Caoimhe

Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad is out today

In the Japanese version of the game, the Lucille, Riolta, and Melisma locations are all 平野 (plains or w/e). Meanwhile, the Ralos, Sidas, and Perie locations are all 森 (forest, etc.). So a strictly literal localization would have ensured these area descriptors were consistent and shared.

(That would be, for example, Lucille Plains, Riolta Plains, Melisma Plains. Ralos Forest, Sidas Forest, Perie Forest.)

That, dear reader, would be incredibly repetitive and suck major ass. We've got some neat synonyms in English, so I broke them out and assigned them based on the location size and vibes.

So we ended up with Lucille Plain (small one screen area), Melisma Prairie (larger one screen area), and the Riolta Plains (multi-screen area). Tree-wise, we had the Ralos Woods (small forest area), Sidas Forest (dense woodland), and Perie Grove (sparser area, more like a clearing).

A perhaps more egregious change was using the 平野 (plain, again, because Japanese has synonyms too) in マルティリオン平野 and tweaking it to Martylion Wastes But look man, the place is literally a scorch mark on the world map and when you enter it, you get a scene where Regius tells you how much it sucks and everything is dead and nothing will ever grow there again. It works. Sue me.

The Eastern Road and Southern Highway locations also share a location descriptor in Japanese. They're the Eastern and Southern 街道 (main road) in Japanese. But one is a country road between a small village and town, and the other is an intersection area in Inner Ionia between the capital, a major city, and a port town, so again the call was made to differentiate them based on their function.

hope you like four slightly different pictures of a game's map

This reminds me of Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey where she uses variations on the repeated phrases and epithets. From her own introduction:

The formulaic elements in Homer, especially the repeated epithets, pose a particular challenge. The epithets applied to Dawn, Athena, Hermes, Zeus, Penelope, Telemachus, Odysseus, and the suitors repeat over and over in the original. But in my version, I have chosen deliberately to interpret these epithets in several different ways, depending on the demands of the scene at hand. I do not want to deceive the unsuspecting reader about the nature of the original poem; rather, I hope to be truthful about my own text—its relationships with its readers and with the original. In an oral or semiliterate culture, repeated epithets give a listener an anchor in a quick-moving story. In a highly literate society such as our own, repetitions are likely to feel like moments to skip. They can be a mark of writerly laziness or unwillingness to acknowledge one’s own interpretative position, and can send a reader to sleep. I have used the opportunity offered by the repetitions to explore the multiple different connotations of each epithet. The enduring Odysseus can be a ‘veteran’ or ‘resilient’ or ‘stoical,’ while the wily Odysseus can be a ‘trickster’ or speak ‘deceitfully,’ depending on the needs of a particular passage. I have tried to bring out the beauty in the formulaic scenes that repeat, as normalized cultural practices, actions that will be alien to every modern reader—as when the people of Pylos are sacrificing ‘black bulls for blue Poseidon, Lord of Earthquakes,’ or in the many moments when black ships, equipped with oars and sails, travel across the water from one island to another: ‘A fair wind whistled and our ships sped on / across the journey-ways of fish.’

Here’s a list Jason Kottke wrote collecting all the variations Wilson used for «ἦμος δ’ ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς», “But when early-born rosy-fingered Dawn appeared”.