Translating all text I see in Mario

I screenshot, go to album and translate, then tweet my best guess. It’s good practice because most of the text is short blurbs and I can do that quickly and play for a bit before having to translate again - less energy draining than the walls of text in other games, although Cappy can drag on. Definitely grammar bottlenecked, but I have the Japan Times grammar dictionary to reference. I’m already spending nearly all of the time translating instead of playing and I bet Metro Kingdom is going to be extremely slow-going. So much english in this game - why do they call them グランドパワームーン instead of something like 大力月?

Sometimes I have no idea, so I just make a sentence that uses the words I understand. I’ll review these in a few months to see my progress.

Occasionally, I feel pretty good about my translation without using a dictionary.

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I too, am playing Mario in Japanese and it’s actually super awesome. Since it’s kinda a kids game, I feel like the Japanese level is right in the ballpark of what I’m looking for, so it’s amazing practice.

Plus, it’s freaking Mario. I’m so glad they left Japanese as an option. The husband and I sit there trying to figure out sentences for a few moments. lol

Friend: “Why did it take you 300 hours to complete Mario?”
Us: “Uh, reasons?”

Good luck with your Mario Japanese en-devour! I’m right there with you. <3

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Do the sand skeletons end their sentences with すな because it means sand? Like this is their accent and that’s just how they talk?

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Yes, japanese people love to make their characters end phrases with this kind of thing. In Persona 4, Teddy, who’s a bear, ends all his sentences with “くま”, for example.

And the robots in Mario Odyssey speak in all katakana. I think that in english they must speak in caps lock.

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文字通り砂だらけですごく暑そう。
大きな結婚指輪が有名なんだって

the big wedding ring IS famous

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Bowser tells Mario to suck a dick

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I also chose to play it in Japanese to try to make the most of my time with it. Got to the credits two days ago and beat the last post game world today (still have a lot of moons to collect though).

The true test when playing in Japanese is the Sphinx Challenges, since is quizzes you about things in the game) with four options. They aren’t very hard, language wise, but it’s cool to get a bit of real reading comprehension.

It’s also very helpful that everything has furigana. I’ve added a lot of new words to my SRS-collection!
Some examples:

未知 - Unknown
富豪 - Wealthy person; Millionaire
中間ポイント - Checkpoint (the flags that allows you to continue from there after dying)
原始人 - Caveman
雪だるま - Snowman
幅跳び - Long Jump

If you finish Wanikani, I think you’ll be familiar with every kanji you encounter in the game. Not 100% sure, but I can’t remember any instance of having to look up any new ones.

Literally full of sand and easily hot. The big wedding ring isn’t famous!

文字通り砂だらけで、すごく暑そう
I would translate this with something like “Like the name implies, it’s covered in sand and looks very hot.”
だらけ can be found here

I think 結婚指輪が有名なんだって is more in the line of “I heard that there is a famous wedding ring there”. A literal translation might be somehing like “(I) heard wedding ring is famous”.

I hadn’t encountered なんだって before, but it seems to fit with this explanation.

This second one is a good example of where it might be good to consider the context while making a translation. Bowser is obviously after different things around the world in order to plan his wedding, so it would make sense for the wedding ring to be like the most famous and awesome wedding ring there is.

Keep up your translations! :crabigator:

Shoutout :o

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