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Translation notes
This is merely supplemental information; in no way should this guide be necessary to complete the game. Therefore, spoilers ahoy throughout!
Translation is the process of "converting" the Japanese sentences to English sentences. Localization is the process of making them sound natural, as well as figuring out what to do with puns and such. Localization also sometimes involves making other changes. A famous example is EarthBound's localization changing an octopus statue to a pencil statue. For this project, we pretty much only changed text. However, we did localize that text quite a bit.
Our translation had three translators -- Torbjorn Joker, geishaboy, and me (Kef Schecter) -- and while we all localized the text a bit as we went along, I obsessively rewrote much of the game's text until everything sounded just right, so I was the primary localizer. That means if you don't like how something's phrased, I'm the guy to blame.
We also worked on different chapters. Torbjorn did most of chapters 3 and 4 and some of 6, chapter 5 was mostly a mix of Torbjorn and geishaboy, and I did most of the rest. I had to put a lot of work into making sure it sounded like it was all written by one guy. It wouldn't do for Andy to be talking like Watchmen's Rorschach in one chapter and like Charles Dickens in another.
The Japanese name simply means "Animal Land Murder Case".
I had already settled on the name Animalville for the setting of the story -- more on that in a bit -- so I considered calling the game "The Animalville Horror". I do still like this title much more, but it's not really a horror story, nor was the murder more horrific than your everyday shooting. It also doesn't include the phrase "Animal Land", so people who have heard of the original would have trouble recognizing it.
I also considered names like "The Animal Land Murder Mystery", but "Murder in Animal Land" seems perfect: it has a dramatic punch, yet maintains recognizability. Anyone who knows the name "Animal Land Satsujin Jiken", especially someone who knows what it means, will immediately recognize it.
Virtually all of the character names are obvious plays on animal names. We translated them accordingly.
Andy: Originally Oidon. I pulled the name Andy out of a hat, probably because it sounded a bit like Oidon. (Not that that matters; I'm just explaining my train of thought here.) The word oidon means "I/me" in Kagoshima dialect, but Oidon does not speak in a dialect and this may be a coincidence. He does, however, refer to himself in the third person, so this might have been a subtle joke. It took me a long time to understand what Andy's personality is supposed to be, and once I understood it, it was obvious why they made him a dog. He's forever loyal, just like a dog. He's your bestest friend ever, just like a dog. While not stupid, he's a tad simple-minded, just like a dog. Dogs also have a good sense of smell, which is occasionally relevant.
Renard: Originally Gonkichi. Gon and kon are noises foxes make in Japanese, and -kichi is just an element added to make it sound like somebody's name. I asked the romhacking.net IRC channel what we should call him and they came up with "Renard", which is French for "fox". There is also a fox named "Reynard" (with a "y") as the subject of traditional European folklore. I arbitrarily gave him the surname Fox; he originally had no surname. Truth be told, I'm still not particularly fond of the name Renard, but it would be tough coming up with a more foxy name.
Kit: Originally Kokon. Ko- is a diminutive prefix meaning "little" or "offspring". A fox's offspring is a kit. Easy peasy.
Red: Originally Konta. The -ta doesn't mean anything I know of. I decided to call him Red, both because he's red, and because the red fox is a species of fox. I might also have been thinking of comedian Redd Foxx.
Bunnie: Originally Pyonko. Pyon is the sound a bunny makes when it hops, and -ko is a very common suffix for Japanese girl names. For a while I considered naming her Amy, but I decided she deserved a rabbity name, so I named her Bunnie. I'll freely admit I took the name from the Sonic the Hedgehog character Bunnie Rabbot. I also considered "Bonnie", which sounds like "bunny" but is also a real name, but I just don't like how it sounds, and the player might not notice the connection.
Persia: Originally Peruu. She's apparently supposed to be a Persian cat, which in Japanese is perusha. If it were a male character I'd probably use "Percy", but it's not, so I can't. I couldn't think of a feminine name that sounded like Persian or Persia without actually being "Persia", so I just went with that. Before I figured out the origin of the name, I simply called her Peru, and it was pretty weird calling her something else after all that time.
Pokey: Originally Taaji. I'm pretty sure "Taaji" is from taatoru, which is the English word "turtle" rendered in Japanese. It isn't the normal Japanese word for turtle, which is "kame", but it is sometimes used anyway, especially for sea turtles. Turtles are slow, so I called him Pokey. I also have a cat named Poki, which may have influenced me. The original name I came up for him was Lentulus, which I still prefer. In addition to being a real Roman name, it suggests the Latin/Romance word lente, "slow". But it's a very in-jokey thing, and it'd be more consistent to use a simple name.
Ling-Ling: The name リンリン would normally be romanized Rinrin, but this is just the Japanese rendering of Ling-Ling, a popular name for pandas both in real life and in fiction. Pandas are Chinese, so they get Chinese names. I had to shorten her nametag (the name that appears when she speaks) to "Ling" to make it fit, and for that reason I considered just calling her "Ms. Ling" throughout the game, but I decided to stick with Ling-Ling.
Tyger: Originally Dorakure. The Japanese word for "tiger" is tora, and "dora" is probably meant to bring the word "tora" to mind. I originally considered "Drago" or "Drake", because they sound like "Dorakure". Those names clearly suggest a dragon, not a tiger, but the name of his cafe is Dragon. I also considered "Tyson", which keeps the "ti" sound in "tiger", but also because, well... what else would you call a large beast capable of biting your ear off?
Teddy: Originally Beasu. The English word "bear" comes out bea or beaa in Japanese. Given the absence of breasts and eyelashes, I'm guessing this is meant to be a guy, so the name Teddy seemed appropriate. Then again, Bunnie also lacks breasts and eyelashes, and she's clearly a girl, if only because the script says so. So it's possible I've guessed wrong, but there's no way to know. He or she actually looks feminine to me, but then, so do several other male characters in the game.
Koala: Originally, well, Koala. Nothing to see here, move along.
Nuki: Another name straight from the original game. He's a tanuki. No mystery here.
Vixen: Originally Tsuneko. The name is a bit misleading because neko means "cat", but make no mistake, she's a fox; the proper way to read it is "tsune" (from kitsune, "fox") plus the feminine suffix -ko. A vixen is a female fox, and also the name of one of Santa Claus's reindeer, so it has some precedence as name.
The Japanese version says in English, "This is GRAVE MESSAGE for MSX USER'S by ENIX." Yep, they had a superfluous apostrophe. What's really bizarre is the name "Grave Message" is never used anywhere else inside or outside the game. Why does the game say this? Hell, why does this screen exist at all? The game's title and publisher are already given on the title screen.
I originally wanted to replace this with a full-screen splash screen with translation credits and the translation's homepage URL. But as I was hacking the title screen for a bugfix, I noticed how easy it would be to just put the URL under the copyright notice on the title screen. So I did. I decided the homepage would be sufficient to provide the translation credits, and that meant the splash screen would be largely superfluous. It seemed a good place to identify the translation's version number, though, so that's what I used it for.
The prologue was in a region that had a very limited amount of space for text. However, I noticed that the Japanese wording was repetitive. After I cut it down, the translated text fit fine without having to be compressed or relocated.
In Japanese, the village isn't mentioned by a proper name; it's called "doubutsu no mura", or "village of animals". It's not a big leap from there to Animalville. But if the village is Animalville, then what is Animal Land? The name Animal Land appears in the script once and only once (in a dialogue with Koala), and the phrase "doubutsu no mura" only appears here. I've decided Animalville is a city and Animal Land is like a state or country.
There were some simplifications here, since the text had to fit in a certain amount of space and I didn't want to bother with relocating it. For instance, the English version has Andy ask, "What's the file's name?", but a more accurate translation would be, "What was the file's name again, boss?". It's not really a big loss, and we often made similar edits throughout the main script even when there were no such space concerns anyway.
The "Password:" prompt originally said "file's name". I didn't want players to think it had to do with computer files.
The passwords in both the original and the English version are all named after animals, but not the same ones. For one thing, "armadillo" doesn't fit into eight letters in English. I chose exotic animals that most people would not guess, such as the Kakapo. (This particular choice was inspired by the book Last Chance to See, by Douglas Adams.)
The password for the ending, which is never given in-game, was えンディング, which is the English word "ending" in katakana, but with the first letter in hiragana instead, making it much harder to guess. I decided to use the password "IMACHEAT", a tribute to the same code in SimCity 2000, where it gave you money. I also considered "XYZZY", but it's too easily guessed by people who have heard of it.
I did think it'd be fun if typing "XYZZY" produced the text "Nothing happens, boss," but it'd be a lot of effort for a message that maybe one player would ever see.
The menu at the upper right is the main reason why I bothered to program a proportional font. There was no way I could fit some of the text otherwise, and using a proportional font hugely increases the number of letters I can fit into the available space. Of course, as a side benefit, I got to use the proportional font for the game's text as well.
Since my main motivation was screen space, I used a font designed to maximize it. (The font is my own custom variant of a font by Tauwasser. I ended up changing it enough that it's hard to recognize as such, though.) Still, a small handful of letters are slightly wider than they could be, because I thought they looked better that way. So long as I could still fit everything in the menus, I didn't mind.
Formatting the text took a lot of thought. At first I decided on an overly complicated solution I was too lazy to code -- it involved making a version of Atlas that would be smart enough to wrap lines, the rationale being it would be useful for future projects as well -- so I ended up sitting on the game for a year and a half. Eventually I picked it back up and used a much simpler solution, which was writing a linewrapping algorithm in ASM. I had a few false starts at it, but I had it complete within a couple of days. Sometimes you should just Keep It Simple, Stupid.
The Japanese version asks the user to press a key using a rather obnoxious "PUSH SPACE KEY !" prompt in English. It gets old fast; imagine playing the whole game with it! I replaced it with a small "press space" prompt that only draws as much attention to itself as necessary.
One thing that occurs throughout the game is other characters are referred to as "animals". That is, they'd say things like, "I saw an animal run through here" instead of "I saw a guy run through here". Maybe this sounded fine in Japanese, but to me it sounds odd -- it sounds like maybe they mean a "real" animal, one that walks on four legs, instead of the "funny" animals in the game. So we usually translated it as "person", "guy", or whatever fit, since the distinction between "animal" and "person" is not important in this game. On the couple of occasions where the text refers to "people" as in "humans", we just called them "humans".
Right off the bat, we have a case of culture clash: Andy is smoking a cigar. These days, here in the west, good guys don't smoke. They especially don't smoke in children's media. Censorship is one area where I make an exception to my general rule of doing what an official localization might have done. That said, I decided to avoid profanity, since the game didn't have any -- in fact, Japanese doesn't have any -- and, historically, at least, profanity is even more out of place in a kid's game than smoking is. (You'll notice that in the original, uncensored versions of Looney Tunes shorts, characters may smoke, but they'll never say "hell" or "damn".) We'll discuss profanity more later.
When you look at the chair in the study, Andy just says, "Rather big chair." A more literal translation would be, "It's a rather big chair, boss." It's a tiny difference, but this sort of trimming down is done throughout the script. Why? Well, first it was because I was concerned about ROM space and screen space. Both of these ceased to be concerns after I'd already translated the first two chapters, because I'd expanded the ROM to get more ROM space and implemented a proportional font to get more screen space. A concern that did remain, though, is Andy talks a lot, and using fewer words meant less typing. I'd also developed a mental image of Andy as a gruff detective, the kind who usually doesn't use more words than necessary to get his point across. So it was also a way to give him more personality. Yes, it's an arbitrary change in personality, but a literal translation wouldn't have done his original personality justice either.
I should mention I had to resist the temptation to make him talk like Sam from Sam & Max. Yes, they're both canine detectives, and I like Sam & Max, but let's keep 'em separate.
One of the first things the player is likely to do is "look" at the floor. In Japanese, this produced a rather unhelpful message: "Nothing has fallen in the area I looked. Of course, Oidon's job is more nose than eyes." I found two faults with this: one is that it seems to suggest using the "sniff" command, which is not the correct action. The other is that it doesn't have any hints as to what is the correct action, which is the "check" command. So I instead had Andy suggest that maybe you and he should check it out in more detail, using the bold font to hint at "check" being a command.
Early on, Andy finds a scrap of paper with a symbol that looks like a badly written katakana ヌ ("nu"). This is the first letter of Nuki, a character later in the game. Hence I translated this as a badly written letter "N". When Andy observes he cannot read anything past this weird ヌ, he says, "too bad... uu, wan wan!" "Uu" is clearly some noise of dismay or frustration, and "wan wan" is the Japanese equivalent of "bow wow". I thought "bow wow" sounded a little too silly and too random, so I used "grrowf!", which still expresses frustration, sounds dog-like, and isn't too silly. Andy never goes "wan wan" again in the entire game.
When the player looks at the chair in the English version, Andy says, "This chair and this desk go well together, don't they? But there's no pair that fits better than you and I. Platonically speaking, of course." This is a pretty straight translation of the Japanese, except for the last sentence, which I threw in because I found it amusing. I don't think the original Japanese line was meant to be read with any homoerotic subtext, but the player would probably read some into it anyway, so I felt it was best to acknowledge it in a dismissive fashion.
There's an object that, if you look at it a second time, it says in Japanese, "However many times you look, it's the same." I translated this as, "The more you look, the more it stays the same," a play on, "The more things change, the more things stay the same." It says the same thing as the Japanese version, but it's a little more flavorful. This version is mildly quotable, whereas the literal translation is completely forgettable.
Similarly, if you try using the "show" command before picking up an item, in the English version, Andy will say, "You have nothing to show and no one to show it to." I like how the use of "it" suggests that "nothing" is a thing you could show something, like you have nothing to show, and no one to show your nothing to.
There's apparently unused text in the game that suggests that Andy finds a naughty magazine. This would be in the study, but it's unclear where it could be found. It's not in the safe or drawer, which text later in the game makes clear you're not supposed to be able to open yet.
At the end you finally go to headquarters. I debated with myself for a while whether the sign should say "POLICE" or "ALPD" (Animal Land Police Department). The Japanese text originally said "keisatsu", meaning "police".
This chapter introduces the mechanic of showing items to other characters, which you'll do a lot in this game. Usually, Andy asks, "Recognize this?" or "Know anything about this?". A typical answer that many characters give throughout the game is "shirimasen", which literally means "I don't know", which is also often used to answer questions like what kind of life Renard led. But after "Recognize this?", "shirimasen" means "I don't recognize it", not "I don't know". I had to put a lot of work into making sure each translation of "shirimasen" was the correct answer to the question asked, which was tricky since the context was often lacking. It boiled down to a lot of playtesting and watching for I-don't-knows that should be no-I-don'ts and vice versa.
No doubt an official localization would have changed the onigiri and other Japanese food in Bunnie's shop to donuts and whatnot. And if I were making an official localization, to be distributed via Virtual Console or something, I probably would. But most people playing this translation would be familiar with stuff like onigiri, so changing the food seemed unnecessary.
Still, at this point I feel I should point out why localizers often change these things. The popular perception is that localizers think their audience is too stupid or ignorant to know what an onigiri is. I think this is usually not the main reason. I think they do it to avoid breaking suspension of disbelief. Asking yourself "What's that thing?" or telling yourself "Oh, it's that weird Japanese food again" is a distraction; it reminds you that you're watching a TV show or playing a game, and a translated one at that. You're supposed to be focusing on the story or the gameplay experience! Meanwhile, hamburgers or donuts don't prompt such responses and the viewer or player goes on his merry way.
That said, it's even more distracting when localizers half-ass it. I can't imagine what they were thinking when they did this. I can only guess they originally intended to edit the images but ran out of time or money after dubbing the dialogue.
At headquarters we run into a menu item naming issue. There are two items whose names I don't like, "check" and "ponder". "Check" can be used either to pull up a quick dossier or to actually check a character you're interrogating. I would prefer that it say "Dossiers" when nobody is present, since that's what it does, but it wouldn't be worth the effort to make the text change depending on the situation. Also, there's at least one occasion where it does more than provide a refresher; checking Nuki's dossier in chapter 4 will allow you to go to his place.
Kit and Red both give the same response, word for word, if Andy asks for an alibi before establishing the time of death with the News command. I decided this seemed a little strange, so I had Kit's response be a rather literal translation and gave Red a much looser one. This sort of thing happens a couple of other times in the game.
There's a pun involving the weird ヌ symbol here. When Andy asks him what it is, Kit says, "nanika ga nutto dete kita to ka", which could mean "some kind of 'nu' appeared or something" or "something suddenly appeared or something". I think it's a weak pun even in Japanese, to say nothing of how it looks in English.
Kit and Persia both mention "puff-puff". This is a long-running joke in Dragon Ball and Dragon Quest, the latter of which was also published by Enix. This was tricky to translate because I wanted to preserve the gag for people who have heard of it, without making incomprehensible for people who haven't. The original Japanese used it like a verb, like "I want to puff-puff him", but that definitely wouldn't work. Eventually I settled on "I want to give him some 'puff-puff'!", which I expect would sound enough like some vaguely naughty act.
In chapters 3 and beyond, asking a character about Renard brings up a prompt, "What about Renard?". In chapter 2, Andy asked you the question instead. This inconsistency was in the original game. I would have preferred to fix it, but it wouldn't be worth the trouble.
I'm proud of this one: if you sniff Persia before summoning Kit, Andy said something like, "It smells like blood... would be a lie. It smells like perfume." (The wording is less unnatural in Japanese.) The game pauses briefly after printing the ellipsis, so at first the player is led to think Andy really smells blood. I translated this as, "It smells like blood... sweat, and tears have gone into making her fancy perfume." I actually originally wrote "blood... toil, tears, and sweat", echoing the wording of Winston Churchill, but I'm told the other way is more common. It's also shorter and snappier, so I went with it.
There is a pun when sniffing Pokey. Andy says something like, "I smell some kind of drink. He's a turtle, so it must be kōra". "Kōra" can mean either "cola" or "shell", like turtles have. About the best I could do was suggest he smells like turtle wax. Here I had Pokey object, since I don't think Pokey could let that pass without comment, whereas he originally said nothing. I'm not generally a fan of adding lines out of the blue, but I'll do it when it really looks like a character ought to say something. The number of added lines in this game can be counted on one hand, so don't worry, we didn't go overboard.
When asking Ling-Ling about the note, she notices the character on the scrap of paper might not be a katakana ヌ, but the kanji 又, meaning "again", suggesting whoever wrote it intended to return. Since our version looks like the letter "N", about the best we could do was suggest maybe we've been looking at it sideways and it's really a "Z".
When Andy drinks the coffee in the Dragon Cafe, he scalds his tongue, but afterwards says it has a good flavor. My translator for this line, Torbjorn, was tempted to translate the compliment as "Damn fine coffee, though," in reference to Twin Peaks. I was cool with the reference because it didn't change the meaning, but let's face it -- this is mostly a kid's game. There's no way a kid's game would say "damn". How many people playing the translation would be kids is aside from the point; putting swearing in Sailor Moon just comes across as childish, and so too would it here. So we compromised on "darn fine coffee".
While we're on the topic of swearing, there's a line later in the game where Andy shouts "Damare", Japanese for "Shut up!". Since he was saying this in response to a statement he didn't believe, I really wanted to translate it as "Bullshit!", which seemed to fit the context better than "shut up" and was as forceful. In another work, that's exactly what I'd have done, but it'd have been very out of place in this game.
We gave Nuki a speech pattern that seems appropriate for a deadbeat. The character didn't originally have any particular speech pattern -- nor does really anyone aside from Andy. This is mainly for the sake of giving the dialogue some much-needed variety. It also makes him sound suspicious -- criminals often stereotypically talk this way. This plays into Andy's suspicion that he's the culprit.
Originally Andy didn't say anything after Nuki offhandedly mentioned sleeping on a mat. This message is more significant than it seems; it allows you to search the mat in Nuki's room. This is very frustrating to figure out on your own, so I added a hint: Andy says, "Mat? Hmmm."
Incidentally, the mat is specifically a tatami mat. We decided not to use the word tatami because of that whole thing about localization not breaking suspension of disbelief. That said, it's still a mat either way. I also added another hint: when you check the mat, Andy tells you that it can be opened. I did this because "open" and "mat" aren't two words that normally go together.
When you show the jewels to Kit, he asks where you found them. Then he says, "Huh? Nuki's room?" even though nobody said anything. It might be interpreted as your player's character answering the question, but since this doesn't happen much if at all elsewhere in the game, it seemed bizarre, so I let Andy tell him instead.
There's actually not much that's interesting in this chapter. Sorry!
Holy genre shift, Batman!
The name of this forest is Mayoi no Mori. This is a very common name for forest mazes. The Lost Woods from the Legend of Zelda has this name, as does the Forest of Illusion from Super Mario World, and probably a million other forests in games. The idea is it's a forest one can easily get lost in, so it's not the woods themselves that are lost; it's the Get-Lost Woods. But that's a dumb-sounding name, so I just went with Lost Woods like everybody else does. It helps that the name fits nicely on menus.
There's a word that describes a simple concept but is a little tricky to translate: "ashimoto". It basically means "at your feet" -- the area you're standing on. This appears in the "look" command throughout the chapter. I first translated this as "ground", but there are times where a different word is also translated as "ground", so instead I used "down". I could have used "at feet", but I didn't want the player to think the command looked at your actual feet, rather than the area around them.
There's a bug in the game where you can use the ball on the tree even after taking the magazine, and it will seem to knock the magazine down again. No new magazine appears, though. I'd prefer to fix this, but it'd be a lot of effort, and many players would probably never come across the bug.
After you get the clean ball, and therefore you have two balls, the inventory still says "Ball", as though you only have one. This isn't a bug, exactly. The Japanese language doesn't use plurals, so it's the same menu item whether you have one or two. Unless we wanted to hack the code, we had three choices:
- Ball: Live with the fact it will sometimes be wrongly singular.
- Balls: An awkward choice, because the player doesn't know at first that there's a second ball.
- Ball(s): Not only does this have the same problem as "Balls", it looks awkward.
As with the magazine, you can toss the ball into the lake again and she will again ask which ball you dropped, but you don't actually get a new ball for doing so.
This chapter is home to the most tortured pun in the game, and the only one that had any bearing on the story or gameplay, which meant we had to deal with it. There is a stone with an inscription that does not quite make sense. Elsewhere, a mole tells you to find the "kokeshi stone" or "kokeshi rock". Naturally, the player is meant to imagine a stone statue of a kokeshi doll, or something like that. But, in fact, it turns out that this refers to the stone with the inscription: if you erase ("keshi") the letter こ ("ko") from the inscription, the inscription make sense. "Ko keshi", get it?
It's remarkable just how badly this translates into English. It depends on both knowing what a kokeshi doll is and knowing that "keshi" means "erasing". We could have carefully set it up so the player learns about kokeshi dolls and the Japanese word "keshi" sometime before the pun comes into play, but it'd be very contrived and the puzzle would be all but impossible. I had to think of what to replace it with. When I only saw it in the script, I thought maybe I could have the player search for "Ragnarok" and find a "rag in a rock". But when I played the game, it was clear this wouldn't do. The name of the stone has to hint at what to do with the message.
The next thing I thought of was a "nosy stone" / "no Z stone". But I needed to put the letter "z" in the message, and I didn't like any of the results. So I went through the alphabet in my head: No A, No B, No C... so that's how I got to No L. The letter "L" fit rather naturally in the message, too.
I wanted to add a hint the original game didn't have: if you "use" the inscription at the wrong time, Andy would give you a hint by mentioning the Noel Stone. "Noel" to "No L" is quite a leap even with the hint, probably more than "kokeshi" and "ko-keshi" was in the original. I would have added this hint, but there's a problem: you might find the inscription before you find the mole who tells you about the Noel Stone. I also felt the puzzle was still too hard. I solved both problems by having the Noel Stone tell you it's the Noel Stone; the kokeshi stone originally had only the "diamond rock is mirage" message and nothing else. You had no way of identifying it as the kokeshi stone, or even that there is a kokeshi stone, other than the mole's hint to look for one. This does render the mole's hint superfluous, but I felt that's a small sacrifice considering it may save the player a lot of frustration.
Incidentally, Mother 2 (the Japanese version of EarthBound) had a similar gag. There's a statue in the game in the shape of a kokeshi doll, and you need to get rid of it. The item you use to do so is called the "kokeshi keshi", which means "kokeshi eraser". The localization preserved the wordplay by changing it to a statue of a rubber eraser, so the item becomes the "eraser eraser". It also added to it by having an earlier obstacle in the game become a pencil statue (originally an octopus statue, which had no wordplay involved) and the item used to remove it become the "pencil eraser".