Posted on December 27, 2018 by Heidi Mandelin‧20 Comments
Uh-oh, it’s another otome game on the Nintendo Switch! And it’s by the same people who released Kitty Love, so you can probably guess what the translation quality is like.
You’re the new assistant manager for a visual kei band called FOX EAR, and the members have a secret – they’re all mythical fox creatures! They really want that magatama necklace you wear because their powerful foxy ancestor is sealed inside. But the only way they can get that necklace off of you is to get romantically close to you. *wiggles eyebrows*
Just like Kitty Love, nearly every single line in the game has a spelling or grammar issue. I’ve chosen the funniest mistakes for the gallery below. Enjoy!
When the stars and the moon appeared in the sky. Contrary to this brightness, it was just too dark to see anything on the other side of the stairs in the basement.
(This is the very first line in the game.)
FOX EAR is the band group of unique 5 Visual-kei member with each and one of the members put the fox ear.
The sound was so aggressive that my cousin needs to weave through his voice to talk to me.
(What is it....?
That dream----This pain....
Difficult to even breath....?)
"Yeah, because you're being nervous! It's just to have a mean. You are cute. ....Hey Vessel."
"n?"
(This is an unlocalized "hmm?" type sound)
I can understand why Kasumi's worried. U/ki was still breathing with his shoulder.
(U/ki "breathes with his shoulder" multiple times during his route. I still don't know what it means.)
Thankfully I was injured heavily. U/ki shouldn't feel the responsibility.
My hurts are pounding so fast and feel like it was going to be dark in front of me.
Sat sun and a full moon was lighting the sky. While looking at the bright shine of the moon, Akito raised his torso.
(I can't take off my eyes....)
"If you become a true box, then the story is different."
As U/ki said that he place his hand on my head and he stroked and sliced until my cheek as if he was checking.
Unlock the key and opened the door
He didn't wake up whatever I do, so I was touching like an ornament.
I have clavicle and accessories. When you arrange the neck to make it look good, I noticed that Akito was staring at me.
Obviously, since he's hugging me, we're in a distance where our nose to nose is colliding. I am perplexed.
A drunk Akito started sleeping in K-suke's hand. His eyes shine yellow in the darkness of the night.
Refuse to give a giant,
It is strange to say such a thing,
It fell through the mouth.
I almost dropped my bento box. U/ki pushed sausage-shaped in octopus into my mouth.
Towards the end of summer, the sky already shows the autumn. I was walking while looking at mackerel sky.
"Long time no sees, Akito.
You seem to be in health I suppose."
(His mother is saying this, btw)
There was kindness and determination of Akito from holding my hand. It gave me a tingle that my smile just leaked out.
It's peaceful, calm, and happy, but ticklish for me. Akito gave water, taps lightly around the seedlings, and speaks to the green pepper
The neck of Akito gives a bitter voice.
You can't see the scenery from the sky when you are alive. With the joy, I wrapped around myself around the neck.
Asleep head became a little clearer now. It was a familiar ceiling, familiar wallpaper. It was my room.
Embarrassment blew away, and I made my eyes round.
It made my spine a chill.
While having an anxious face, and asking with eyesight.
My heard was getting warmer as warm as his warmth, Kasumi can tell through the palm.
"Okay, then I'll get something from the bending machine from downstairs. I'll be right back."
(They called it a "bending" machine 9 more times in this route, never a "vending" machine.)
He grabbed my head and ran.
"..I don't know why.
You probably are like an air for me."
I heard the voice suddenly and surprised. Kosei went to the male part of the hot
"That's called a crap."
"Where have you beeb. I was worried....
....!?"
"Sure....
I'll give you a tour so please follo.... Was!"
"Nice to meat.... Wah!"
The woman was mortified that her face was butter, then the face changed her expression.
The characters in this game have weird names like U/ki and K-suke. That’s fine because it fits with the visual kei style they’re going for. But sometimes the game forgets their names entirely and calls the characters something else. FOX EAR was sometimes FOX YEAR, Kasumi became Kazumi quite often, and K-suke was Kesume once. But the worst was Akito. The game did whatever it wanted with his name – Akatsuki, Akihito, Akiho, Akinin, and Anita.
A few weeks after posting this article, the game’s translation was updated. Is it any better? Here’s the first line in the game again:
Old Translation
New Translation
New Translation
Aside from that new line being too wordy, the new translation does make a lot more sense. The player character was rewritten to sound like a real human person and a lot of the grammar errors were fixed.
These are just a tiny percent of the strange translations in Ayakashi Koi Gikyoku, so if you want to see more, definitely check out the game for yourself. And if you discover any other Switch games with bad translations, share them in the comments or on Twitter so we can take a detailed look at them here!
Update Status
I'm taking a relaxed break from Legends of Localization at the moment, but I still plan to add more articles and comparisons from time to time.
I'll also slowly be improving and updating various sections of the site. During these times, pages, links, and images will surely break somewhere - I apologize in advance. I've also turned off comments for now until I can reasonably keep up with them again.
In the meantime, check out some of these other articles:
‘I was walking while looking at mackerel sky.’ It’s an odd sentence, but mackerel skies are definitely a thing! It’s cirrocumulus/altocumulus clouds in a pattern that looks kind of like fish scales. Though the pic shown has cumulus clouds (or what appears to be anyway), not the clouds that actually make up a mackerel sky.
I’m actually pretty surprised that was what was translated, given how everything else was…
Heidi Mandelin
Ah, yeah! I had to look up that term and saw that I’ve definitely seen the sky look like that. I thought it was a funny phrase though, so I included it 🙂
sarusa
Wow, these translations sure create the sexy mood they’re going for.
I love these Heidi, so I hope you’re enjoying the badness.
On ‘breathing with his shoulder’ my quick guess would be that shoulder = kata, iki = breathing but kata also = excessively and iki also = going – so it was really ‘going all out’.
Hetare Kaiser
片息 (kataiki, lit. fragmented breath), that is, difficult or heavy breathing can apparently also be spelled 肩息 (lit. shoulder breath): https://tangorin.com/words?search=%E8%82%A9%E6%81%AF Incidentally, Google Translate translates 肩息する as “To have a shoulder breath”.
sarusa
Good catch – we’d need to see more examples, but it sure makes sense in the above one. Also explains how stupid machine translation would get it more naturally.
Heidi Mandelin
Ahhh! Thanks for that insight
Nyperold
Ah, and here I was wondering if it was referring to armpit farts.
Freezair
This translation is called a crap. 😛
Whelkman
Is the dithering supposed to invoke memories of early 90s limited color graphics?
sarusa
Nothing about the art is good – the ‘sexy’ main characters are mid-tier tumblr level. So I’m guessing it’s supposed to invoke ‘this was cheap to outsource from existing generic backgrounds’. But if you want to be generous it kind of works to keep your focus on the characters by making the backgrounds hazy and low contrast since they don’t really matter. It’s the one semi-competent bit in all of this!
Whelkman
The band shot is especially amusing. It’s like the artist heard that one needs to vary perspective between drawings to keep things interesting but didn’t understand what that meant and ended up having every band member oriented at a different angle. It doesn’t help that the drawings were probably made into individual assets and eventually placed haphazardly by a programmer with no eye for aesthetics.
Holy crap, looks like those SakuraGame machine translations.
YelseyKing
Now I need to remember to greet the next person who I haven’t seen in a while with “You seem to be in health I suppose.”
Maki
This is one in a series of games where it seems like an English speaker said the words aloud into a speech-to-text program, the transcription of which was thrown into the game sans editing. Is that a common technique or something?
“U/ki pushed sausage-shaped in octopus into my mouth” sounds to me like the original translator came up with “sausage shaped in octopus,” and then an editor looked at the line and realized “Hey, in English, you’re supposed to hyphenate the phrase ‘thing-shaped’!”
(The transcription under the picture leaves out the word “in,” by the way.)
Heidi Mandelin
Haha, I guess I was subconsciously fixing the grammar as I transcribed some of those XD
‘I was walking while looking at mackerel sky.’ It’s an odd sentence, but mackerel skies are definitely a thing! It’s cirrocumulus/altocumulus clouds in a pattern that looks kind of like fish scales. Though the pic shown has cumulus clouds (or what appears to be anyway), not the clouds that actually make up a mackerel sky.
I’m actually pretty surprised that was what was translated, given how everything else was…
Ah, yeah! I had to look up that term and saw that I’ve definitely seen the sky look like that. I thought it was a funny phrase though, so I included it 🙂
Wow, these translations sure create the sexy mood they’re going for.
I love these Heidi, so I hope you’re enjoying the badness.
On ‘breathing with his shoulder’ my quick guess would be that shoulder = kata, iki = breathing but kata also = excessively and iki also = going – so it was really ‘going all out’.
片息 (kataiki, lit. fragmented breath), that is, difficult or heavy breathing can apparently also be spelled 肩息 (lit. shoulder breath):
https://tangorin.com/words?search=%E8%82%A9%E6%81%AF
Incidentally, Google Translate translates 肩息する as “To have a shoulder breath”.
Good catch – we’d need to see more examples, but it sure makes sense in the above one. Also explains how stupid machine translation would get it more naturally.
Ahhh! Thanks for that insight
Ah, and here I was wondering if it was referring to armpit farts.
This translation is called a crap. 😛
Is the dithering supposed to invoke memories of early 90s limited color graphics?
Nothing about the art is good – the ‘sexy’ main characters are mid-tier tumblr level. So I’m guessing it’s supposed to invoke ‘this was cheap to outsource from existing generic backgrounds’. But if you want to be generous it kind of works to keep your focus on the characters by making the backgrounds hazy and low contrast since they don’t really matter. It’s the one semi-competent bit in all of this!
The band shot is especially amusing. It’s like the artist heard that one needs to vary perspective between drawings to keep things interesting but didn’t understand what that meant and ended up having every band member oriented at a different angle. It doesn’t help that the drawings were probably made into individual assets and eventually placed haphazardly by a programmer with no eye for aesthetics.
Just to let you know, the transcription has an error of its own: ‘the stars in the basement’ where the screenshot has ‘stairs’.
Whoops! Thank you
Holy crap, looks like those SakuraGame machine translations.
Now I need to remember to greet the next person who I haven’t seen in a while with “You seem to be in health I suppose.”
This is one in a series of games where it seems like an English speaker said the words aloud into a speech-to-text program, the transcription of which was thrown into the game sans editing. Is that a common technique or something?
“U/ki pushed sausage-shaped in octopus into my mouth” sounds to me like the original translator came up with “sausage shaped in octopus,” and then an editor looked at the line and realized “Hey, in English, you’re supposed to hyphenate the phrase ‘thing-shaped’!”
(The transcription under the picture leaves out the word “in,” by the way.)
Haha, I guess I was subconsciously fixing the grammar as I transcribed some of those XD
“He took my head and ran”
Well that’s not very nice now is it? I can’t rofl
So, what, they hired a proofreader to double-check and clean up their Engrish but could only afford to pay them for half the game? What happened here?