EarthBound / MOTHER 2 Translation Comparison: Summers 3

Mr. Fork Speaks

When revisiting the museum in Summers in EarthBound, Mr. Fork says, “It must be something teeny weeny that Mr. Spoon has found. I don’t need to know the specifics.”

In MOTHER 2, he says something more like, “I bet Mr. Ricebowl’s discovery was nothing much at all, huh? I don’t really care to know what it was.”

Crap in EarthBound

One line that I see fans sometimes mention is from this sailor in Toto. In EarthBound, he says, “You made my wife wake up. She quit talking about all that serious crap…”

This is one of the few times “crap” appears in the game. It was actually kind of surprising at the time – Nintendo was really serious about censoring/toning everything down so for them to let a couple “crap”s slip was like, “Wow.” It’s not even really considered a bad word nowadays, so it’s hard to explain it well, but considering all the other stuff they wrote around in the text, this is interesting.

What’s weirder is that in most of these cases (if not all), the Japanese text didn’t even really require using “crap”. It’s not wrong to use it (“junk” or “stuff” would work just as well), it’s just strange that they almost went out of their way to use “crap” instead.

Anyway, the REAL reason I want to bring up this sailor is because he has a really cool quote in EarthBound: “After all, it could only cost you your life, and you got that for free!”

The Japanese version says basically all the same stuff, but the English line just sounds very smooth and natural, almost like it had originally been written in English. I can seriously see a grizzly sailor saying something like that in English in real life. So a tip of my hat to the translators and editors on this one.