no way to sound "piratey" in Japanese. Japan has a long native tradition of piracy. They're most of the reason China preferred to ship goods over inland canals instead of along the shore. A historian could probably do a good job coming up with linguistic features in Japanese associated with their historical pirates, but I assume nobody would understand what was meant. But that's more of a fact about modern Western pop culture (pirates are their own genre!) than about piracy as a historical phenomenon. It's not a Western thing, any more than highway robbery is a Western thing.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  I don't care about what is technically better, nor do I think Japanese origin means it is automatically good. I care about the artists' original vision. I am interested in the story that they want to tell. Not the story some localization team wants to tell. >there is no way to sound "piratey" Do they need to sound piratey for me, the player, to know that they are pirates? >Zapdos and Jolteon are called "Thunder" and "Thunders". Is that any less lazy than English names like Seel the seal or Krabby the crab? It doesn't really bother me.

raydiatian 4y ago

Generally speaking, if you’re going to video games for the writing, you’re going to have a bad time. I’m not saying that there aren’t those few unique gems out there, but I haven’t played many games and thought “thank god for these cutscenes”

raydiatian 4y ago
Also, let’s be real, English translations of Japanese titles are absolutely the worst offenders. I don’t speak Japanese, so I can’t say whether or not coherent dialogue gets lost in translation but like: Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, literally any JRPG at random. Nobody I know talks like they do in these titles, and I still don’t understand why it’s fashionable to write inane character dialogue like they do in these games.
- astrange 4y ago
  A lot of it is due to: https://legendsoflocalization.com/redundant-translations-in-games-anime/ https://legendsoflocalization.com/redundant-translations-in-... But no, Hideo Kojima and Tetsuya Nomura are just inane writers and there's a lot of pressure to make games unnecessarily long by padding cutscenes out. The recent FFVII Remake I thought had great writing in both Japanese and English though, which is surprising since I didn't expect it out of that staff.
- lupire 4y ago
  Traditionally it's because Japanese has far more data per character of text, so a whole sentence couldn't fit in a NES cartridge.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    Such games use only Kana without Kanji, so bit per character is like 7bit Alphabet vs 8bit Kana+Alphabet. It's just(?) 14% increase.
bentley 4y ago
I don’t think anyone’s expecting the storytelling in a game aimed for 10‐year‐olds to be amazing. This is Pokémon, not Shadow of the Colossus. The original Pokémon does have a strong aesthetic of its own, coming from director Satoshi Tajiri’s fond memories of catching bugs in childhood.

biophysboy 4y ago

I’ve been learning Japanese for a few years. The basic translation here is close, but it still sorta keeps the non sequitur: they’re nice AND ALSO easy to move in. But these are not meant to be independent statements. Part of the problem is that Japanese does this thing where they label whole statements as “good” with いい. To me, he’s really just saying “it’s great how comfy shorts are!”. If you translate it robotically, he says “speaking of moving easily, shorts are good!” But we don’t judge clothes like this in English, so it’s weird sounding

Centigonal 4y ago
so something like "when it comes to moving easily, shorts are good!" ?
fenomas 4y ago
TFA's version is right. "Shorts" is the topic word (the topic particle after it is implied), and the "easy to move" and "good" parts both modify "shorts". So robotically, "speaking of shorts, they're easy to move in and good" or the like.
ramchip 4y ago
That sounds odd to me. If you say このリュックは大きくて便利 it's clearly the backpack that's convenient, not the statement, so why would 大きくていい be different?
- biophysboy 4y ago
  I see what you mean. I was stuck on the “って”. I think I misread a bit.
  - mahoho 4y ago
    I think you're correct about the two statements not being completely independent, though. In both the shorts and backpack examples the second adjective is meant as a corollary of (or subordinate to) the first. タンパン（は）よくて動きやすいぜ！ or このリュックは便利で大きい both sound unnatural and it seems to me like the logical relationship between the adjectives is lost. The same grammar could technically be used to combine two independent statements, but the context indicates the (pseudo- ?)dependent interpretation. In English we would just say "Shorts are easy to move around in!" and it wouldn't lose any of the semantic meaning, but I do think TFA's "nice and easy" might preserve some of the "feeling" of the Japanese without sounding unnatural like a word-for-word translation would be. I'm not a native speaker though so I could still be completely wrong.

testmasterflex 4y ago

Didn’t even know the name Pokémon was derived from Pocket Monsters. Makes sense.

somat 4y ago
I always got a little bit of inexplicable joy out of how the card game was "pocket monsters"(using latin characters) in Japan and "pokemon" in the US. Was it to appear exotic in both markets? perhaps the respective terms were easier to trademark in each domain. maybe they were a small scrappy game company making it up as they went, there was no real motive behind the names. They just called the english translation what the japanese version was known by at that time.
- astura 4y ago
  You're overthinking this, abbreviation of loanwords is just what is done in Japanese. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_abbreviated_and_contracted_words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_abbreviated_and_contr...

kurthr 4y ago

Apparently, one of the commonly used Japanese words for a logic gate flip-flop (a beach shoe?), can be written as "bird clapper" (one of those bamboo water fountain features you see in gardens). I think this comes from なるこ in the original text, but my Japanese is minimal. That sounds just sort of non-intuitive, but when reading a patent where the accepted US filing used the word "bird clapper" every time a type of logic gate was intended made reading it initially incomprehensible, then bizarre, and finally hilarious. I've briefly looked at USPT and although I can find references to such phrases in patents, the one I'm looking for appears to have been thankfully fixed.

thaumasiotes 4y ago
Those are called sozu. (添水; might mean something like "water accumulators".) Sozu and clappers are both known by the more generic term of deer scare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_scare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_scare https://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic/bam-boo https://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic/bam-boo But clappers appear to be clappers, not a water feature: https://www.japan-talk.com/jt/new/naruko https://www.japan-talk.com/jt/new/naruko
- userbinator 4y ago
  The mechanical analogue of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxation_oscillator#Pearson–Anson_oscillator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxation_oscillator#Pearson–...
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    I can see how the sozu is analogous to such an oscillator... but sozu aren't called clappers. The energy a clapper uses comes from you shaking it. There's no buildup and no release.

seanhunter 4y ago

No discussion about bad videogame translations into English would be complete without mentioning "All your base are belong to us" from "Zero Wing"[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us

shever73 4y ago

“Congraturation! You Sucsess!” - Stop The Express, ZX Spectrum, 1983

oli5679 4y ago

The first NPC interaction in Pokémon Blue/Red can remember being a source of amusement for me and my primary school friends. Professor Oak: "This is my grandson. He's been your rival since you were both babies. Erm... what was his name again?" Player: types in a silly/rude name Professor Oak: "Yes! I remember now! His name was (silly/rude name)!" I also remember the rival saying "smell ya later". I wonder if this was in the Japanese version and if it was influenced by Milhouse from the Simpsons.

ejolto 4y ago
Looks like the author from the OP has an article about that too [0], and it is not "smell ya later" in the original. It is just a causall goodbye, "Welp, be seein’ ya!". [0]: https://legendsoflocalization.com/qa-smell-ya-later-pokemon/ https://legendsoflocalization.com/qa-smell-ya-later-pokemon/