EarthBound / MOTHER 2 Translation Comparison: Tenda Village 2

Tenda Chief Speaks

After you give the Overcoming Shyness book to the Tenda chief and he reads it to the tribe, he (or everyone else?) supposedly says in EarthBound, “Chat chat, whisper whisper”

In MOTHER 2, what he’s actually saying is more like, “Everyone talks much now.” It’s hard to explain if you don’t know Japanese, but it would’ve been easy for a rushed translator to see this Japanese text as onomatopoeia rather than words.

Smelly Item Change

After you cure their shyness in EarthBound, the Tendas give you “Tendakraut” as thanks. It apparently stinks really bad, too.

In MOTHER 2, they give you a “Gumi Durian”. Remember that they’re called the Gumi Tribe in Japanese. You can read more about durians here, but here are some quotes from famous travel/food writers about it:

”Its taste can only be described as…indescribable, something you will either love or despise. …Your breath will smell as if you’d been French-kissing your dead grandmother.”

-Anthony Bourdain

”…its odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock. It can be smelled from yards away. Despite its great local popularity, the raw fruit is forbidden from some establishments such as hotels, subways and airports, including public transportation in Southeast Asia.”

-Richard Sterling

Anyway, since durians aren’t well-known here in the States, the localizers changed it to a take on sauerkraut.

Name Confirmation

Back in Summers, Tony called up and asked for the player’s name. Something similar happens now, but it’s a little tough to explain. Basically, in EarthBound, you just have to re-confirm that your name is spelled properly.-Nothing special.

In MOTHER 2, though, what happens is that when you entered your name for Tony, you could only choose letters from the English alphabet. From that, the game tries to figure out how your name would be spelled in Japanese, and it displays it here. You’re then asked to confirm if it’s correct, or, if not, then correct it manually.

It’s kind of a neat little thing I haven’t seen any other games do, except for maybe MOTHER 3, but I don’t remember if it worked the same way.

After you confirm your Japanese-spelled name, the chief asks one last time to make sure you entered your full name in the proper order since Japanese names are opposite of what we’re used to – family name come first, then given name.

In EarthBound, it doesn’t really ask about this name order business, because it wouldn’t make sense to.

Tea Break

It’s nothing major, but since we’re at it, let’s look at the two versions of the Tenda Village tea break text:

The biggest differences are that the Japanese actually calls the tapestry “poorly-made” or possibly “plain-looking” instead of “beautiful”, and the English version also omits the whole thing about “encounters” and “farewells”, which admittedly is hard to fit into the translation in the same poetic way used by the Japanese version.

Also, the English version adds in the part about Giygas being the “arch fiend of the universe”, that wasn’t in the original.

And, as we’ve seen before, the religious “goddess” mention was replaced with a simple “I wish you luck”.

Other than those minor quibbles, I really like the phrasing that EarthBound uses, it comes off pretty smoothly.

Lumine Hall Writing

After you go through Tenda Village and pass through the Lumine Hall dungeon, you reach Lumine Hall itself. As you might expect, the writing on the wall is in Japanese in MOTHER 2, here’s a quick look at how it looks in both games:

The text is essentially the same, though I feel like the Japanese text ends on a more curiosity-piquing note with, “Are my thoughts being written out? Or could it be that…?” rather than EarthBound’s, “My thoughts are being written out on the wall… or are they?” I have no idea what it’s hinting at, though. Maybe it’s Magicant-related.

Hole and Hall in Japanese

In MOTHER 2, the dungeon after the Tenda village is called “Lumine Hall”. This spelling can be seen if you use the Sound Stone after finishing the Lumine Hall Dungeon.

EarthBound has a little bit of trouble with this name, though. The issue arises from the fact that ホール can be translated as either “hall” or “hole”, it depends entirely on context. With multiple translators working on different parts, it’s easy to make consistency mistakes, and the end result in EarthBound is that the place is called both “Lumine Hall” AND “Lumine Hole”. It doesn’t help that there’s a hole at the end of the hallway that you have to take to get to the next area of the game.

You can see the inconsistency at work here:

Still, from the fact that MOTHER 2’s Sound Stone says “Lumine Hall” and the fact that it’s the luminescent hallway itself that restores your energy and gives you the melody, it’s pretty clear that the intended name is “Lumine Hall”.

Incidentally, the pronunciation is along the lines of “loo-mih-neh” or “loo-mih-nuh”, depending on how lazy you are with your pronunciation. I always thought it was “loo-mine” (rhyming with “too fine”) until I played the game in Japanese.