An English translation of Silhouette Mirage that’s faithful to the original Japanese script exists at last thanks to fans who released a patch for the Saturn version Wednesday.
Rasputin3000 uploaded the patch to SegaXtreme. It uses the Sega Saturn Patcher utility, which comes bundled with the patch’s ZIP file download.
Rasputin3000 led the effort last year to insert the official English script from the PlayStation port into the Japan-only Saturn version. That effort took about four months, but while he was doing that, a translator named Wiredcrackpot — the person responsible for the Radirgy fan translation on Dreamcast — was toiling away on a retranslation of the game with editor CSketch.
“Work on this retranslation actually began before the [previous] patch was released, and has honestly been almost as much work (for me at least),” Rasputin said in SHIRO!’s Discord server. “Wiredcrackpot put a ton of passion into the retranslation, and it shows. Check out the include translator notes. You will not be disappointed.”
They took on a retranslation because the official PlayStation localization from Working Designs strayed far from the original Japanese script. It threw out the many overt and implicit references to Christianity and replaced them with “malarky,” as the patch’s translation notes describe it.
Those translation notes, included in the patch’s ZIP file in a PDF, extensively describe the characters and world of Silhouette Mirage as it’s presented in the original Japanese. One of main character Shyna’s friends, for example, is named Moses, and he helps her fight against his own people, the Mirages — mirroring Christianity’s Moses defying the Egyptians who raised him from birth. He is named Bug in Working Designs’ script where the allegory is completely lost.
The translation notes show direct comparisons between the Wiredcrackpot and Working Designs scripts:
“This is possibly the most made-up Working Designs script,” the notes say at one point.