Now that I’ve joined this forum, time to have another obligatory thread about our beloved badly-localized, yet somehow memorable, trilogy that preceeds Trails series in the Legend of Heroes franchise!
Oh yeah, this thread CONTAINS SPOILERS for not only the trilogy as a whole, but also the entire Trails series!
To open up the discussion:
The dragon in Sword Emperor Zamza books is named アルベリヒト. It was translated as “Alvericht”, buuut doesn’t that name sounds familiar?
I've gotta reread those books some time, given how long it's been and how much lore Falcom loves to either hide or at least foreshadow in them. <stares at Sapphie and Doll Knight in particular>.
Speaking of name translations, Gu4n just finished a run of Cagesong (PSP, Japanese) and being as much of an etymology geek as me, he started looking into some of the names to try and parse them. While he was doing it, he found a big one that I hadn't even considered because I assumed Falcom just made up the term: The Wave of Raual (ラウアールの波) actually takes its name from Rahouart (or Rahovart), a demon mentioned in Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal. This also appears to be where Falcom got the name Durzel from. That'll teach me not to make that assumption again... xD
And welcome to the board, glad you made it!
Haha, I stumbled upon this forum while checking whether this web project of yours have updated since the last time I visited or not.
Speaking of terminology, we need to compile terms and names from the PSP version and then decide which ones are translation fumbles and which ones are just Falcom-brand Engrish at work.
Haha, I stumbled upon this forum while checking whether this web project of yours have updated since the last time I visited or not.
Speaking of terminology, we need to compile terms and names from the PSP version and then decide which ones are translation fumbles and which ones are just Falcom-brand Engrish at work.
Well, there have been a few updates (depending on when you last dropped by)... but now the progress bar widget that I just added has borked itself and I'm not sure why (EDIT: Working now xD). But you might find it especially interesting that since Guan just finished the trilogy, we've been playing around with other names so the glossary's gonna have a lot more Gagharv place-names than my notes were accounting for only a week ago. xD
On translation fumbles versus Falcom Engrish, most of the names don't have official romanisations aside from selected characters and the locations... and Cagesong's the odd exception where the regions of Weltluna have official names but the individual towns and cities do not, for some reason. Off the top of my head, Igunis and Dartu would be clear cases of Falcom Engrish (Ignis/Darts respectively) as would Jurio as opposed to Julio. Bandai un-Engrished at least one name ('Conrod') and the list of names that didn't have official romanisations but which they screwed up would take a while to list in full.
EDIT: All the Weltluna locations I'm pretty certain of are on the glossary. We can blame Falcom Engrish (or... Spanlish? Poltuguese? Ilish?) for the country names while all the places within the countries never got official ones so those would be pure translation fumbles. Not that I can entirely blame Bandai for some of those, I needed Gu4n to point out how many were references that I'd not even thought about and some of them are really obscure. Given a number of made-up names in earlier entries, I'd have gone with 'Racos Palma' and called it a day too, in all likelihood.
