Translation Fun

I'm slowly crawling through various game text that I found confusing in the localization, at least if it wasn't already covered over here. I figured I might as well put my work online in case it's of any benefit to others.

Presently, I'm not aiming for fluency, as that can come with further editing. My current priority is to extract all of the information that should be there, as best I can.

The first thing I checked out was the "hologram room" in the Solaris laboratory, to obtain additional clarification on this and that. Here I'll post the character entries as-is, with my comments in brackets.

***

□ Fei
Lambs Number 001589750
Fei Fong Wong
Ether Response... Infinite
Anima Alignment... Infinite
Comments: Contact. Immediate disposal desired.

["Ether Response" is a truncated translation of "Ether Response Rate". "Anima Alignment", similarly, should be "Anima Alignment Value". Not sure what either of those MEAN, exactly...]

□ Elly
Minister [Gazel] Number 6920188-2
Elhaym [Elehayym] Van Houten
Ether Response... Infinite
Anima Alignment... Infinite
Comments: Possible Antitype. Approval for retrieval and necessary analysis granted.

["Minister Number" should be "Gazel Number", here and in subsequent entries. Not sure how that substitution happened.]

□ Citan [Shitan]
Lambs Number 584921547
Hyuga Ricdeau [Rikudou]
Ether Response...240
Animus Alignment...98
Comments: None.

[Citan having a "Lambs Number" isn't a mistake, as he was born a "worker bee".]

□ Bart
Lambs Number 221589542
Bartholomew Fatima
Ether Response... 210
Anima Alignment...90
Comments: Upon retrieval of Anima “Dan”, schedule for Animus adjustment. [This actually says "schedule adjustment as Animus", that is, Bart is to be "adjusted" in his capacity as (part of the?) Animus. Very slightly more lucid than just "Animus adjustment".]

□ Rico
Test Mixture Number 000-215914
Ricardo Banderas
Ether Response...160
Anima Alignment...85
Comments: Created by the Ethos [the Church] as an experimental mixture [same phrase here as used for "test mixture" above]. Used by the Kislev Battling Association [Committee] to measure battle potential. The data has been transferred. Schedule for Animus adjustment. [Schedule adjustment as Animus.]

□ Billy
Minister [Gazel] Number 321658-11
Billy Black
Ether Response...290
Anima Alignment... 92
Comments: Schedule for Animus adjustment. [Schedule adjustment as Animus.]

□ Maria
Lambs Number 54109854
Maria Balthasar
Ether Response...170
Anima Alignment...74
Comments: Unusable.
[What, they won't accept an Anima Alignment Value under 90? On an aside, Maria was at one point intended to get an Omnigear.]

□ Chu-Chu
Primitive Animal
Ether Response... N/A [incompatible]
Anima Alignment... N/A [incompatible]
Comments: Unusable. Annul and dispose.


□ Emeralda
Codename Emeralda
Ether Response... N/A [cannot be measured]
Anima Alignment … None [alignment ?inadvisable or ?impossible]
Comments: Nanomachine colony. Data analysis complete. Annul and dispose.
[Much mystery here, probably on account on me not knowing the nuance of the terms used. "Cannot be measured" meaning there's nothing to measure, or...? I also can't tell whether it's saying aligning her with Anima would be a bad idea or just outright impossible.]

***

Next up are parts of Citan's big info-dump in the lab, right before Fei and Elly are captured. I'll put Honeywell's in bold.

***

Citan: This place was not meant to be seen since the origin of time.

This is definitely not what he's saying, but the language he's using is incredibly difficult for me and the best I could come up with on my own is, "Here is one compromised from the start, bound since the origin of time to an ever-living body." Citan seems to be opening the info-dump with a cryptic reference to Emperor Cain, but beyond that I got nothing. I need to consult someone of a higher skill level about the line.

Fei: The origin of time?
Citan: Yes... 10,000 years ago, beings called humans were born here. The first were the Emperor and the Ministry's elders.

Shitan: Yes, 10,000 years ago. The creatures called humans were born upon this earth. Those first humans were Emperor Cain and the old men comprising the Gazel Ministry.
[It doesn't say "men" specifically, but the original word seems more a generic term for old people, lacking the connotations of "elder".]

Elly: How could a human... live 10,000 years...?
Citan: Now only the Emperor is left. His destiny is to never die. However, the Ministry is different.
Shitan: Naturally, that was only one person, the Emperor. He is the human whose destiny is to never die. But the Gazel's destiny was different.

Citan: Once, during the Diabolos invasion... the Ministry elders died losing their bodies.
Shitan: The war with the former surface-dwellers... Due to the Diabolos' invasion, the old men of Gazel completely lost their bodies.

Citan: Now, the Solaris governing Ministry exists as data in memory banks.Each of their personalities are bits of data.
Fei: It's the data on the memory bank?
Fei: They're data in a memory bank?

Citan: Having neither flesh nor souls they are just binary numbers.
They both exist and do not exist at the same time..."

Citan: After the Fall, wanting to resurrect their bodies, and create a worthy vessel, they transferred a research facility that was once the Soylent System on the land to Etrenank.  
Shitan: After the Day of Collapse, they who were fixated upon corporeality and desiring their resurrection transferred one of the Soylent Systems that had been on the surface to Etemenanki, in order to produce suitable bodies for that [their resurrection].
[Can be streamlined to: After the Day of Collapse, they became fixated upon their [lost] corporeality. Desiring resurrection, they transferred one of the Soylent Systems from the surface to Etemenanki so that it might produce suitable bodies.]

Citan: Eventually the facility was no longer only for the Emperor's life and the Ministry's resurrection, but it began producing food and drugs with additives that controlled the public.
Shitan: Eventually the institution, no longer limited to researching only the Emperor's longevity treatments and Ministry's corporeal resurrection, came to double as a facility researching organic weapons, along with special food and drug additives that would regulate public opinion.

Citan: Of course, the 'Ethos' also sent various data to help.
Shitan: [do this line later]

Fei: That means we were living for those elderly people of Gazel?
Citan: Yes.
Elly: They're transferring and taking living data via memory cubes to the Ministry so they can use them to resurrect their bodies!?
Elly: Individual bio-data is transmitted via the memory cubes every time a record is taken, to be put to use for the Ministry's physical resurrection?!

Citan: Yes.
Fei: You mean those mutants getting disassembled at that factory were too?
Fei: You mean the demi-humans getting cannibalized at the factory were, too? [Tidy this up later.]

Citan: Basically, they wish to reuse the useless dregs.
Shitan: Unusable dregs... It's more like re-using them. [A little off. Try to fix later.]

***

All for now.

This is really impressive!
Mind if bits and pieces eventually end up in our in-house wiki? :3c

No problem! What sort of uses do you have in mind?

One thing that might be useful are wiki pages where three versions of the script can be displayed side-by-side in columns.

| Original Japanese | Original Localization (Honeywood's) | Alternate Take |

I've been struggling to compile notes and compare texts on my tiny laptop screen. Just dumping everything onto a Wiki page might be more efficient! I went ahead and made an account. I can go ahead and slap a "Translation" or whatever page into the Xenogears group if that sounds ok.

I'm at work at the mo so I can explain later but in the meantime go nuts! I might need to install some more modules to make it look better translation-wise.

It starts yelling at me if I add ANY attributes (like "border" or column width) to a table, so I guess it will require a little TLC later. :3 Here's the specific error if it helps.

Code:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /wiki/index.php on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Thanks for giving me the exact error!  I'll forward this to my host to see if I can't get this resolved soon.

Edit: Ticket has been placed. It'll probably be resolved tomorrow! \o/ Sorry for the trouble.

Update: Try again, Reichu! My host said they whitelisted the thing that was turfing up.

That's awesome, thanks for taking the time to do this.

No problem, Ben! If you (or anyone else) know any scenes you'd like a second take upon, let me know and I'll add them to my cue.

BTW, for conveniences' sake, the translations are being posted right onto the Wiki page now, here. I'm hoping to polish off what's already there, once I check out the omissions in the Karellen/Ellie scene. It turns out that when Karellen is talking about Ellie's DNA and the Uroborus Ring, he makes a reference to the snake-biting-its-tail imagery and to the Jungian concept of the Great Mother. Looking forward to getting that part properly translated.

I've also gotten in touch with an acquaintance who is much better with Japanese than myself and he's been happy to help out in the spots where I have trouble. He was able to more or less decipher Citan's weird opening statement (that "not meant to be seen since the origin of time" thing), which I'll go and add to the wiki.

I've reached Karellen's expose on nonsense sci-fi genetics, and getting exceptionally baffled about what the hell he might be talking about. I'm assuming by default that he's referencing actual scientific ideas and subsequently eviscerating them. Perhaps someone who knows more about biochemistry than myself can help decipher some of this? I include the original Japanese, then Honeywood's version, followed by some notes. You can also see over here the diagram that Karellen brings up while he's talking, though I'm not sure how useful it is.

カレルレン
「従来のナノマシンでは、遺伝子の組み替えは行えても、▽
　その更に内奥、二重らせんの空隙部分……イントロンに隠されている情報までは解らなかった。▽
KRELIAN
"Although the nanomachines up until now could recombine DNA, they couldn't uncover any information in the intron which are located in the replacements of the double helix.

My incomplete translation of this bit is, "Although traditional nanomachines carried out genetic recombination, they couldn't discern so much as the information being concealed in the introns." The Japanese here makes no reference to "replacements" (which to my knowledge should be 置換, as used a little bit later), although it uses the phrase 二重らせんの空隙部分 (gap sections of the double helix) as ?roughly equivalent? to "intron". From what little I know of genetics, gaps and introns are very different things, so this is quite difficult to make sense of. It could be that "gap" is the wrong translation, but the other meanings are similar: empty space, void, opening, aperture, and so forth.

だが新しいナノマシンはいとも容易くその空隙に隠されている情報を見つけてくれた。▽
本来“あるべきでない”情報をね。まもなくその結果が出る。▽
However, the newer nanomachines easily discovered this data.
Data that originally 'should not have existed'. And we are about to see the results of that."

Nothing really incorrect here, though the first line more specifically refers to "data hidden in those gaps". I'm a bit perplexed by this concept of information that originally/fundamentally shouldn't exist -- can anyone make heads or tails of that? It's not the last time Karellen will mention it.

カレルレン
「ふむ、転送されて来た記録通り、類似波形を描いている。▽
KRELIAN
"Hmm, according to the transferred record, it depicts a similar wave frequency as expected."

He doesn't actually say "as expected" here, though it's implied in the terms used, I dunno. 類似波形 just means "comparable/similar waveform", though comparable to what? I can only guess comparable to whatever's in his document. I might have to ask my source about this one.

カレルレン
「これは君の遺伝子のエクソン置換前の空隙……▽
　本来は情報の存在しえないイントロン部分を解析、がい念化したものだ。▽
KRELIAN
"This is what your genetic exon looked like before replacement...
This is the conceptualized form of the intron which carries information that isn't supposed to exist."

For the first sentence, I got, "These are the gaps prior to exon replacement of your gene." Yeah, those "gaps" again -- what the hell are they? Unclear if "gene" is supposed to be singular or plural here; Japanese cares little about such things.

Second sentence: "(By) analyzing the intron section, which is information normally unable to exist, [the gaps?] have been conceptualized." He doesn't specify what's being "conceptualized", so I just guessed that it was the last explicit subject. Also: now it's not just information that isn't SUPPOSED to exist, it's UNABLE to exist. The hell, Karellen.

That's as far as I've gotten. Well, congratulations, Xenogears. I think your technobabble might just be giving Evangelion's a run for its money. It never gets any easier...

Hey there, Reichu!
Not exactly sure where to put this, but I've been derping around looking for details on Krelian's Lab and stumbled onto this page: http://www.neoseeker.com/xenogears/faqs/46268-perfect-works.html Not sure if you've seen it or might find it useful?