Today’s post is another smaller one and looks into the Samurai Outfit in Super Mario Odyssey. It’s part of an ongoing series of comparison from the game both by request and personal curiosity.
A lot of patterns are repeated from previous posts, so I recommend reading them or else my commentary may seem a little short (as I’m avoiding repeating myself every post).
| Japanese | Lit. Translation | Official Localization |
| 工芸品としても美しい サムライスタイルの帽子
工芸品としても美しい サムライスタイルの服 |
A beautifully crafted Samurai-style cap.
A beautifully crafted Samurai-style suit. |
The samurai wore helmets that were functional AND fancy.
The samurai basically walked around wearing works of art. |
Like previous posts have shown, localization through this game ups the straightforward Japanese description with colorful flair.
The Japanese here you can actually see has the same lines with only one word that is different: cap and suit. It may be worth noting that in Japanese the armor is “Warrior armor” rather than “Samurai” directly. However, in the description itself they reference the Samurai directly, which may be where the localization got the “Samurai” armor from as a way to express [Japanese] Warrior while keeping true to that description.
More literally, the Japanese does say “Beautiful handicraft in a samurai style.” When you see this more literal description, then the localization referencing the “works of art” makes more sense than may appear from my translation.
However, one key difference is the localized description keeps referencing what “the samurai” did (“the samurai basically walked around in”, or “the samurai wore”). It’s a very subtle thing, but the Japanese simply describes the armor, where as the localization seems to be describing the armor within compliments to samurai aesthetic/culture in general.
If you have been reading the previous posts up until now, you begin to see the things I state above are pretty consistent through how localization went about handling the descriptions in this game. Whether that is a good or a bad way to go about it is up to you!
That’s that!
I will continue to look at fun differences between the versions of sorts of games when I get time!
Any dialogue you’re interested in? Feel free to send in comments or via email!
kantopia 