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Spoiler warning: This article includes major spoilers for Ranni’s ending in Elden Ring

Elden Ring Ranni ending
(Don’t worry, this picture is from the cinematic trailer, not the ending)

※この記事の日本語版はこちらで読めます / This article is available in Japanese here

Now that players have had some time to get into Elden Ring, more and more people are clearing the game. According to trophies, the ending that players have chosen the most is the “Age of the Stars”, unlocked by clearing Ranni the Witch’s quest. But what does this ending entail? A lot of the dialogue is cryptic, which has left players confused and divided over what it means.

Unfortunately, it appears that the confusion is coming from a number of mistranslations and localization changes. Elden Ring’s backstory might have been written by George R. R. Martin, who of course writes in English, but what he provided was only a “backbone” for the story, and the script for the game itself is, as director Miyazaki has said himself, written by him and From Software. Though the game only has an English voiceover, this voiceover is derived from the translated version of the script, and so any mistranslations in the script would make it into the voiced dialogue as well.

With the text originally being in Japanese, it has to be translated into English, and unfortunately it seems that some mistakes were made along the way.

Also see:

Elden Ring survey results show players’ fave weapons, bosses, and more

 

 

The Ending Dialogue

Elden Ring Age of Stars Ranni endingIn the English version, Ranni says:

“I do solemnly swear.
To every living being, and every living soul.
Now cometh the age of the stars.
A thousand year voyage under the wisdom of the Moon.
Here beginneth the chill night that encompasses all, reaching the great beyond.
Into fear, doubt, and loneliness…
As the path stretcheth into darkness.
Well then. Shall we?”

“Here beginneth the chill night that encompasses all, reaching the great beyond”. It seems that the translator who handled this line did not understand the original line at all, and while the individual parts are correctly translated, the order of the words, and thus cause and effect and thus the entire meaning of the line have been changed.

In Japanese, the line states “to all, you may think of the chill night as infinitely far away”.

To break down the problems with the English translation of this line:

  • “Encompasses all”: In the original line, “subete yo” indicates that she is addressing “all”. “Encompasses” is nowhere to be found in the original line.
  • “Beginneth”: There is no mention of anything beginning in the original line.
  • “The great beyond”: This seems to be a mistranslation of “haruka ni tooku”, meaning “infinitely/extremely far away”. The translator seems to have been unable to understand how this relates to the rest of the line and changed it to “reaching”, when Ranni is in fact telling all people that the chill night will, from now on, be far away.

“Into fear, doubt, and loneliness… As the path stretcheth into darkness.” has also been mistranslated, erroneously being connected with the previous line, when it in fact should be connected to the following line.

As with the previous line, it seems that the translator was unable to understand Japanese sentence structure and parse the correlation between lines.

A better way to represent the Japanese dialogue would be:

私は誓おう　すべての生命と、すべての魂に
“I shall swear to all lives and souls”

これよりは星の世紀
“From hereon is the Age of Stars”

月の理、千年の旅
“The laws of the moon, a thousand year journey”

すべてよ、冷たい夜、はるか遠くに思うがよい
“To all, you may think of the chill night as infinitely far away”

恐れを、迷いを、孤独を　そして暗きに行く路を　さあ、行こうか
“And now, let us go on our path of fear, doubt, and loneliness, into darkness”

(This is a literal translation to clarify the meaning of the Japanese dialogue: Some rewording might be prudent if it were for actual implementation into a game)

So, the original line has her not beginning a chill night, but telling everyone that the chill night will now be kept far away, and the the mention of fear, doubt and loneliness is referring to her own dark path. But what is the chill night, and what does it being far away actually mean?

 

The Explanation in Ranni’s Room

Age of Stars Ranni Elden RingThankfully, there is an event where, when you go to Ranni’s room and talk to the doll after clearing her quest, she clearly explains everything to you. Unfortunately, the lines here were also mistranslated.

 

The English version’s dialogue states:

“Upon the order I envision.
Mine will be an order not of gold, but the stars and moon of the chill night.
I would keep them far from the earth beneath our feet.
As it is now, life, and souls, and order are bound tightly together, but I would have them at a great remove.
And have the certainties of sight, emotion, faith, and touch…
All become impossibilities.
Which is why I would abandon this soil, with mine order.”

 

The Japanese dialogue states:

私の律について
“About my order”

私の律は、黄金ではない。星と月、冷たい夜の律だ
“My order will not be of gold, but of the stars and moon, and chill night.”

…私はそれを、この地から遠ざけたいのだ
“…I want to keep it far away from this land.”

生命と魂が、律と共にあるとしても、それは遥かに遠くにあればよい
“…Even if life and souls are one with the order, it (the order) could be kept far away.”

確かに見ることも、感じることも、信じることも、触れることも
…すべて、できない方がよい
“If it was not possible to clearly see, feel, believe in, or touch the order… That would be better.”

だから私は、律と共に、この地を棄てる
“That is why I will leave this place, along with the order.”

(This is a literal translation to clarify the meaning of the Japanese dialogue: Some rewording might be prudent if it were for actual implementation into a game)

 

The “far away” here, “haruka ni tooku”, is the exact same wording used in the ending where she says the cold night will be far away. It is odd that the exact same wording used here is mostly correctly translated to “keep them far” in this instance but mistranslated so badly in the ending. (Though it is misinterpreted to refer to the stars, moon, and night, when it is referring to the order itself)

The line about having “them”, referring to life, souls and order, kept at “a great remove” suggests that Ranni is separating the three, but the original dialogue seems to suggests that it is impossible to do so, and that her choosing to keep the order far away is a compromise to deal with that.

The biggest problem with the English version is the line stating “have the certainties of sight, emotion, faith, and touch… All become impossibilities”: Players have argued that this ending erases the emotions of people for some reason. This is in fact an egregious mistranslation: The line is actually referring to the order.

The Japanese language commonly omits the subject when speaking about something when it should be easily inferred, but this frequently confuses people who are not very fluent in the language, and that seems to have been the case here. What Ranni is saying here is that it would be better if the order is not somewhere physically close by, where people can see and touch it.

Additionally, the “tashika ni” used to indicate that right now people can clearly see or feel or touch the order, a word that is not all that important in the line and could in fact be omitted entirely without changing its meaning, was misinterpreted to have undue importance, turned into “the certainties”.

Similarly, the softly-worded “dekinai hou ga yoi”, where Ranni is just saying she thinks it would be better if these could not happen, was changed into the hard “become impossibilities”. Combined, this line gave many players the impression that the ending would result in Ranni forcing people to give up their emotions.

 

What This Means

There you have it: The explanation Ranni gives in her room makes it very clear what her ending means, while the mistranslated dialogue in the ending gives many players a completely wrong impression.

Ranni believes that while the order may have to exist, as it is entwined with life and souls, it causes problems for the people. Her solution is thus to take it and leave, keeping it far away, where people cannot see, feel, touch, and believe in it, embarking on a journey into fear, doubt, solitude and darkness to do so.

Elden Ring director Miyazaki has stated that he feels that NPC dialogue in the game is more straightforward than before, and having an ending explained so clearly is in fact quite unprecedented for Dark Souls games. It is thus quite unfortunate that the English version went to such measures to twist and warp what would otherwise be such a clear explanation.

 

Also see:

Rapport, Annals and the Royal Rat Authority: 10 Mistranslations in the Dark Souls Series

 

This article was updated on 3/20 to add further clarifications

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

103 COMMENTS

  1. The second portion isn’t a mistranslation at all. It is intentionally vague. While I found it to pretty clearly reference the order, however, I can understand why others may have been confused.

    • How is it not a mistranslation when the original text and localized version are nothing alike, and have completely different meanings? “have the certainties of sight, emotion, faith, and touch All become impossibilities” is the clearest example of a mistranslation there ever was. What the hell kind of cope are you on?

    • I’m not seeing it. The part mentioned about turning emotion info impossibilities seems like a pretty huge mistranslation to me, given how it was not about turning them into impossibilities, and in fact emotions were never mentioned at all. Could you elaborate?

      • She’s referring to her order, and having the certainties of sight, emotion, faith, and touch be impossible. Which is why she takes her order far away, so people can not see it, feel it’s presence, worship it, or be close enough to touch it like how the current order is and how it’s a constant presence people see, feel, believe in, and touch. The Japanese version makes this clear, while the English one is left to interpretation. If you think she meant to remove emotions from people, then she contradicts herself in the ending when she addresses the world, the people, and says the age of stars and moon has begun, saying there will be doubt, fear, and loneliness. All three of those are emotions, so why would she say that if people would have no emotions?

  2. The only thing in this article that’s a legitimate mistranslation is the first part of Ranni’s ending. The second bit about the dialogue at her tower is translated just fine, the problem is one of misunderstanding on the part of the retarded fucking players who don’t know how to read english above a 3rd grade level and can’t understand that “the certainties of” senses doesn’t mean that people are going to lose their sense of sight but that they are not going to be live in a world of predetermination as it was under the Golden Order. The line reads just fine as is, people are just retarded.

    • I disagree.

      “As it is now, life, and souls, and order are bound tightly together, but I would have them at a great remove”: It is unclear what “great remove” means, but it sounds like she will have all three: Life, souls, and order, at great remove.

      “And have the certainties of sight, emotion, faith, and touch… All become impossibilities.”: This sounds like she is eliminating all of these from humans, making it so that people cannot see, feel, believe, or touch each other.

      When looking at the two together it feels like she wants to turn mankind into unthinking husks or some kind of hivemind under the dark moon god. But this article makes it clear that those lines are mistranslated, and I’ve also been hearing that the stuff about the dark moon being an outer god might be a mistranslation too.

      They really dropped the ball on this.

      • Once you see how a lot of things are symbolic, it’s easier to understand or guess.

        How is “as it is now, life, and souls, and order are bound tightly together, but i would have them at a great remove” any better than “even if life and souls have to be one with the order, it could be kept far away”much better? That’s still vague.

        Again it’s symbolic. Plus the Japanese “If it was not possible to clearly see, feel, believe in, or touch it, that would be better” still like the English one, implies the intent or preference to rid people of those things if we take it literally. But it’s all about her order, her conversation starts by declaring it’s about that, her whole speech is about her order. The sight, touch stuff is all in regards to how she intends to not be a constant and invasive presence like the golden order and everything else was. Life, souls, order, are referring to how things are in the lands between with the golden order, Marika, the fingers, greater will. It’s why she killed herself as she wasn’t gonna be a pawn on the greater will or the fingers chess board. That’s what she means by how those three things are all linked, and that she intends to remove that by getting rid of the board and letting people think and act on their own.

        • It’s not “symbolic” you drooling brain damaged imbecile, you’re cherrypicking parts and saying “hurrrr but what does this mean” but when looking at all of the corrected translations it’s entirely clear what it means.

          >still like the English one, implies the intent or preference to rid people of those things if we take it literally.

          The article clearly states that it’s supposed that “it” refers to the order which recontextualizes the line completely and thus cannot possibly mean ridding people of these things you illiterate retard.

          fucking moron

    • “hoho, me wanna look so smart, me wanna flex, gonna call everybody”
      When clear mistranslations happened, and there’s not much to discuss
      Even Miyazaki stated in on the intreviews that game is much more straightforward than his previous titles(even item’s decription now tell full story what was written – e.g. Merchant set near Three Finger, telling what happened to them, or Vyke set, telling about his decision)
      But you being 0 IQ degenerate with mentality of 14 year maximalist wanted to look the smartass but ended up being just a pompous idiot. I see the only retard here – it’s you

    • It’s really weird how there’s a subset of the soulsborne fanbase that hates Japan and frequently tries to downplay and distance the series from Japan despite it being quintessentially Japanese. That’s the crowd that always comes up with the bizarre mental gymnastics of “the voiceovers are in English, therefore the script was written in English first”.

      Yeah, it’s little more than racist gaslighting. People like G-Wide, x1 and Scott in this very comments section are of the same stock. They’re delusional.

      I want to add, a lot of western game devs with their bad faith critique of the games like the recent UX fiasco, that also has really strong racist vibes to them too. There’s a strong “asians are stupid and should listen to us superior westerners” nuance to them and it’s disgusting.

  4. I still understand both versions, and despite the translation difference, I still come to the same conclusion as to what she means.

    She does start by addressing all, saying “to every living being, and to every living soul” And something is beginning though, the age of the stars and moon, with Ranni and the Tarnished at the helm. The end of the golden order, the fingers etc will have an affect on all, everyone. Which is why she says there will be fear, doubt, and loneliness, as change can be scary, hard, and now they won’t have the golden order, gods, fingers and so on controlling and influencing them. They will have to forge their own path.

    Don’t think it’s a big deal, I mean she makes it clear by starting that conversation stating she wants to talk more about her order. The Japanese version in regards to her order says “keep it” far away, and the English one says “keep them” far away, yet despite wording it different, an order in this context is her rules, mandate, religion etc. Just like the golden order’s was about the Elden Ring, Marika, the fingers etc, Ranni’s is about the stars, moon, night, whatever that entails truly. So she’s keeping what her order entails, away from people. The stars and moon are already far away from people to begin with, so It’s not literal, but symbolic. Though saying “it” referring to the order as a whole is better than saying “them” referring to specific parts of said order.

    Her saying she’d have the certainties of sight, emotion, faith, and touch become impossibilities, is no different than the Japanese one saying if those things were impossible, that would be better. In both versions she isn’t saying they WILL be impossibilities, simply that she’d prefer if they were. Otherwise she would of said “I will have them be impossibilities” instead of “I would have” And more importantly, it’s what she intends anyway, in both versions. Again not literally, as like with the stars, moon, night talk, this part is also symbolic. Hence why she says in both that she will leave, as to allow everyone freedom, to make their own way.

    • The mistranslated version is completely different from the correct one. If you reached the same conclusion from it, that only indicates that is something wrong with you.

      And it’s not symbolic you idiot, did you even fucking read the article before shitposting? She literally says having an order that’s just RIGHT THERE in the tree so that people fight over it and it controls their lives is a bad thing, but you can’t just destroy it because it’s connected to life itself, so she’s taking it far away into space where it won’t be a problem anymore. The mistranslated version is some ambiguous garbage about starting the chill night and making emotions impossibilities. They are nothing alike.

    • >I still understand both versions, and despite the translation difference, I still come to the same conclusion as to what she means.

      >immediately posts a wall of text showing he didn’t understand anything

      lmao

  5. The problem with game localizations is they’re always handled by people who work in the regions the game will be released in. Elden Ring is done by Frognation, a UK company. The translators are not immersed in Japanese language, and it’s unclear if they ever even have any contact with the language at all outside of work. Sometimes they’re just people who got the N1 from a business Japanese course. People who are actually good at translation get governmental or corporate jobs for it. That leaves the dregs for game translation. It’s a matter of course that game translations end up so bad as a result.

  7. It is a mistranslation, but they are pretty close I think in meaning that one could understand what Ranni means if they think on her words and this particular ending enough. The Souls games are hardly ever straightforward after all.

  8. this is just sad. from soft’s translations have gotten worse and worse since DS2. i thought sekiro’s problems were so bad they’d light a fire under from soft and make them make sure they did it right on their next game, but apparently not. Elden Ring is filled with grammatical errors, typos, outright bad translations like this, and freaking Disney movie references the localizers added in. I’m sick of this stuff. I just want to play the game the way the writers intended it.

    It’s bad that the profession is so unreliable I have to learn Japanese if I want to have any hope of getting the real story from manga and video games and foreign film.

    • They’ve been bad since ds1 dude

      Loss of the annals

      Actually they’ve been bad since before souls even, look at armored core and kings field

  9. Frognation’s translator gave an interview whining about how difficult it is to translate Miyazaki’s text because of all the hard kanji.
    archive. ph/zHRHt

    You can tell when the translators don’t read shit. Complaining about difficult words and Kanji is cope. If I were hiring a translator for a project I would start by asking them about the last 5 novels they read in Japanese to see what their opinions were on them. If they struggle to answer this question, there is no reason to hire them at all. This alone would filter out most of the retards who have been screwing up vidya translation/localization for the past 20 years.

    The quantity and variety of reading that a translator has done (in both their native language and their other languges) directly affects the quality of their output. Many of these Japanese learners who move into translation/localization positions do NOT read, or might not even be ABLE to read a full-blown piece of literature in Japanese. Complaining about rare words or obscure Kanji is one of my biggest red flags for someone who doesn’t read.

    Also this is a video game. You think someone’s gonna work on learning Japanese in school for ten fucking years and work for peanuts in the video game translation business? They’re going to instantly go to work with English publishing houses translating serious Japanese works from people like Haruki Murakami, Yukio Mishima, etc., because video game and anime companies will pay you the same as a fry cook at Denny’s for translating the same amount of text as in a novel. game translation, it’s handled exclusively by people who are literally just not good enough for real translation/interpretation work.

    It’s likely that the Frognation translator has never once read a book or news article in Japanese

    • “Looking glass” is a thing so potentially they meant a “crystal looking glass” instead of a ‘crystal-looking glass”

      What is wrong with “one among” ? That’s a perfectly normal use of the phrase. One among many, one among them, etc. This is regular english. Actually unironically go read some books you god damn mongoloid. Just because your simple ass doesn’t use it doesn’t mean it isn’t common english.

      “Those committed to high treason” – You don’t need to commit high treason yet to wear this. In fact you SHOULD be wearing it you fucking retard. Without wearing this the Fingers know what you are doing, therefore you put this on BEFORE you comit treason.

      Jesus christ you’re retarded stop being a faggot anon.

  12. “And have the CERTAINTIES of sight, emotion, faith, and touch… All become impossibilities.”

    “Certainties” is the keyword, and it’s simply Ranni’s way of saying: what you see, feel, believe, and anything you can interact with in the world, can be questioned. It will become impossible for anyone to know -anything- for certain, as her order will be so out of reach that it will leave people forever contemplating. The people of the Lands Between would be free to rely on their interpretation of life, what it means to have a soul, and what they think order should be, irrespective of Ranni’s order.

    Uncertainty is, unironically, the certainty of Ranni’s order.

    • “Certainties” is a mistranslation of 確かに you illiterate retard. All this bullshit you came up with is a load of retarded fanfiction based on a mistranslation.

      • I spoke to the literal mistranslation because it doesn’t change Ranni’s meaning at all. Especially for native English speakers, the English translation should be quite easy to understand. Yet, here we are… In the Japanese text, her intention is still the same. The conclusion is the same. There isn’t going to be literal fucking darkness. Ranni’s dialogue is allegorical. The issue stems from fucking zombie idiots like you, that’ve been conditioned to be literal and “right” at any cost, even if it means you have the reading comprehension of rock.

          • Dumbass.

            “I spoke to [topic]” means that he spoke in regards to and to address the topic, not that he held a literal fucking conversation with the topic itself as if it were a person.

            YOU don’t even understand English.

    • It’s already been proven that everything you’re basing this comment off was mistranslated. The dialogue you use as a basis for it is completely wrong, meaning so is your idiot fanfiction. And you’re stupid enough to think other people are dumb?

      Absolutely pathetic.

    • >“Certainties” is the keyword

      No it isn’t, the entire point of this article is that the line was mistranslated. She never talked about certainties of anything. Do you even understand English?

    • I’m not surprised that the moron who comes in saying everyone else is dumb turns out to be the stupidest motherfucker around.

      Read the damn article you brain damaged mongoloid. There is no mention of “certainties” in the original text, it’s a mistranslation.

  13. Before this article, some English players speculated that Ranni simply meant her order would be distant and that she was merely prone to speaking in an overdramatic “chuuni” fashion. That speculation might be sheer good luck on their part, because her English lines certainly aren’t intutive to that interpretation.

    With that said, I personally think that, ironically enough, the English text might have accidentally summed up what the Dark Moon (if it is an outer god) will actually want with the Lands Between. Ranni’s mentor warned her to fear the Dark Moon, and from what we can observe of the sorcerers’ long history, they tried to rely on and discern fates from the moon and stars anyway, their experiments turned them into Astel-like stones and killed them, the ingredients for Seluvis’ potions mention how there’s a history of using such tonics, and so on.

    There’s even the spirit jellyfish Aurelia quest, where the ghost sisters are finally reunited at a ruin near their tombstones. The reward for this quest, sealed away right next to Aurelia’s sister, is the Primal Glintstone Talisman, a rock covered in blood that notes sorcerers would kill themselves to strengthen these stones. With Aurelia’s ghostly sister sealing this item away, and the graves of the sisters nearby, I got the impression that the sisters may have been sacrificed for some twisted attempt to gain greater magical powers.

    Another grim thing for Ranni is that, despite her attempts to cast off any fate with her partial suicide, she still appears to be bound by one. The Fingerslayer Blade’s description notes that it can’t be used by someone without a fate, so Ranni is still a puppet on a string. Unless the Fingerslayer Blade’s description was also mistranslated, the Dark Moon might ultimately not allow for the world that properly translated Ranni hopes to create.

    Sorry for the tangent. The official English translation certainly fumbled some of Ranni’s most important lines, and it even did so twice.

    • I have doubts about the dark moon being an outer good, I don’t see anything in the English text that really indicates it and with Miyazaki saying the story is more straightforward I think if there isn’t a single mention of it being a god then it prolly isn’t a god.

    • The people who got it right didn’t speculate based on the ending, they got it from the flavor text in items. If anything it’s people who completely missed the conversation in the tower who got it right, because the english mistranslation is total bull.

  14. https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/comments/thqdou/the_night_of_black_knives/i1b5qcs/

    u/SpaceballsTheReply from r/EldenRing says:

    “Are y’all just getting this from that one reddit post accusing it of mistranslation? Because that same post got some of its other “corrections” comically wrong. Don’t take a random dude’s word as gospel, especially when From’s English localization team is one of the best in the business.”

    LMFAO @ frognation “is one of the best in the business”

    the fucktard also linked to this interview where the translator just sucks his own dick, wow what a convincing argument, I’m sure that a bad translator would just admit to it in an interview instead of pretending to be hot shit

    https://archive.is/wip/Tkifq

    fucking moron

    • >From’s English localization team is one of the best in the business.”

      >lost the annals
      >all that havel shit
      >”knight berenike”
      >royal rat authority
      >affinity
      >tseldora
      >flexile sentry
      >ichorus earth
      >writhing ruin
      >everything in DS3 about angels

      derp

  15. I think that if you chose this ending it means to you that you will never feel the cold of night because hell.. is no where near cold.

  16. How is it a mistranslation? She says it the same thing, just with a metaphor. I’m going to trust professional translators over a bunch of wannabe weeaboos.

  17. Dualshockers plagiarized your article but they don’t understand Japanese and managed to get a load of details completely wrong, so now they’re just spreading misinformation. Typical western gaming journalism at work.

    https://archive.is/0QrcO

    • Twah, I understand Japanese and every single point that the Dualshockers article covers that wasn’t already brought up here is completely wrong. Seems like pretty clear proof that they plagiarized the article.

      Never heard of this Iyane Agossah guy but it’s clear that he shouldn’t be writing for ANY publications. He claims to understand Japanese but if you look at his twitter his grasp is elementary at best, he tries to hide it by randomly retweeting Japanese stuff but it’s pretty clear.

      Pretty fucking despicable.

  18. this article is blatantly wrong. the english audio is the original, meaning the japanese subs are irrelevant. however you choose to interpret what she says, it’s not a mistranslation.

    • You’re wrong. This is from the translation company itself: archive. ph/zHRHt

      >Localising a From Software game follows roughly like this: Frognation is sent the Japanese text, which they then translate
      >Once the dialogue is translated, Morris and Miyazaki go to London to work with the voice actors in-person

      The Japanese text comes first. This has never once been in question. It’s written on their own damn website too: archive. is/Z2hez

      >日英翻訳を担当しまし
      Handled J>E translations
      >宮崎さんによる日本語のセリフ原案を元にした英語の脚本の制作
      Based on Miyazaki’s script
      >スクリプト翻訳
      Script translation
      >海外ローカライズ用のテキスト翻訳
      Translation of text for foreign localization

      You need some real brain damage to think that a Japanese man who runs a Japanese company who made this Japanese game wrote all the text in a language he doesn’t understand first before having it translated it into Japanese.

  19. 確かに means certainly, not clearly. That’s why they changed it to “certainties” when rephrasing it.
    Here is the definition from a JP dictionary when used as an adverb as it is in that sentence:
    まず、まちがいなく。 Put that into deepl and tell me it means “clearly”.

    • You’re an idiot. Whether 確かに means certainly or clearly isn’t what’s in question here, those two English words are practically synonymous. The problem is that the translator thought the line was about “certainties of sight, emotion, faith, and touch” when the subject of the line is actually the Order, and it’s supposed to be “certainly seeing, feeling, having faith in, and touching the Order”. The line is and always was supposed to be about making it so that people can’t come into contact with the Order anymore, there is literally nothing in the original script about “the certainties” retards like you keep squealing about.

  21. The French version of the game actually has the dialogue correctly translated. I think it’s because we have more people fluent in Japanese here, so there is more professional scrutiny on translation work for Japanese stuff.

  22. 日本語でのコメントですみません。この下にdeeplでの翻訳をつけます
    この記事では日本語訳を正規としていますが、実際のところ英語が開発のベースになっていると思います
    GRRMの神話を読んだ宮崎さんが脚本を書き、その脚本を原典としてFrognationという会社が英語に訳しました
    その英語音声と脚本、字幕をもとに、ふたりの日本人翻訳者が和訳しています
    つまり、英語のほうが宮崎さんの脚本のニュアンスに近く、正しいと考えられます
    いまのところ日本では大きな問題になっていないですが、日本に住む一部の英語話者は「なぜ英語にある会話が日本語版には無いの！？」と驚愕しています(和訳されていないので、日本人はゴストークの腕がない理由を知りません)
    日本で販売されているエルデンリングのほうが値段が高いので、私は非常に不満に思っています

    Sorry for my comment in Japanese. I will put a translation in deepl below this one.
    This article uses the Japanese translation as the official one, but I believe English is actually the base of the development
    After reading the GRRM myth, Mr. Miyazaki wrote the script, which was translated into English by a company called Frognation using the original source material.
    The English audio, script and subtitles were then translated into Japanese by two Japanese translators.
    In other words, the English version is closer to the nuances of Mr. Miyazaki’s script and is considered correct.
    So far, this has not been a major problem in Japan, but some English speakers living in Japan have asked, “Why is there a conversation in English that is not in the Japanese version? (Since it is not translated into Japanese, Japanese people do not know why Gostok’s arms are not there.)
    I am very frustrated because the Elden rings sold in Japan are more expensive!

    • I am Japanese. This commenter is an idiot. I am bilingual, and the explanation of what caused the translation errors is very realistic. Reverse, I cannot see way that the English could be mistranslated into the Japanese text. In the Dark Souls Japanese community there are some lunatics who say that the English text is original, and they are stupid lunatics.

      お前さん頭湧いとるんちゃう？日本語→英語→日本語とかそんなわけないだろ
      てかFrognationは初代ダクソから翻訳の質が著しく低いって英語圏で叩かれてるわボケ、lost the annals事件があったしバーニス騎士団をKnight Berenikeという個人に誤訳した件もある
      ブラボではマリアが男と呼ばれたし一番酷いダクソ２ではジェルドラがtseldoraになるという、日本語習いたての外人がおかしがちなミスまである
      てか「秘文字の剣」より「暗号化された剣」の方が宮崎の書いたニュアンスに近いとかアホすぎて草生えるわ

      てかお前さん英語分からないだろ。今回の誤訳も、英語が分かれば誤訳がどこに起因してるのか丸わかりで逆に英語→日本語に誤訳された痕跡がない

      お前のようなキチガイがたまに出没するけど一体どういう思考回路してるのか理解し難いね

    • Source? The interview with Ryan Morris of Frognation made it pretty clear that Miyazaki writes everything in Japanese and Frognation then translates to English. http://archive.ph/zHRHt

      That’s not something new, they’ve always been open about how Miyazaki writes in Japanese and they translate to English. This was how it’s been for all of Dark Souls and Bloodborne.
      http://www.frognation.com/fn_news/

      And: If English is the base language then how did they come up with this garbled load of contradictory nonsense, while the Japanese text actually lines up with the motives established in Ranni’s quest?

      Do you even understand what’s being discussed?

    • Hi, I find it highly doubtful that the nuance of the English version is closer than the Japanese. When we compare the two versions, the Japanese translation on this page lines up with Ranni’s ideologies and motives that were previously established, while the official English dialogue has her do a sudden heel turn and act like a villain saying that she’s going to cover the earth in the fear of the cold night and make emotions impossible, which openly contradicts everything up to that point. That’s what got people arguing about what the ending means in the first place, it was just such a weird turn of events.

      If you pay attention to the people arguing that the English version isn’t a mistranslation, it’s clear that they’re reaching: It’s confirmation bias where they’re applying the established info from earlier in Ranni’s quest to the ending dialogue. So even then, they’re agreeing that the ending SHOULD line up with the earlier stuff.

      It’s pretty damn clear that SOMETHING is wrong with the ending dialogue, and if the Japanese translation fits better then I feel that we can assume that it’s the “correct” version.

      What is your source for the translations, BTW? Frognation’s translator has been interviewed by RPS and PCGamer and he has never mentioned anything about translating English to Japanese. In fact he always talked about how difficult it is to translate Miyazaki’s script FROM Japanese to English.

        • TWO people? Do you seriously think TWO people translated the entire English script into Japanese? That’s extremely unrealistic.

          It’s far more likely that these were the people hired to handle the work they did with Grimm early on in development, it would be unrealistic to go directly to Frognation before actually needing the localization of the entire script and recordings. That would mean they only handled the backstory stuff, because Grimm never touched the game’s actual script.

          Has anyone asked them exactly what they did?

          • dude, Fromsoft is just a small company, who do you think they are? Square Enix? Ubisoft?
            They were working with the game years ago, not 1 or 2 days of course they can translate the whole game text with only 2 persons.
            8 hours/day, 365 days, 2920 hours, not enough time?

        • こんにちは、グーグル翻訳を使用して申し訳ありません、私はこれがメッセージを伝えることを願っています。

          その過程で日本人の翻訳者が関わっていたそうです。 GRRMが関わっていたので、私はこれに驚いていません、そして彼らはおそらく彼が書いたものに取り組んでいました。

          でも、英語の台本は宮崎の本来のビジョンに近いとおっしゃっていますが…英語の会話がいかに奇妙かご存知ですか？

          記事に記載されているラニの対話は、性格から外れており、確立された目標と性格の動機と完全に矛盾しているため、プレイヤーを混乱させてきました。

          プレイヤーはこれについて議論してきました。なぜなら、彼女は世界から感情を消したいという邪悪な悪役のように見えるからです。これは他では決して言及されていないことです。

          一方、この記事にリストされている翻訳された日本語の対話は、確立された物語に完全に適合しています。

          この対話が日本語から英語に完全に誤訳されたと仮定することは完全に合理的であるように思われます。

          ちょうど私の2セント。

        • その日本人翻訳者のTwitterを見ました。あなたは、Frognationからの返信を見ましたか？

          https://twitter.com/Frognation_ltd/status/1503403125784285185
          「おつかれさまです。だいぶ昔になってしまいましたが、ありがとうございました！」

          翻訳者もこう返信しています
          https://twitter.com/keiko_fukuichi/status/1503641930873286661
          「まさかクレジットしていただけるとは思っていなかったので、感激しております… 本当に楽しくて、光栄なお仕事でした。またお力になれる機会を楽しみにしております。」

          ゲームの脚本に携わった人間のことを言っているようには見えません。発売したばかりのゲームなのに仕事をしたのが「だいぶ昔」はおかしいし、脚本を翻訳する人がクレジットされないことを前提するのもおかしい。

          他の人が指摘したように、この翻訳者が担当したのは、何年も前の開発初期にマーティン氏が書いた神話、だと思います。

          いかがでしょうか。

    • >So far, this has not been a major problem in Japan, but some English speakers living in Japan have asked, “Why is there a conversation in English that is not in the Japanese version? (Since it is not translated into Japanese, Japanese people do not know why Gostok’s arms are not there.)

      What’s this about Gostoc’s arms?

    • 元の言語は日本語です。そのため、元の言語から翻訳されたフランス語版のEldenRingは正しい翻訳になっています。自分で確認できます。この記事の日本語訳と一致しています。他のいくつかの言語にも正しい翻訳があると思います。英語は質の低い外れ値です。まあ、それとちょうどものを省略した他のいくつかの言語。

    • 情弱クレーマーかよ
      フロムの原文が日本語ってインタビューで言ってるんだから和訳もクソもないだろ
      ゲーム内にGRRMのテキストは無いぞ、それを元に膨らませたものを宮崎他フロムスタッフが書き、翻訳会社が英訳した

      あー、ほかのレスに書いてあったこいつのツイッター見たらただのやべー奴で草

      人様に迷惑かけてないで病院池や池沼

    • I saw this on twitter and arrived here, but https://twitter.com/a1klo_open/status/1506093740334624768

      > Two Japanese translators translate into Japanese based on the English audio, script, and subtitles.
      Wrong

      Why don’t you see the staff roll before spreading such a hoax?
      It’s listed properly, Keiko Fukuiti and Yosei Muto
      https://imgur.com/a/oguGxKJ
      However, the role is Mythos Japanese translation
      In other words, these two translated only the myth written by GRRM for From into Japanese!

      Which one shouldn’t be lacking in confirmation?

  23. I understand Japanese and knew that the stuff was mistranslated. I’d actually been trying to raise awareness about them since even before this article was up. But no matter how hard I try I keep running into braindead imbeciles saying things like

    >No it’s not mistranslated, they mean the exact same things if you just pretend the English version is a load of metaphorical bullshit that could theoretically mean the same thing

    >lmao your literal translation is lifeless and boring

    >I PREFER THE MISTRANSLATED VERSION BECAUSE IT SOUNDS BETTER

    I just want to say: It’s not the translators who are to blame for this bullshit, it’s these braindead fucks enabling them. The English speaking soulsborne community is just cancer.

    I really like From’s games. Unlike these retarded children who only play the souls games because they’re the flavor of the moment I’ve been following From since AC1. I played the Kings Field games. I played the original release of Metal Wolf Chaos on the Xbox. I played fucking Murakumo. My Favorite From game is AC4A.

    I guess I just assumed that other supposed fans actually cared about the games as much as I do, and so wanted to let them know how the incompetent translators are doing them a disservice.

    Instead it’s been nothing but absolute fucking morons going “lmao who cares” “it’s not mistranslated because I say so” “I prefer the mistranslated version” “no, the English came first so it’s the Japanese that’s mistranslated” “there’s only English voices so the English is canon”. People who don’t understand Japanese and barely understand English arguing that they know better than people who are fluent in both. Low IQ imbeciles who keep griping over the wording of “certainties” in the English version when it’s literally something that the translators conjured out of thin air.

    Screw this community, it deserves to gulp down all the liquid shit it gets.

    Sorry for soapboxing but it looks like this is the place to do it, because reddit and 4chan and discord and somethingawful and resetera and gamefaqs and youtube are all decrepit shitholes filled with this same retarded bullshit.

    • I used to post about Dark Souls mistranslations on Reddit years back, from sometime after SOTFS was released up to 3 vanilla’s release. I deleted my account and left the site forever because of what a shithole it was.
      People who didn’t understand Japanese kept arguing that mistranslations weren’t mistranslations even when they clearly were, or that the mistranslated versions were “better” because they were “more unique” and other such inane shit, applying it to even the worst of mistranslations like Royal Rat Authority. My translations were done literally to convey the meaning of the original text, and people attacked me saying that I don’t understand English because literal translations weren’t as natural as the localized (and mistranslated) text. Eventually I started getting stalked and harassed by a guy who claimed to understand Japanese but just kept posting fake Japanese taken from Google translate and saying all of my posts were wrong, and some random psycho who was either an alt of the first guy or just some kind of nutjob. Also, even though I deleted my account and listed the harassment from these people as the reason, nothing was ever done to the perpetrators, and for some reason my former account’s page says it was banned, not that it was deleted. I guess Reddit sides with harassers.
      The western Souls community has a record of responding to talking about mistranslations this way: Denial, insults, non-logic like claiming that the Japanese is translated from English even though they’re literally made by Japanese companies, and general racism and gaslighting, up to and including accusations like “you may understand Japanese but you don’t understand ENGLISH, CHINK”. The “chink” is hyperbole but I got accused of not understanding English a million times after I mentioned being Asian, even though English is my first language.
      So no, none of this is new or surprising in the least. There is no point in engaging with the larger western Souls community. Just make a private Discord and invite only friends or something, it’ll do tons for your mental health.

  25. Cephas on Something Awful criticized this article. I can’t be bothered to reply to him there but I would like to address what he and a lot of other people are doing here.

    > I don’t really understand some of the accusations that are brought up in that video/article. I took some japanese in college so I might just have an incomplete understanding though.

    Why does someone like this think they are qualified to discuss the mistranslation?

    I am ethnic Japanese and I think I am pretty fluent, and it is pretty clear to me that the mistranslations are really bad. The article explains how the mistranslations happened pretty concisely, and looking at the about page, this is a Japanese website run by Japanese people, right?

    Why are idiot white people who do not understand Japanese constantly arguing that they understand Japanese better than actual Japanese people?

    This is nothing more than gross whitesplaining.

    And of course, there’s how many of these people are just stupid and don’t understand what “(This is a literal translation to clarify the meaning of the Japanese dialogue: Some rewording might be prudent if it were for actual implementation into a game)” means, saying that the literal translation doesn’t match the tone of the game or whatever (Cephas is also guilty of this).

    There were a few comments bringing up innate racism in the soulsborne community above, I’ve observed it firsthand myself a lot and the mistranslation discussion has been bringing out some of the ugliest examples of it yet.

    • Isn’t SomethingAwful literally a den of white supremacists? What did you expect from there? Sounds like “Mommy I went to the KKK website and they were being MEAN TO BLACK PEOPLE!!!!”

    • I actually bothered to look this Cephas person up because I was bored and curious, and I’m not entirely sure if it’s racism.

      It’s unfortunately part of human psychology that when encountering something that they do not or cannot understand, people with low IQ will initiate a fight or flight response. It looks to me like this Cephas person is such a low IQ individual, and being confronted with something they do not understand, is lashing out in response.

      It is a sad truth that only intelligent people are able to acknowledge that they are ignorant. This does not seem to be an intelligent person, and most of the people posting in that thread don’t either.

      That being said, this person acknowledging that they barely understand Japanese, only to launch into a line-by-line analysis on how stuff written by actual Japanese people is wrong is… Yeah, that is definitely something. And like some other people defending the translations in this comments section, they keep fixating on the use of “certainties” which is just proof that they didn’t understand anything they read at all.

      Please don’t misunderstand me, I am not trying to downplay your concerns about and experiences with racism. It’s just that while a lot of things might look like maliciousness, it’s typically just incompetence, ignorance, and good old fashioned stupidity, and this particular case looks like it to me. That’s just a very stupid person you’re looking at.

    • https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/comments/tkxpyg/im_sure_vaati_will_explain_everything_right/i1u6ofb/

      Here’s some more low IQ racists reaching to deny the mistranslations

      /u/Detsuahxe says: “This article is written by a literalist weeb who doesn’t particularly understand Japanese or localization. Can’t wait for it to stop getting passed around.”

      Yeah japanese website with translation by japanese people is “weeb who doesn’t understand japanese” now

  26. Full disclaimer. I hold a professional interpreter and translator certificate and licence in Australia for multiple language combination. My background is Asian Descendant born in the US and native speaker of 6 languages – English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Korean, and Japanese. But this is not about my abilities. I’m just an upset fan.

    After finishing Elden Ring, I could not hold back anymore on how Ryan Morris and Frognation literally butchered and fucked up the game script.

    It’s almost downright criminal what this guy and his lackeys are doing to the Elden Ring. He is doing a disservice to the entire global fanbase and players of Elden Ring. This is not a light matter when millions of people who don’t have the luxury to understand Japanese, will end up reading their putrid work and form a completely wrong image of the game. This is NOT Miyazaki intended. Original concept should be respected, preserved at the best effort, and delivered to target audience without any personal bias and distortion as possible. Students of translation learn that every translation is, indeed, a ‘rendered’ version, reconstituted and recreated by the translator themselves. But then we have a professional code of conduct and code of ethics which we adhere to – no matter what, stay closest as possible to the source material.

    This, is where, Ryan Morris and Frognation fails so miserably. Whether their effort to distort all the lines were intentional or not, they not only commit all 3 major mistakes in translation field.
    1. Omission – The translator is LEAVING OUT on some elements of the source text, therefore, information is either partially or completely lost/missing for the audience.

    2. Addition – The translator is ADDING irrelevant information that was NOT THERE in the original text.

    3. Distortion – The translator is CHANGING the meaning of the text by understanding wrongly the source material, or translation is not delivering the original meaning.

    As a professional paid translator, his job is to AVOID all of the 3 grave mistakes and deliver the most truthful rendition of the source script and deliver the same ‘feel’, ’emotion’, ‘perception’ and invoke the same ’emotional response’ in the viewers/audience. Whether this is due to Ryan’s (and his team’s) incompetence and lack of proficiency in understanding Japanese language, or purely due to his blatant disregard to work ethics, is unknown. Maybe he has ulterior motive. We will never know.

    • Didn’t you already post this on /vrpg/? Guess I’ll post my reply here too.

      From the interview with Frognation’s translator:

      > “It’s been a bit of a collaborative effort with some characters,” Morris continued. “I interpreted Solaire, with some flair, and made some choices with how he would speak. There’s not quite as much embellishment in Japanese, although it all means the same thing. It’s sort of a holistic translation where you’re taking the context into account as you’re trying to make a coherent character. Miyazaki takes each character quite seriously, I think he kind of falls in love with them, and tries to make them speak very sincerely in almost all cases, but they can be misguided.”

      I wonder if Ranni’s stuff isn’t actually mistranslations, but him “interpreting” her as a supervillain and changing the dialogue on purpose.

  27. BTW I’ve seen people saying that the Japanese script is translated from the English dub. I guess that might be plausible, except that Frognation never lists anything of that sort on their website, and there’s the obvious J>E localization choices that don’t make it back from this supposed E>J, namely stuff like Vanclad (Vendrick), Dunashandra (Nashandra), Eldritch (Aldrich). If the Japanese text WAS based on the English dub wouldn’t they have changed those names to ヴェンドリック　ナシャンドラ　アルドリッチ in JP? Just wanted to put this out there.

  28. And hey at least it’s not Skies of Arcadia

    https://web.archive.org/web/20161216115103/http://esoarcadia.org/2015/04/13/interview-with-klayton-vorlick-translator-of-skies-of-arcadia/#more-143

    > Yeah. we basically sat down, I did a rough translation of the text, and then threw away the Japanese text. We mapped out the big story beats in each scene, and then just watched the cutscenes and ad-libbed what we imagined each character would say, and then rewrote a lot of the dialog completely.

    > Haha, yeah. We thought this stupid jap pedo anime shit was too creepy for US audiences

    Just another day of American localizers at work.

  29. MOre mistranslations/dumb localizations

    CLEANROT
    >It’s a pun on the Japanese word for “noble” with one of the kanji replaced with rot
    >The word is actually also a real word, noble rot
    >貴婦人 (Kifujin) = Noble lady
    >Cleanrot is clearly meant to be a pun on this with the “fu” replaced with “rot” 貴腐 which is ALSO the word for this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_rot
    >(Incidentally it’s also internet slang for older BL fans, elder fujoshi. This might be Miyazaki’s idea of humor because to Japanese players it looks like you’re fighting “old fujoshi knights”)
    >Rather than taking any of the nuances there at all they took the word, split it up, dropped them into internet dictionaries, and chose a random word to translate 貴 into, turning it into “cleanrot”.

    >Eh, with something like this (the fujoshi pun definitely being on purpose because it’s way more well known than the fungus) there’s straight up no way to do a translation that covers everything, I wouldn’t call this a mistranslation like the Ranni ending which is straight up an N5 shitter failing to parse elementary grammar, or the removed Sekiro references which was either done on purpose because Sekiro was published by Activision or because the translator straight up just didn’t know that “shura” is from Sekiro.

    >Cleanrot sounds retarded in English and it’s the job of the localizers to come up with a word that captures the nuances of the original that sounds right.

    A guy replied
    >>it’s a layered play on the actual fungus noble rot, which is a beneficial fungus (it even looks like scarlet rot), you want noble rot on your crops. So it’s a “clean” rot
    >>e I got the gist of it from the game that cleanrot knights and Malenia and the other NPCs that spread scarlet rot would think of it as a cleansing fire.

    To which the anon who understands japanese said

    >That’s wrong. Did you do Millenia’s quest?

    >The bug cultists are the ones causing the the rot to progress in the world AND Malenia. Malenia resisted them, but succumbed to the rot in order to take down Radahn.

    >The Millenia quest has Gowry try to trick you into making her succumb to the rot too

    >This is in Gowry’s dialogue after Millenia dies

    >but Millenia kills herself rather than submit and gives you the needle to return to Malenia so that Malenia can resist it.

    >It’s not supposed to be a beneficial thing at all, Malenia is literally fighting against it and only uses it because she’s weak and gives in to the temptation of using its power.

    >This is in Millenia’s dialogue when you first arrive in the city, and then before she dies.

    >Or rather, it’s what’s in the Japanese dialogue. I’ve seen people say that Gowry is just some guy taking control of a bug when it’s pretty clear that he IS one of them in Japanese so maybe there’s mistranslations there too.

  30. Not really mistranslation but figured I’d post this too

    >>Why the fuck did they translate 神人 (literally “god-people”) into “Empyrean”?
    >>wtf is even an Empyrean?

    >”Empyrean” as **ADJECTIVE** means something that relates to the stars/firmament/realm of gods.
    >The “empyrean” as a **NOUN** is basically a synonym for the firmament (at least colloquially), and is specifically a part of the heavens.
    >In no way, shape, or form it can nor should refer to a person or entity.
    >Now, had the original text used the word, I’d have been okay with it (it’s not an uncommon word in a lot of media). However the literal meaning of the word in Japanese is “god people” or “god person” or “godlike person” or whatever other interpretation. Translating it as “empyrean” makes no sense.

    Different person, Japanese anon had this to say about Empyrean:

    > the Japanese word is 神人 meaning “part god, part human”. “Demigod” is written in katakana (Demigoddo), which is atypical because in Japanese the word is usually rendered as 亜神/ashin or ajin (“partial god”).
    >Of course it’s unclear how many important keywords where coined by GRRM and so if these were English or Japanese first. Demigod is certainly GRRM though because Demigoddo is extremely unnatural for Japanese.

    >I actually think Empyrean is too important to the “backbone” that GRRM wrote for us to be certain which language came first there, same with the Erdtree, Golden Order, Shattering and such.
    >From interviews we know that Miyazaki came up with the Shattering, but he also said that he hadn’t named it at that point, and that the Erdtree didn’t exist prior to him coming into contact with GRRM (no explicit mention of who came up with it, just that it didn’t exist before).

    >Hanshin 半神 is used as a translation of English demigod, but in Japanese these three terms, all of which could be translated to demigod in English, have different nuances and use cases.

    >Shinjin 神人 does typically mean part god part human, but it’s a made-up word to begin with. In some cases it’s used to refer to humans who have become gods. But usually it’s half gods, half humans.

    >Ajin/ashin 亜神 just means a partial god. In Japanese fiction this can also refer to stuff like youkai whose power levels went so high that they’re partially gods. It’s the vaguest of these terms.

    >Hanshin 半神 which you linked has the completely different and specific nuance of people who are born to a human and god parent, you see it in actually mythology, like referring to Hercules.

    >I suspect that GRRM came up with Demigod, and the Japanese side which was charged with translating it (we have confirmation that there were two Japanese translators handling GRRM’s writings, check the credits) were not sure which of these translations to use, and settled on the lazy “Demigoddo”.

    >I made shinjin and hanshin sound too similar so I should add that the difference is that shinjin does not explicitly carry the nuance of the parents. It could be someone who is a distant descendant of gods, who has inherited god powers. These words are thrown around in fiction and reinterpreted by people all the time, so there are exceptions, but hanshin typically means one parent is a god and one parent is a human.

  31. But to be real tho, this article’s been posted on r/eldenring a couple of times and it keeps getting downvoted and targeted with vitriol and I don’t get it. People were done a disservice by the bad translations, but their reaction is to attack the messenger and say the translations were fine, even when it’s so clear that they aren’t. And it’s always people who don’t actually understand Japanese, because people who actually do all agree that the translation was screwed up. What the hell is going on with this place?

    • It’s literally just racists who hate anything foreign and want to pretend that the English version is the only version. They get upset when told that the English version is wrong and a foreign version is correct. That’s where comments like this come from:

      >Not sure if you speak/understand Japanese or not but let me tell you as someone who’s playing this game in Japanese, the English is a thousand times better. The Japanese dialogues/subtitles are often awkward, weird, use weird words (lots of hard kanji but that’s not necessarily a problem) and overall is just… off. I’ll agree that some item descriptions in English are weird and some name translations are kinda edited/re-written so they don’t map 1:1 (and lore might suffer from that) but other than that, English is the superior version. Anyone who’s fluent in both languages would agree, but unfortunately among gaming groups you usually get EOPs with rudimentary understanding of Japanese or Japanese people with very weak understanding of English so it’s kinda hard to get a more nuanced view of both versions. I haven’t played other soulsgames so I can’t comment on those, just talking about Elden Ring.

  32. As crummy as the mistranslation is, a lot of you are getting really heated and spiteful to people that managed to infer what was meant irregardless of the error.

    There’s no reason to be so hateful, you can bring up the example of redditors, sure, but why stoop to their level? Be better.

    • I’m sorry but did you see this?

      >You’re genuinely retarded. As soon as someone points out that you’re both wrong and pathetically weebish, you break down in tears and have a Reddit moment. Kill yourself as soon as possible so that you don’t accidentally procreate somehow and waste a generation of resources keeping your worthless lineage alive. Pathetic, insignificant parasite that you are, everyone will be happy to see you go. Don’t bother responding. I’m not subscribing to the conversation. Just kill yourself. Don’t put too much thought into it. Nobody wants you here or cares about you, and those that do are actively wishing you’d just off yourself to get you out of their lives. Do it. Take the plunge. Make your parents proud for once.

      Or this?

      >Jesus Christ, all you translation guys have a FUCKING MASSIVE POLE UP YOUR ASSES. Take your views on dialogue and SHOVE THEM UP YOUR UGLY VIRGIN ASSES.

      And the people claiming they “inferred the same meaning” did not and STILL DO NOT get the meaning at all. It’s literally a bunch of brainless idiots fixating on the word “certainties” which does not exist in the source text, attributing a meaning to it that does not exist in the source text, and claiming that the meaning applies to the source text when it does not. Fucking moron.

      >Weebs gonna weeb. I’ve said it before. There is no mistranslated in the Ranni dialogue. It’s just worded in a way that can be confusing if you don’t pay attention. I doubt there is any mistranslated shit at all.
      >Now I’m looking specifically at the ‘certainties’ part and reading it as Ranni returning a sort of free will to the people. Nothing will be certain/pre-destined in the way that there were previously prophecies and pre ordained paths. It seems obvious she’s not saying she’s going to take everyone’s eyesight away.

      It’s a step forward that they’re not thinking that it’s literally taking sight and whatever away but this shit about destiny and pre-ordained paths is still a load of nonsense they’re making up.

      Also, I’m Japanese and whenever I mention this when discussing the mistranslations because it’s relevant that I UNDERSTAND JAPANESE AND YOU DON’T, people accuse me of lying, larping, or being a weeb, supposedly because Japanese cannot speak English and by using English I am supposedly outing myself as a liar.

      So yeah, maybe you can fuck off.

  33. 強度
    Stat that determines how much stamina blocks use on shields, etc

    >一般には，物体特に工業材料の強さをさす。この場合の強さすなわち強度とは，ある定められた条件のもとで材料が示す抵抗の限界をさし，通常は応力の値をもって比較する。たとえば，(1) 変形に関しては比例限度，弾性限度，降伏点または耐力，クリープ限度（→クリープ強さ）など，(2) 破壊に関しては，静的荷重では引っ張り強さ，圧縮強さ，剪断強さ，曲げ強さなどが，また動的荷重では疲れ強さ，衝撃値（→シャルピー衝撃値）などがそれぞれ用いられる。この例からもわかるように，材料の強度とは，同一材料でも，荷重の種類，加工条件，形状，使用環境（温度，湿度，腐食条件）などによってその都度異なる値を示す。

    >How strong something is materially. Its resistance to breaking and warping, etc.

    Frognation translation:
    GUARD BOOST

    Why does shield have “guard boost” as a stat and why would a boost determine how strong the shield is? Who knows?

  34. A lot of western fans claim Patches first appeared in Demon’s Souls but he is and always was a reference to Armored Core. He’s literally an Armored Core character, and in Demon’s Souls his dialogue has reference to his full name in Armored Core (Patch the Good Luck) AND his mech (No Count). But Frognation decided to rename him for no reason, and surgically remove every single instance of him ever referencing Armored Core, even though he uses the name of his mech in every single appearance, including in Elden Ring.

    https://arch-img.b4k.co/vrpg/1648181934698.jpg

  35. Ranni’s ending isn’t the only one that was mistranslated, they screwed up the mending rune of perfect order too

    >>A rune found by the Goldmask Lord
    >>When the King of Erde holds up the fractured Elden Ring, this can be used to mend it
    >>A rune with a transcendental viewpoint that will make the Golden Order perfect/complete
    >>The imperfection/incompleteness of the Golden Order comes from instability of viewpoints. There is no need for gods with hearts like men, which were the defect in the Order.

    >The Elden Lord is not brandishing the mending rune, they’re brandishing the Elden Ring itself. The wording here is very clear.
    >The word translated to “perfect” also has nuances of “complete” in Japanese. “Ideology” is outright wrong; What it’s saying is that this mending rune will, by having a point of view transcending everything, be completely impartial and objective.
    >”With hearts like men” is just a descriptor stating the reason, the main thing it’s saying is that there is no need for gods at all.

  37. Funny how these dumbasses going “nooooo the English version is perfect there are no mistranslations, I understood this garbled crap perfectly” only showed up AFTER the mistranslations were pointed out and the meaning was clarified. Before it was all this sort of nonsense:

    “The golden order she mentions is literally causality. She’s talking about making reality itself inconstant. ”

    “she straight up tells you she will also make it so sight, emotion, faith, and touch no longer exist. ”

    “Sight, Emotion, Faith, and Touch would all become impossibilities”

    “the inhabitants would become vague beings incapable of senses, and that they’ll abandon the planet and be weird cosmic beings”

    “Uh, what? I’m having a hard time grasping what she means. Does she want everyone to become ghosts or something?”

    “all those mental gymnastics people do to pretend her ending is a good ending for mankinds, Imao look, I like Ranni but no matter how you twist the interpretation of “the certainties of sight, emotion, faith, and touch… All become impossibilities” it doesn’t sound good to humanity ”

    “Can you read and not just pick a clause from the middle of two sentences? She’s abandoning the current state of the world for HER POWER. ”

    And of course, even the ones who claim they understood it keep pushing fixating on “certainties” and pushing THIS version which is still completely wrong:

    “I feel like this is implying that sight, emotion, faith, and touch will no longer be certainties like under the Great Will because there will be no god to guarantee your fate and experiences.”

    The dumbasses claiming that it’s just a metaphor only managed to come up with that excuse after the actual meaning was pointed out. It isn’t hard to just look at the garbled mess and warp it into whatever you want after the fact.

  38. The fact is that there are very few good translators handling video games, or pop culture in general. I am a professional translator based in Japan, and I am native level in both. I would never consider working in pop culture translation for two simple reasons: 1) It’s a lot of work and 2) the pay is shit. I probably make 10-20 times whatever the head of Elden Ring’s translation team is making for mostly for translating e-mails and Powerpoint slides that say similar things over and over again, and occasionally telling someone what someone else said. Why wouldn’t a translator choose this job over video games? The answer is simple: They go with video games when they don’t have the choice, when they are literally not competent enough to get a real translation job.

    This isn’t something exclusive to J-E translation, E-J has it pretty bad too. Western games are frequently mangled even in big titles like the Call of Duty “kill them, they’re Russians” fiasco, and then there’s movies and Natsuko fucking Toda and her brood of incompetent idiots like Anze Takashi. There’s even some literal conmen going around scamming western indie devs on Steam and selling them E-J machine translations.

    Corporate translation, the job which requires competence to do, comes with actual scrutiny and repercussions from bad work. Pop culture translation can be done by people who literally don’t understand either language (pic is from a game from Bandai Namco, which obviously has far more money than From), and the only repercussions are at absolute worst a handful of people complaining about it on the internet. And even then, they get attacked by people who don’t understand the language and say it’s all fine, nothing is mistranslated, it was done by REAL PROFESSIONALS who know better than YOU, INTERNET POSTER.

    People who don’t understand the language come up with all sorts of stupid excuses like it’s context, it’s hard kanji, it’s localization because localization means “translating it wrong on purpose” now apparently, when more often than not it’s a single simple word that was mistranslated out of incompetence, or someone failing to understand how foreign grammar works.

    Anyone who understands Japanese, and I mean ACTUALLY understands Japanese and not the shitposters who took a course in college, can tell that the translations of these games are terrible. Ranni’s ending was done by someone who had problems understanding basic grammar. Tseldora in Dark Souls 2 was messed up by someone who couldn’t tell the difference between ツ and ジ, one of the most basic problems encountered by first-time learners that people literally make fun of. Even the simplest of things like 強度, which refers to the integrity of material and indicates how strong shields hold up against attacks, got mangled into “guard boost” which seems to have no correlation to what the stat does at all, and seems to be a wild guess by someone who isn’t even competent enough to look the word up in an actual Japanese language dictionary (J-E dictionaries are traps because they tend to offer one word alternatives instead of definitions, with 強度 only presented as “strength” which on its own is of course would be misleading).

    And aside from language fluency there’s also genre fluency: Words like 異形 and 落とし子 are literally taken out of the Japanese translations of Lovecraftian works, and with the reach of Lovecraftian works in Japanese pop culture anyone who has read a decent number of books or even manga should recognize them for what they are. The translators here do not, and so instead of “eldritch spawn” we are getting “malformed naturalborn bastards”.

    But all bad translators have to do is give interviews on how they love their job and work sooooo hard and it’s soooooooo difficult and they studied in Osaka once (as an exchange student, which means probably for three to six months, with all the classes in English) and have JLPT1 certification (the bare minimum baseline needed to say you are fluent in Japanese at all, and nowhere close to being fluent enough to be a translator) and people who have no idea what they’re talking about WILL take up arms to defend them

    And the worst part of it is the Souls series isn’t even getting the worst translations in video games. They aren’t even getting the people who rewrite swathes of text and rename random characters after their friends for no reason then justify it as localization.

    But to sum it up

    >This shit should be down to a science by now, not subject to last-minute perusing by the unpaid intern who wants to go home early on friday.

    Sorry, it’s down to a science for people that actually pay for it. If you’re hiring a video game translation company, you’re not getting anything BUT the interns.

    And I want to add: People constantly go on about the shitty PR piece interviews given by the translators as if shitty translators would admit to how bad they are in interviews, and I’m constantly getting idiots who do not understand Japanese showing up to whitesplain to me how obvious mistranslations are not mistranslations at all. Another reason for how they keep getting away with shitty translations is these people, drooling imbeciles who make up all sorts of ridiculous excuses and defend the mistranslations, enabling this sort of shitty practice to go on.

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