Adventure of Link Translation Guide

As Zelda fans, and especially as Zelda theorists, we all tend to do a whole lot of complaining about translation and localizations done by Nintendo of America. Dan Owsen and Bill Trinen have all received extreme amounts of online bashing. This new feature from GlitterBerri.com compares the original English text and the original Japanese text, before offering its own fan translation. There are already plenty of these around the web, but we know there are lots of the analytic type at our site (me included) that like to see what fans get in their translations.

So check it out to see the main differences between the English and Japanese versions. It seems that the English translations have been extremely simplified compared to the more natural translations. At the same time, they show a lot more creative license. For instance “I AM ERROR”, the classic line is more literally translated “My name is Error”, but that’s just crap isn’t it? It slightly annoys me how much seems to get lost in translation in Zelda, but the Adventure of Link isn’t one of the larger concerns, with less than 700 words in the game anyway. It’s the translations of the Adventure of Link manual as opposed to the game where things get really interesting, but this feature is sure worth checking out to see what us English gamers lost due to translation.