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RUclips took too damn long to point me here

Understanding that the rhyme scheme was an additional bit of flair added by the official translation, if there was a rhyme scheme in the Japanese that made it impossible for you to keep the original meaning and set a rhyme up, which would you generally prioritize?

Some additional comments/clarifications: 1. Another bit of context for the ambiguous Japanese line “さあ、呪詛を” (Saa, juso wo/Come now, the curse) that I didn’t cover in the episode is its reappearance in the Befuddled Villager’s second dialog. It’s followed by a repeated call for the attention of bloodless beings. Personally, I don’t think this sheds any light on the phrase’s meaning, which is why I didn’t mention it, but it’s possible that the idea of “listen[ing] for the baneful chants” works better here than the idea of “joining/pronouncing the chanting.” Again, I’d still try to ask for clarification if I came across a set of lines like this in my work, but I thought the additional context was at least worth mentioning here. 2. My discussion of the switch from “Ghos” to “Kos” is in Translationborne 65, after Micolash first pronounces the name. 3. For the sake of clarity for those who haven’t seen my earlier episodes (specifically Translationborne 3), when I talk about “Dying Will of Blood” not being an existing translation in the game to reference, I’m not suggesting that phrase as a valid alternative to “Blood Echoes”. I actually quite like the official English term. 4. Another thought I had on “Accursed Brew” as an item name while watching back the episode is that it’s possible the “true” item isn’t the skull at all, but the mix of curses that are drawn to it. In this case, it would make sense to somewhat de-emphasize the specific locus of the curses in favor of the fact that you have them gathered into one place. In other words, it might not be the skull that’s the important part of the item, but the curses it’s stewed in. I’m not sure how true that interpretation is to the actual lore/intention of the Japanese, but it could be another argument in favor of the official translation.

I'm surprised I managed to catch up. In the lore community there tends to be a lot of controversy about how the official localization compares to the original Japanese, so it was really refreshing listening to an expert's measured commentary. I've also had a lot of fun learning about the sort of background stuff on how translating is done from a job perspective, which I feel like cuts away a lot of perfect world scenarios. Love the translation index too. I know I've mostly been commenting on whether I liked when the official translation took a particular risk, but the honest standout moments for me were when you went over character dialogue. All in all, this has been an absolutely wonderful series.

Loved the detail on the differences between blue and Aoi and how that changes the context.

Comparing "Spartan" vs Valtr's speech, Spartan is a little much for me because it implies the existence of an entire civilization in the setting. League is just sort of a word and Valtr's voice is dated, but in a roleplayer kind of way, where I could see a real life person with some quirks talking like that. I guess part of that comes from where I'm from (southern US), where sometimes people genuinely do adopt that style of speech for political purposes.

Loved the section on the Chikage and double meaning.

On the use of weirder terms, I think Akelarre goes too far by virtue of sounding like a name and being a proper noun - the first instinct on reading it isn't "oh this is a word I don't know, I could look it up". Instead, it's "oh, this is a fantasy name". Arrant works because it's spoken, I think, so the context and tone get the idea across. Hypogean straddles the line a little, but I think it works in the really in the setting because both gothic and cosmic horror like to throw around loaded scientific terms in weird places ("non-euclidean geometry"). So in Bloodborne, excellent! In something like Dark Souls, probably too much unless, I don't know, it's a jail in Izalith or has some other context to justify it. Gaol oversteps for being an unnecessarily weird and dated spelling of a commonly used word, and I really feel like just prison would've been better. When the game first came out, people were pronouncing this area like "goal" or "gowel". Funnily enough, because that tripped up so many people in Bloodborne, when gaol was used in Elden Ring, it didn't end up being a real issue. I think I'd rather the official translations add more mood than be more literal, though, so I'd definitely still take "Hypogean Gaol" over "Underground Prison".

The commitment to this series and the dedication to the little details are amazing, thank you! Found this series just before Xmas and now I’m all caught up I can’t wait for the next instalment. Any plans to do something similar to this for other games?

On revealing an illusion as in make perceivable versus revealing an illusion as in dispelling, I think the answer is that it's both in both languages. I'm going out on a limb here, because I don't speak Japanese and maybe this ends up looking dumb, but "see" as in perceive can also work in the same way: perceive an illusion or perceive that something is an illusion. So, when we're questioned about what Logarius might've seen, we're clued into the fact that he probably put himself in a world of illusion until we or some other intruder show up. When we use the crown, we flip to the other side of the coin and use it to see through the illusion that hides the queen. I feel like Fromsoft's writers just like this kind of wordplay. The major caveat to my explanation is that it sort of spawns a lore theory which exists to justify it, which is less than ideal.

Love the stuff about the Inflicted Organ in particular. Learning that tonsils used to be called amygdala used to refer to what we now call tonsils, but now refers to the part of the brain, symbolically links a lot of things together. I think what's happening here, thematically speaking, is that they're tying in the emotion of horror with the throat because the throat is a source of screaming via the double meaning of Amygdala. Focal infection theory comes in nicely too, sort of associating the infection of beasthood with roaring in a more direct way. Just really cool stuff. On the choice of "Root," I honestly disagree. Root to me means something more like underlying source ("the root of the problem"), so when I think "root" I think of an origin from which other things grow. On replays I used to always get it backwards on which chalices were randomized and which were fixed. Granted, once you read the item descriptions it couldn't be clearer, but I feel like an item name should convey mechanical meaning rather than obscure it. This could definitely just be a me thing though.

I found these behind-the-scenes details on video game localization just as interesting as the thoughts on Bloodborne's translations. This series has been fantastic.

Great episode, for all the difficulties in translating Bloodborne it's awesome just how often Frognation knocked it out of the park, like with the Bloodletter. I can definitely see how the term "samurai" could fit for a Japanese audience but be a bit too historically specific for the anglosphere. It's definitely become a bit of a meme for Japanese fantasy to refer to "a mysterious land to the east" but oh well 😄 I imagine you're closing in on the end of the series now?

Now this, is the proper way to celebrate a new year🎉

Oh recommendation is cooking with this, im going to go ballistic for these

I just want to thank you for your dedication to continuing this series for so long, there are a few similar series on youtube but none of them actually go through the entire game and read every single thing like you do. Back when I started following you, I would have never thought that in half a decade I'd still be watching your videos while playing bloodborne on PC at 60 FPS, but here we are lol

Some additional comments/clarifications: 1. You may have noticed a discrepancy in my literal reading for part of the Yamamura Hunter Hat compared to my written-out version later in the episode. In the voiced portion, I read out, “as proof that he became a hunter and a hunter of the League”, but all written versions use the phrase, “as proof that he became a hunter and a fellow of the League”. The latter version is closer to the Japanese, but I didn’t catch that in the early part of the episode when I was doing the voiceover. I had intended to re-record this, but, unfortunately, I’ve had a cold that’s affected my voice for several days, and was therefore unable to make the correction in time for the release. It’s a small enough detail that I don’t think it would have been worth delaying the episode, but I did want to include an explanation here. 2. This is really neither here nor there, but I enjoy imagining the interaction where the League member(s) who welcomed Yamamura gave him the hat. He’s obviously going to get a League Staff, because every member gets one, but I can just see them taking in his foreign garb and thinking, “You know what this poor guy needs? A hat.” Did an old hunter give him one of theirs in that moment, and then buy a new one later? Or was this a present of sorts delivered to him as part of welcoming him into the group? It’s just an interaction I can’t help but think is both interesting and at the same time deeply human. 3. I sort of hint at this in the episode, but to be clear, the item name I literally translated as “Haori of the Japanese Nightingale” is almost certainly using the phrase “Japanese Nightingale” to get across the idea of a color. “Uguisu-iro” (鶯色) is a Japanese term for a sort of greenish brown, the same color as Yamamura’s haori. This makes the official translation of “khaki” considerably more understandable as a translation choice. Reference: dictionary.goo.ne.jp/word/%E9%B6%AF%E8%89%B2/#jn-18239 4. Given the note above, I think it’s interesting that the translators render “shikoku no hakama” (紫黒の袴) as “Wine Hakama”. Literally, this is more straightforward in the Japanese, consisting of the Kanji for purple (紫) followed by the Kanji for black (黒). I wonder if the translators decided to use a real-world term to represent this color as it’s more relatable to English speakers than “Nightingale-colored” would have been. Reference: dictionary.goo.ne.jp/word/%E7%B4%AB%E9%BB%92/ 5. One final thought on the colors: I think it’s interesting that the Japanese pieces of attire are the only parts of this set identified by their color, and the colors used aren’t friendly to Western descriptions of color. Maybe this was meant as another way of setting them apart from the rest of the set. 6. The use of the term “淀み” (yodomi/stagnation; dregs) in the Japanese description of the haori and hakama ties in with the theming of the League. It’s the exact same term used on the League rune (淀み), and it’s also used to describe what “虫” (mushi/bugs) are the source of. In the official translation, the description uses the phrase “stared straight into impurity” on the haori/hakama, the term “Impurity” for the rune, and “vermin” (the official term for 虫) are said to be the “root of man’s impurity”. While this all lines up nicely, though, the official English is slightly less consistent than the Japanese in using the idea of “impurity” in places like the Molotov Cocktail descriptions and in references to the Vilebloods. Since the League and their crusade against “淀み” (yodomi/stagnation; dregs) were added in an update to the game, though, some amount of confusion with past translations was probably inevitable. You can’t plan for what you don’t know is coming. 7. One other point about translating “samurai” as “Eastern warrior” is that the term can be used more generically even in Japanese to refer to a warrior, or just a remarkable person. Reference: dictionary.goo.ne.jp/word/%E4%BE%8D_%28%E3%81%95%E3%82%80%E3%82%89%E3%81%84%29/ (If you can read Japanese, see sense 3.) 8. Something I never directly bring up in the episode is the way Brador’s Japanese lines tend to end in the speculative/questioning phrase “かね” (kane), which you can sort of judge by the frequent appearance of the word “perhaps” in my literal versions. To me, this has the feel of a verbal characteristic of his Japanese speech, as opposed to him always asking questions. This may be why the official translators take some of these lines and rework them into statements where it seems appropriate, most notably on his dying line “Nothing changes, such is the nature of man...” 9. One other feature of the Japanese for the Bloodletter I think the translators handled exceptionally well is how it is literally described as “suck[ing] up blood pooled in the intestines, at the bottom of the heart.” The tricky thing here is that the term I’ve literally translated as “heart” (心/kokoro) is also associated with the meanings “mind” and “spirit”. So, in a sense, the blood is said to come from the depths of one’s guts and also the heart of one’s consciousness. Given the possibility of blood as a medium for will in the world of Bloodborne, this metaphysical aspect is much more reasonable than it would seem in the real world, but even so, it’s hard to avoid sounding either too generic (sucks up blood pooled in the intestines, at the bottom of the heart) or too silly (sucks up blood pooled in the intestines, at the base of the mind). However, the official solution of “draws upon blood from the inner reaches of one's body and soul” manages to thread this needle perfectly.

It’s been a little while since I’ve watched an episode of the series, but something funny happened and I wanted to share with you! I was scrolling my phone and came across a video of some people talking about the movie Princess Mononoke from Studio Ghibli. It’s been one of my favorite movies ever since I was a kid, and as soon as I came across it I thought “man, I wonder what the translationborne guy would come across for this translation.” I know that may not sound like much but I think it speaks to how interesting your work is! I’ve literally never come across any type of translation context that I found interesting until watching the videos that you created! I hope you’re still doing well, and I promise I’ll finish the series eventually XD

Concise and clear as always!🎉

Yay it's translationborne day!

Some additional comments/clarifications: 1. Since I spent the entire section on the Fist of Gratia talking about the spelling of “Gratia,” I didn’t get a chance to mention how much I like the official handling of the opening line, “指を差し込む穴が開いただけの鉄塊” (An iron lump with only holes for sticking fingers in opened). The whole idea behind that specific wording seems to be that this is just a solid piece of iron unworked except for some holes created for sticking fingers into it. That the translators were able to convey this same concept by using a simpler wording, "A chunk of iron fitted with finger holes," is something I find to be a particularly nice touch. 2. Another great move by the translators towards the end of the description for the Fist of Gratia is how they specify what the Japanese was referring to with “その様” (that appearance). This is meant to indicate that the appearance of Gratia swinging the weapon at beasts and causing them to reel back was in some sense heroic. Fully restating what was written above in English would be too repetitive, but completely mimicking the Japanese and writing “that appearance” could prove misleading. Thankfully, the solution of specifying that “her unrelenting pummelling appeared oddly heroic” threads this needle perfectly. 3. Looking back, I’m not sure how clearly this came across in the episode, but the reason I wanted to go into why Japanese people have trouble recreating sounds not in their native language is because this then has to be accounted for when translating back from those compromised pronunciations into with English or some other language. 4. Since I didn’t mention the other lines in Brador’s dialog in the episode, I thought I’d clarify here that the other slight alterations don’t bother me at all. Changing Brador’s presumption in the form of a question in his first line, “…お主、聞こえているな…？” (…You, you’re hearing this, aren’t you…”) to the apparently more straightforward question, “Do you hear this?” is something I find is offset by his second English line, “Fear the bell’s toll.” After all, if Brador didn’t think we could hear his bell, he wouldn’t continue by warning us about it in this second line or the rest of the dialog. As I see it, then, the end result is the same in English as it is in the Japanese. Similarly, I feel like both final lines get across the idea that the player character will be inescapably hounded by Church assassins from now on, which is the important thing. 5. When I mention that the various articles of attire in Brador’s set may have had their descriptions changed during development to differentiate each piece after the English translations were locked in, I have in mind something that may have happened with the Deep Sea runes. In the North American release of Bloodborne, these runes all have identical descriptions, whereas in the British English version of the game, the specific resistance that each rune grants is spelled out in the full description. I’ve previously covered this both in the special episode I made about the US vs UK differences and in episode 40 of Translationborne.

I know my ADD is bad when ive actually learned more about Japanese grammar from bloodborne videos. First time watching this, love the content.

Lol audio dips out and i keep of talking away to myself

Spoilers for the result below: For those curious about the final outcome, because @Scotsword was in a position where he was basically guaranteed to win, after having an administrator review the evidence of his position the game was declared in his favor. You can verify this for yourself by watching Scotsword's perspective here: ruclips.net/video/1QH-lYQzLKA/видео.html . If you're unclear on how exactly this would have worked, Scotsword also explains the results when talking to Rossco and me after the recording ends: ruclips.net/video/1QH-lYQzLKA/видео.html&t=5084s

This series, unlike the hunters' appearance, is not too shabby.

On the topic of the use of the "he" pronoun and how the translators wouldn't have known that without developer input or lots of digging around the items, is it also possible that unfortunately it is just a lazy assumption by the translators (because the odds of a female 'beast' is far less likely - I'm not a Bloodborne player so I don't know if this assumption would stand up based on the lore) or an assumption by the character himself?

Aruk: "Farewell Simon" Also Aruk: *walks and spins across Simon's corpse*

Hello Aruki Mania. I started watching your channel about a month ago and binged all of your videos within about 2 weeks. Your work is fantastic. I have a question: in a much earlier video, you pronounced Oedon as something like “Urden” with a very pronounced “r” sound, which I have also heard from other RUclipsrs (Smoughtown even spelled it “Urden” in a recent video). Why is this? If I remember correctly, in a much earlier video you said it was pronounced in Japanese as “Oo-don”, so where does the “r” sound come from? To me, it’s pronounced by the voice actors quite clearly as “uh-den” by Gehrman and the Chapel Dweller.

Always shouldn't be direct translation !

Bloodborne!!!

Another great episode. I find the English version of Simon’s spoken dialogue much more heartbreaking than the Japanese in wording and delivery. Part of it recognizes that the hunters are being punished forever, perhaps intimating that the real perpetrators of the crime against Kos have escaped it. The other part is the irony of becoming the hunted and feeling the exhaustion and strain of it. I also imagined that “harrowed” refers to the quality of being chased or vexed by the nightmare and Brador. On the note of the seedbed, it is perhaps interesting (or not) that in Elden Ring, the NPC The Dung Eater has a set of key items called “Seedbed Curse” to gestate a mending rune that leads to a cursed age. This image of “seedbeds” appears to be a popular metaphor!

It's nice to know that Simon is from the early hunters of the church, maybe his liking of the bow is like Ludwig's taste about the more chivarly weapons. And it fits that Simon ends Ludwig's suffering if the player does not. Death by a comrade. I think to remenber that in early versions Simon is the one who killed Maria.

Some additional thoughts/clarifications: 1. One place where I don’t find the official English quite as clear as the Japanese text is in reference to the やつし (yatsushi/deceptively shabby) being what I’ve literally translated as, “preventative hunters”. This is likely meant to be a callback to the Church hunters who wear the Black Church set, which the item description calls “予防の狩人である” (yobou no karyuudo dearu/[they are]…preventative hunters). Meanwhile, on the Harrowed set, we find the phrase, “やつしもまた予防の狩人であり” (yatsushi momata yobou no karyuudo deari/The deceptively shabby are also preventative hunters). In the latter set of attire, “momata” is a bit more specific than the English “also” in that it specifies that these hunters, too, are preventative ones, making the connection fairly strong. To be fair to the official English wording, there is a callback in phrasing here too. On the Black Church set, those who wear the attire are said to, “understand the importance of early prevention of the scourge”. As for those who don the Harrowed set, these hunters are described as “keen to early signs of the scourge”. So, it’s not as if there’s no similarity in wording or concepts for players to latch on to, but I do think it’s easier to draw this particular connection in Japanese. 2. On the other hand, I think the translators have done a great job of bringing forward the chief implication of the Japanese line, “あるいは、彼らがそう信じるものを、必ず見出す” (aruiha, karera ga sou shinjiru mono wo, kanarazu midasu/Or possibly, they always find that which they believe is there). The point of this sentence is to put forward the possibility that maybe these hunters aren’t actually identifying signs of the beastly scourge so much as they’re seeing what they want to see. The official line, “Or perhaps, when the time is ripe, they find signs of the scourge where there are none,” captures this same idea perfectly. 3. While I talk about most of the rest of the changes to Simon’s dialog in the episode, I didn’t get to mention how much I appreciate the translators’ altering his line about being targeted by the beast-hide assassin “…ずっと、ずっと…” (…zutto, zutto…/…Without ceasing, without ceasing). Literally the idea is that he feels like he’s constantly being hunted by Brador, but practically what this boils down to is that Brador keeps coming after him time and time again, as we can see from what happens to the player character. Especially since the dialog ends with “…終わりなく…” (…owarinaku…/without end), “…Again and again…” makes a lot more sense in English. 4. It’s probably worth pointing out that the word for “seedbed” (苗床/naedoko) Simon uses in his Japanese dialog is exactly the same as the name of the “Milkweed” (苗床/naedoko/seedbed) rune in Japanese. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this connection myself, but perhaps it’s significant to those more familiar with Bloodborne’s lore.

I didn’t understand the “feminine features” of Arianna’s speech. Is there specific words that designate a woman speaking in the first person? Is there anything similar in English? Great series! I’ve been enjoying it very much.

Great episode as always!

And i admire it so heavily.

Keeping a series going about a game thats damn near dead on a last gen console for 7 years is fucking insane

Doris is the one who asks for the password?

Have you watched Charred Thermos's "an agony of effort" series? He makes the case that Bloodborne can be interpreted as a huge allegory of victorian medical practices. Having followed your series since the very beginning i think his theory is definitely reasonable based on the jp text. So if you are familiar with his work, what are your thoughts on this?

Have you checked the Maria's cut content dialogue? I don't know what to make of how she refers to Gehrman, without honorifics but using the title "beasthunter". ruclips.net/video/67Xq08eMq4c/видео.html

Welcome back to translation borne!!!

Thanks for sharing your work. Always super interesting. ✌️

Some additional thoughts/clarifications: 1. One of the nice touches in the official translation of the Blacksky Eye that I didn’t get to in the episode is its name. Considering the presumed tie to outer space/the cosmos thanks to the constant meteor swarm described in the dark patch of night sky in the latter half of the description, I think “Blacksky” does a good job of covering both the idea of a “dark stretch of sky” and the state of the sky we associate with night, which is that it’s black. The obvious alternatives, “Eye of the Night Sky” and “Darksky Eye”, either sound clunky to me or are arguably too specific in meaning. 2. By contrast, the one part of the Blacksky Eye’s translation that I find puzzling is why the translators open the second line with the word “They”. This word makes it sound like it’s either talking about the phantasms mentioned in the previous line, which seems unlikely given that the official translation uses the singular “phantasm”, or that the translators thought since this was a consumable that there would be multiples of this item. That latter possibility seems more likely to me, as it’s reminiscent of the treatment given to the Bloodshot Eyeball-giving an item name in the singular to something players can acquire numerous copies of-but if that’s the case, it’s an even further indication that the process for text-based item translation didn’t involve as much communication as what we’ve seen for the dialog. 3. The entire last section of the Blacksky Eye features what I would consider strong translation work, but I’m particularly impressed by the phrasing of “the slightest rub of the tiny orb”. It naturally conveys the ease with which the meteors can be called forth that I’ve more clunkily rendered as “if the eye is so much as rubbed ever so slightly”, while at the same time drawing a parallel between “the orb”, which in this context is obviously a reference to the Blacksky Eye, and the meteor that emerges from it. 4. There’s at least one caveat I can think of that should be made regarding the idea that the Japanese text doesn’t imply that something happened “at Byrgenwerth” that I didn’t have time to bring up during the episode itself. Namely, that something definitely seems to have happened at Byrgenwerth that caused the Lecture Building to become “adrift in the Nightmare”, as we learn from the Lecture Theater Key. Granted, it’s unclear when that happened, and we know something significant probably happened at Byrgenwerth around the time of Rom’s partial ascension, so it may be that these are significant events from another time. In any case, the main point of how confusing and difficult it can be to puzzle together Bloodborne’s lore even having all the finalized pieces of the puzzle should still stand, to say nothing of what it might have been like when those metaphorical puzzle pieces were being shaped and reshaped during development. 5. Regarding my remark at around 5:28 in this video, you can still see the comment from @LastProtagonist on Translationborne 35 where he first informed me of this possibility. 6. For the Rakuyo, I’m a little surprised the translators didn’t say the weapon demands “great skill”, since this both gets across the idea that it’s a challenging weapon to wield and ties in directly with the Skill stat in Bloodborne that the Rakuyo scales best with. To be fair, the Japanese uses different terms as well, with “技量” (giryo) appearing on the Rakuyo and “技術” (gijutsu) being the name of the stat, and it’s not exactly a mystery that “great dexterity” is meant to be a stand-in for “great skill”. Still, I don’t know if I’d have been able to resist the play on words if I was translating that passage.

Ive got an old board game thats still in the plastic like this.

Thank you for recording this!!

I’ve been theorizing that ashen blood was caused by the fishing hamlet cursing Byrgenwerth, so it was exciting to see another possible connection!

Love yor series the effort, you truly deserve more :)