Final Fantasy IV Translation Comparison: Toroia Castle 2

Now that the Earth Crystal is in hand, it’s time to return to Toroia Castle!

Bedtime Story

Edward saved the day, so when Cecil and friends visit him back at the castle, another big scene begins:

This is a pretty simple scene with only a few things of interest:

• There’s some silly-sounding English writing, with things like, “It’s you, Edward!” and “I’ll take yours too.” But then some other lines feel like they received actual editing. I’m guessing that whenever the editing phase of this project took place, they were in a real rush and could only polish things that really stood out.
• A few lines were removed from the English translation, including a line about Gilbert/Edward’s idea to try the special song and a line in which Tellah tells Edward to focus on getting well. I assume these lines were left out due to space restriction issues.
• In the Japanese version, Cid asks why the song affected the Dark Elf, while in the English version he asks where Edward learned the song.
• Yang continues to call him “Prince Edward” in the translation, and Edward uses the phrase “Master Tellah” instead of “Mr. Tella”. Both are neat improvements over the original, I feel.
• In the English translation, Edward says that he heard a “tune to bind evil fairies”. Because Japanese has a different cultural background and a folklore of its own, the word used here – “yousei” – doesn’t have a perfect 1:1 translation. “Yousei” can actually refer to not just fairies but elves and other things of that nature.

  As a result, the word is often mistranslated by Japanese natives as “fairy” instead of “elf”, which is exactly what’s happened here. Of course, I’m sure one could argue that elves are a type of fairy (or the other way around), but that’s a whole ‘nother topic altogether!

• Tellah’s line, “I’ll take yours, too.” never really made sense to me as a kid. Now I can look back and see that he’s saying he’ll get revenge for Edward too, since Edward won’t be able to go anywhere. And the Japanese phrase for “to avenge someone” includes the verb for “to take”, so now it makes double sense to me why this line ended up the way it did.
• Cecil praises Edward near the end of the scene, but the last half of his sentence was originally meant to appear after some ellipses and a page break. I think this was meant to show deep-down respect and camaraderie. The English translation doesn’t handle the line the same way, but the overall original intent is still there.
• Some added details were included in Edward’s last line to make it clearer to players what he was talking about.

There are actually a few differences in this scene between the original release and the Easy Type release. The only really significant change is the final line:

So it seems that the Easy Type writers and the English localization writers both felt that the original line here wasn’t clear enough for players. So they both added to the line in their own different way.

The PlayStation translation does some interesting things with this scene:

From just a quick look, I see a few things here:

• Many lines were removed, many lines were punched-up, and many were rewritten out of nothing. It’s a strange mixed bag, but I do admire the translator/localizer for being so gutsy.
• Edward’s final line, in which he tells Anna that he finally understands her, is removed entirely. This seems like a big part of his character development, so I’m not really sure why it was left out.
• The line where Tellah tells Edward to be silent made me laugh – the line before it was Edward being silent. I don’t think this was intended, though.
• The translator got the fairy/elf thing right. Cool!
• “Magneto-head” is definitely an interesting translation choice. It fits with Cid’s wise-cracking character, though

A quick peek at the fan translation shows this:

I gotta say, not bad at all! A deeper look shows a few things of interest:

• The fan translators did get tripped up with the fairy/elf thing, but it still somewhat fits with the following line, where he says he was unsure if it’d work or not. The following line was actually missing from the official translation.
• Some of Tellah’s line was changed a bit – he asks for forgiveness, for example. Similar to the official translation, though, he doesn’t tell Edward to get better; that line is missing entirely. It’s very strange that a line that the line above that was missing from the official release was added back in, but this particular missing line remains missing. I’m not sure how that happened.
• Just as the Easy Type writers and the official Super NES writers added in more details to Edward’s final line, so too did the fan translators. There’s definitely some sort of uncanny phenomenon at play here.

Clerics Celebrate

Once you return to the throne room with the Earth Crystal, the clerics gather around with excitement:

In the Japanese script, it’s clear through the use of punctuation and line breaks that these are four lines spoken by four different characters. In the English version it’s not as clear. Maybe it’s two? Maybe it’s three? Four?

The PlayStation translation handles this with:

Cleric: Oh, my goodness!
The Earth Crystal, indeed!
How the hell’d you…!
Three cheers!
BANZAI!

So it seems the PlayStation translation added a new line, made one of royal clerics foul-mouthed, and gave another one knowledge of the Japanese language.

What’s even weirder about the “BANZAI” line is that it’s not in the original Japanese text. Incidentally, “banzai” used in this way in Japanese equates to something like “hooray” or “hurrah” in English. Also, it’s not to be confused with “bonsai trees”.

The weirdness of the PlayStation translation in this scene seems to have prompted a fresh retranslation for the GBA release:

Cleric: Oh my goodness!
The Earth Crystal!
You’ve reclaimed it!
Hurrah!

Party Pooper

Suddenly, things turn dark and an ominous voice booms from somewhere – it’s Kain again!

It looks a line went missing here, and then Cecil’s line was misattributed to Cid in the English translation.

Lending Club

At this point, the clerics all have something new to say. Since there are so many of them and they each say something simple, I thought this might be a good time to closely look at what they say in many different translations of the game.

First up is who we’ll call Cleric 1:

Just formatting it this way sort of shows the evolution of this game’s translations – the original translation had severe memory limits, so it has the shortest line of all – it even goes so far as to remove two sentences to drastically save space.

The PlayStation translation is longer and retains more of the original text. The phrasing and the attitude of the line doesn’t really fit the character or mood, though, which is something the PlayStation translation has done many times before, as we’ve seen.

The GBA translation is usually a slightly-edited version of the PlayStation translation, as we’ve seen, but it looks like this line was retranslated from scratch. Cool! It’s much closer to the original now.

The DS translation is the wordiest of them all, but it also sticks really close to the original text in both meaning and feel.

I often point out the mistakes the fan translation makes, but it’s not a non-stop ride of mistakes. This line is a great example of the fan translators handling things properly.

Now let’s talk to Cleric 2.

There’s not a whole lot to say here. The only question I have is why the PlayStation translators have these clerics talking in such an unsophisticated way, what with their “dangs” and “hecks” and other weird lines we’ve seen previously.

Next, let’s chat with the third-strongest cleric.

There’s not much to this line, either, but for some reason the Super NES translation makes it sound like she’s literally handing the crystal to Cecil. If that were the case, what if the player never talked to this lady and thus never got the crystal?

The capitalization of “Crystal” in all but the Super NES release is interesting to note, too.

Let’s chat with Cleric 4 now:

This time we get an Easy Type script difference too. In actuality, the Japanese phrase used in this line is tough to translate into natural-sounding English without doing some big rephrasing, which is why every translation sounds a bit different. Especially with the first sentence, which is actually missing in the Super NES translation entirely.

It’s also interesting how the official translations from the PlayStation and on just say “Crystal” instead of “Crystal of Earth”, as the original text has it. It’s no big loss, just a neat three-in-a-row sort of thing.

In all, though, I really like all of these translations!

Let’s move on to Cleric 5:

Here we have another line that was changed for the Easy Type version of the game. And in an unexpected twist, the Super NES translation not only adds a line, it’s something that wasn’t suggested in the original text at all.

Time for Cleric 6.

This is a great example of how such a short, simple line will end up translated in many different ways when given to many different translators.

Of most note is the PlayStation translation, which just goes off and does its own thing.

Next is Cleric 7.

Nothing too much here – the biggest things of note I can think of are:

• Japanese verb conjugation doesn’t always match 100% with English verb conjugation, which is why we see a variety of verb forms in these translations. Japanese verbs can be tough to pin down sometimes.
• The original text adds an emphasizer phrase to the “what” in the sentence. It isn’t always necessary to include this in translation, which is why we see some translations here with and without some.
• But of most interest is the fan translation, which again makes a very specific reference to “Earth” that wasn’t in the original. Normally making a reference to something in real life like this would be a problem in any other game or show or whatever – it’s just by sheer luck that this game is supposed to be set on some version of actual Earth

Now for the eighth and final cleric!

There’s actually a tiny bit of ambiguous wording in the Japanese line here – it could be taken as “the power of the person who holds it will change”, although from the context it seems more obvious that the “the power of the crystal will change” interpretation is the intended one. Indeed, every translation but the original Super NES translation agrees with this latter interpretation.

Take Somethin’, Will Ya?

Now that you have the clerics’ permission to raid the basement treasure vault, it’s time to head down there!

If you now answer “yes” when the guard asks if you have permission to enter, she’ll say:

In Japanese, she actually speaks in a really unusual, almost archaic way – a better English approximation might be, “Prithee, take with you our valuables.”

In the English translation, though, she gives a standard-language response that could be taken as a sarcastic, passive-aggressive-sounding piece of text. I don’t think this was intentional, and most players probably read it the straight way and not the sarcastic way, but it’s still a possible, unintended interpretation.

Treasure Topic

The castle’s treasure vault had a few changes made for Easy Type and the SNES translation:

Even if the Silver Apple item does increase your HP, having an extra Elixir is definitely a nicer bonus in Easy Type and Final Fantasy II.