Does Not Illustrate: Woolseyism.Video Games

How am I supposed to know this is a great translation decision if I don't know what it was translated from? (Previous thread only talked about moving the image to a subpage, not the image being a good illustration or not, and it's from 2012 anyway.)

I'm not sure what we could use as a replacement. Maybe we could use some visual like in Cultural Translation, or maybe an image of a character's name in different languages, or a subtitle. I think this is going to be very hard to illustrate well because we'll need to explain half the image for our monolingual tropers.

Edited by mightymewtron on Jan 6th 2021 at 1:36:25 PM

This thread moved the pic from Woolseyism. I'm inclined to say this is a decent Keep Until Better Image Suggested case, provided the caption is changed to something more explanatory of the dialogue change.

Yeah, Keep Until Better Image Suggested.

Keep Until Better Image Suggested

either change the caption or remove the image. don't just keep it as is.

Edit: Never mind.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 12th 2021 at 2:12:59 PM

I say remove it. The picture does nothing to actually show the trope unless you know what the original text said. The trope is about a translation style, not just a funny line, and the picture is useless for that purpose since the vast majority of people seeing it won't be able to deduce anything about the actual trope from it since they don't know what was said originally.

Yeah, I agree with a pull. It's not illustrating anything.

Besides that, I don't think the page itself even does a good idea of explaining what makes the image a Woolseyism. The only thing on the page with any level of explanation about it is:

• The Advance version also changed a few of Kefka's lines, giving him wisecracks he did not have in the SNES version. Though a bit more contested, Kefka's line in the picture on this page, "son of a submariner", to "son of a sandworm". Both work in the context, but there are no submarines in the game.

All we're told is that it "works in context", with no explanation as to how it works in context, compared to the original. This is just a little short of being a Zero-Context Example. What was the original line? Why was the translation a step up?

Forgot to actually mention my point - people will see this, won't understand what makes it a Woolseyism, will look at the examples to see what makes it a Woolseyism, and, at best, will get a vague answer that boils down to "someone liked it." I know it's a YMMV, but there should at least be some explanation to help others understand why someone felt that the example was a fit for the trope. Right now, the page image is not only useless, but actively harmful in giving people an idea of what the trope is.

Edited by AGuy on Jan 11th 2021 at 10:27:30 AM

Pull

Pull.

Pull.

This trope already has issues and a bad image won't help any.

I'm leaning towards pull here. Do we need a crowner?

I've slept since I last posted and I changed my vote, which was as simple as removing an arrow from my post.

Edit: You know what? Scratch that. Just pull it. I'm actually kind of leaning toward BUPKIS.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 12th 2021 at 2:13:59 PM

My immediately thought went to the Hammer Bros. from Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, as how they speak varies from region to region (taken from the wiki)

And luckily the wiki article links some screencaps of the Japan and American versions:

Hmmmm...that's actually not too bad.

That's a good choice. Need to have some captions for the Japanese text though.

I like that, but the French version or one of the others with visibly shortened SMS-style text might be better, cuz I don't know Japanese at all so I didn't immediately get why the original was abnormal in context. But at least this one shows a funny translation.

Edited by mightymewtron on Jan 12th 2021 at 9:15:27 AM

I like that too.

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Edit: For context, I think text that's entirely in katakana is considered robotic and is given to robots in Japanese works. (I think it's also seen as equivalent to typing in all caps.) At the very least, a lot of early Japanese computers only supported katakana and didn't support hiragana or kanji, which might have something to do with the machinery association.

Basically, in the Japanese version, I think the idea is that the Hammer Bros. are supposed to sound like robots.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 12th 2021 at 7:24:31 AM

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