Comments on: First-draft Asian translations are in.

By: Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 01:56:14 +0000

Not sure how princess was rendered in the original game, but Super Princess Peach was all katakana.
It looks like the older games called her Peach Hime, but later games may have begun using katakana instead. Hard to tell from a quick scan of Wikipedia.
It appears the line “our princess is in another castle” was actually always in English, even in the Japanese version of the game.

By: Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:10:37 +0000

All languages are built into the game, and you can switch between them when you start it up.

With the xbox version, the console has a global language setting, and the game just follows that. So whatever language the xbox is in, the game will be in.

By: Chen

Chen — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:59:01 +0000

Chinese one looks alright, as far as I can tell.

I’ve never played a Chinese version of Super Mario Bros (is there even one?). So I’m not exactly sure if people will get that reference. As for me, I didn’t get it, sorry ;).

Will the original english script be available for reference?

By: Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 02:26:25 +0000

Yeah, exactly. (The two characters you mention are the most extreme case in this screenshot, but the spacing is totally wack in general). I need to write some new code in order to decode one of the tables in the font to look up the positioning info, or something like that. I don’t understand TrueType fonts very well so it’s hard to know, exactly.

Really, the “Princess” in this case is a reference to the Super Mario Bros princess (and the ones in all the subsequent games), and it makes me wonder how those games wrote it…

By: Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:22:20 +0000

Is kerning why the fourth hiragana and the first kanji appear almost on top of each other?

And yeah, you could translate monster and princess, but I suspect using katakana would be more common, particularly with games. Partly because we are talking about the Western notion of what those words mean…

By: Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 04:35:00 +0000

Do the Japanese really drop into Katakana that readily? Writing out “Tim” seems natural, but I swear I can read “Monster” and “Princess” in there. Weird. (I had a semester of Japanese in school 16 years ago and threads of it are still hanging on.)