Illusion of Gaia Translation Highlights
A look back in confusion
Here’s a highlight of some of the translation issues found in this game.
I. Censorship
Nintendo of America had strict content policies on their games, so they could promise to be family friendly. This game’s censorship came in five general types.
First, religion. Censoring religion doesn’t make a game more family friendly per se, but it was the early 90s, just off the tail end of the satanic panic. Parents boycotted media at the drop of a hat. Game devs had to be sensitive about this stuff.
You get a glimpse of what’s in store right at the start of the game.
Almost every instance of the word 神 (kami) was translated as spirit or spirits, if it was left intact at all. In every instance that I can remember, it’s better translated as god or gods.
The only exception I can think of offhand is a time the game uses the katakana カミ (kami) rather than the kanji. Here, it was actually translated as god:
There’s other censorship. Chapel became shrine in the town of Euro.
In Itory Village, savior or messiah was changed to messenger.
In Mu, the Statue of Prayer and Prayer Room became the Statue of Hope and Room of Hope.
Pray was changed into hope in other places as well.
The Fallen Angel Tribe and Fallen Angel Village became the Angel Tribe and Angel Village.
And the world map that shortened Fallen Angel to Dark Angel was changed as well.
Second, slavery. Basically every instance of ドレイ (dorei - slave) was turned to laborer. Slave trader or slaver became labor trader.
There are far too many of these to cover them all. Occasionally, the religion and slavery censorship brushed against each other:
Third, cannibalism. Every instance of 人食い人種 (hitokuijinshu - cannibals) or direct references to eating people were changed into some nonsense about starvation or hunger. This makes much dialogue in this part of the game nonsensical.
Fourth, alcohol:
Finally, violence and blood.
In one case, censorship of blood obscures a plot point. Specifically, Tim uses his psychic powers to cheat gain a totally fair advantage in Russian Glass. He can plainly see which glass is poisoned, whereas nobody else can:
II. Pronouns
Translating from Japanese causes two common pronoun problems.
The first is far easier to deal with. Much of the time in Japanese, people don’t say you. It’s considered too direct. Instead, they use people’s names, even when speaking directly to them. In English, you have to change all of these to you or it sounds weird.
This game gets it right most of the time. Here are some instances where it didn’t.
Finally, here’s an example where they changed someone’s name to you when they shouldn’t have, because it makes it sound like the wrong person is being addressed:
More common is a harder problem. Japanese frequently leaves pronouns out entirely, forcing the listener or reader to figure out the correct one through context. This game is loaded with examples of incorrect choices:
III. Quotations
A similar problem arises with quotations. Japanese allows you to demarcate something as a quotation without specifying who, exactly, is being quoted. To make things even harder, the same construction can also be used to mean something like that which is X rather than said X. And the translator might miss that the sentence in question is a quotation at all.
Here’s one of those examples where something looks like it was quoted, but it wasn’t:
It’s not 100% clear, but it’s highly likely that Rob himself told Lily where he was going:
This girl in Euro who’s into fortune telling is not a fortune teller herself.
Karen abandons Tim in the Tower of Babel. Her reasoning in the original US translation is that she… heard rumors about a vampire from someone at some point?
IV. Tense and aspect
Tense and aspect in Japanese can be quite difficult to map to English, because there are tense and aspect features of each language that the other doesn’t have. And sometimes the translator just misread the tense. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
V. Karen aka Kara
Karen’s characterization was changed in the English version to be brattier, even heartless at one point. It’s only a handful of lines, but they’re frontloaded at the start of the game, so it makes a big difference to how likeable she is.
VI. Plot changes
A small number of the mistranslations (or deliberate changes) affected the plot. These are minor, but they cause some lines to make more sense in the Japanese version.
-Grandma Laura’s cooking and pies are supposed to be terrible and everyone hates them.
Amusingly, they actually made her pie descriptions more disgusting in the US version, even though they played down the fact that everyone hates them:
-Tim does not profess his feelings for Karen on the raft:
This helps explain why she gets so jealous over Tim and Lily’s behavior later in the game. Tim left her hanging! What an inconsiderate time to pass out.
-There’s more than one leviathan. Morris didn’t fuse with the one who ate him. He was transformed into a different leviathan, possibly by the comet. They all might have originally been humans like him:
-In Japanese, the comet has consciously guided evolution on earth, which is unimportant in terms of other lines of dialogue, but opens up interesting lore questions:
-Finally, the game mixed up which entity made which:
This ties back to a line in the attract screen which says the Mystery Dolls/Mystic Statues were supposed to be modeled on gods. It’s because they are gods, and used their power to create the Knights. But that line in the attract screen was both mistranslated and censored anyway, so this tieback isn’t very important in the English version.
VII. Stilted language
Illusion of Gaia has numerous lines where the translation gets the main idea right, but the dialogue sounds odd. This sometimes happens due to space limitations. Other times it’s because something was translated with no effort to change words to native sounding English.
VIII. The opposite
Several times, the game’s translation is almost the opposite of what was actually meant. Or it uses a single word or phrase that means the opposite of the correct word. (For example, key instead of lock.)
If Tim wasn’t summoned, then it’s a good sign, because the bad sign was mistaken:
The elder uses a word that means obedient or docile, not disobedient. He does not think that Tim’s dad was obedient.
Lily is trying to soften it, but she’s still transparently saying that the room smells terrible:
Neil tells everyone they’ll talk about it later, when something that’s already happened happens:
You’re supposed to take the stone there, not find it there:
To be fair, it is weird that lock and key can be represented by the same Japanese word:
Rob wants Tim to gtfo, not to take Lily out of there:
You shouldn’t be cruel. Only I get to do that:
I can’t eat any more, so please bring me another:
I need to talk to you, which is why I’ll say that over and over no matter how many times you talk to me:
IX. Hall of Fame
These are the worst mistranslations in the game that aren’t covered by the categories above. Some of them are authentic frontier gibberish. Some of them are semantically sound, but make no sense in context. Some are wrong for minor reasons, or very close to correct, but context makes it especially funny or weird.
This maid in South Cape is very interested in fiction:
This lazy guard wants to make sure Tim behaves himself:
The queen gets outraged by Tim’s politeness:
The prison guard wants to remind Tim that life on earth is water-based:
The game explicitly said that Tim had never heard the song before she taught it recently, but ok:
Choosing not to visit the Moon Tribe prompts a warning from Lily: My decision has angered… some guy. A very short-tempered, murderous guy.
Having your fortune told is a famous cause of tardiness:
Riverson is quite upset that anyone would steal his ring that the he stored on a skeleton for some reason:
Tim is sometimes aware of having died. Other times, he dies without noticing:
This sounds like the setup for a horror movie about an evil camera:
So… I have to find a cliff that has two sides, drop off one, go back up, drop off the other, and then I’ll be in another world?
Neil is learning his shapes. Once he learned the cross/Cygnus shape, he started seeing it everywhere:
The water in Mu can’t recede until some ghosts mumble some gibberish first:
Lily thinks that all ancient people forgot what they were doing. Maybe that’s why they’re all dead:
Karen wants Tim to come with her, but gets mad at him for smiling, and so decides to go it alone:
Got a question wrong? Too bad, now Ishtar is going to permanently increase the difficulty level of the game:
Karen realizes that she has a psychological disorder that distorts her spatial perception:
This desert could use some new wallpaper, maybe some nicer windows:
Rob’s father is crazy and he’s lost his memory. You can tell because he accurately describes an event from his past:
Pretty harsh of Lily to break up with Rob before they were even dating:
This random person in a town Tim’s never been to is wistful about Tim’s childhood:
Just two geniuses having a sensible argument over whether or not genius should involve loudly assaulting people:
Tim takes advantage of a store mistaking him for someone else and steals their stuff:
“Oh, you’re sad that your parents died? Wah wah, cry me a river”:
Neither of these lines are poorly translated, but it is funny that the same line was pointlessly translated twice over:
And finally, the worst translation in the game. The one line that stood out to me above all others. I am so sad it wasn’t translated accurately.
When you’re drifting on a raft with Karen, she says:
This joke is so good! Can you believe they took it out? For shame.
Final thoughts
This is the first project I’ve ever translated. I know that my translations were overly literal and wordy. What I’ve published here is a first pass. The important thing to me was figuring out whether the original translation got the general idea correct.
I started this translation a long time ago, lost steam, and then picked it back up on this blog. I started 3 to 4 years ago, I think? Not sure. Anyway, I’m glad I finished. I learned a ton about this game and about Japanese. Also: wow, Google Translate has really improved in 3 years. I didn’t use it to translate for me, but I used it to give hints on difficult sentences. The difference over that time is huge. It’s now often much more accurate than the original translation.
As for Illusion of Gaia’s translation overall, I guess my thoughts are: “It’s bad but I’ve seen worse.” There are many, many mistranslations, but few that affect any significant plot point. In the end, it never stopped me from loving this game. Understanding some of the strange dialogue makes me appreciate it more.