Super Mario Bros. Encyclopedia and laziness: Dark Horse's dark heart

Doc von Schmeltwick

Doc von Schmeltwick

Multi-hat Koopa cutie
MarioWiki
Doc von Schmeltwick
(Can't find any relevant pre-existing topic, so I'm making this one; I apologize if there is one.)
Just to make sure everyone's up to speed:
https://twitter.com/SMWikiOfficial/status/1054818140675284993

This is a distinct drop from Dark Horse's last Nintendo encyclopedia I can think of, Zelda: Arts & Artifacts, which did the whole "remove macrons from the Japanese names" thing, but didn't dig into page histories to get fake English names (though a Link to the Past enemy called Zazack was identified with the similar-looking Daira, the enemy Koppi from the same game was identified with the unrelated enemy Goriya (though this is one that the English guides did before them), and calling the first two Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link bosses by their Japanese names, which translated roughly to their English names (which additionally had guide precedent)).

Just, what the heck? How did this even happen? And even after so many pushbacks, turns out the quality was not given positive effect from this.
 
I feel like this will be turning into a drama. I personally find the whole situation amusing at best. They've sold fanon, cool.

Edit: BUT. It will be great to see Dark Horse's or even Nintendo's response to this. That I can't wait to see.
 
You're right there, especially since the book came out, what? 3 years after the initial release in Japan? Judging by appearance, they had plenty of time to be creative with names.
 
This... is amazing. I'm quite surprised that they would literally use the wiki for info, but that is what appears to have happened. Truth is stranger than fiction.
 
Well a good thing is that we're famous now!!!! :D :D :D
 
Doc von Schmeltwick said:
It's just lazy and disappointing. They had one job. Translate stuff. Instead they Frankensteined together a hodgepodge of general bad odor.
Click to expand...

One of the two translators involved actually responded when someone brought up the thread to him on twitter.

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Even before Zack Davisson replied, I didn't think there was any actual malice behind this, but ehhhhh, I don't agree. Here's why:

1: The wiki's Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) license allows content to be redistributed, commercially even, if the original contributors are credited, the license linked, and the content is distributed under the same license. Dark Horse took the original creation of a wiki contributor (here the Soarin' Stu name), included it in a book they sell for $$$... and didn't do any of that. That's bad!

2: It's sloppy and unprofessional. Having the Super Mario Land 2 enemy list having enemies with straightforward inglès names like "Bear" and "Floating Face" next to obvious transliterations like "Furiko" and "Goronto" is inconsistent, not to mention silly. Reffering to the black ball that spits fire in SM64 with a different transliteration of a Japanese name than the one used in the original Japanese manuscript is baffling. So is leaving the name of the Purple Lumas in Super Mario Galaxy 2 as "Lunacomète" instead of literally anything else that sounds like English.

3: The whole "Well, why not canonize the fanon" thing, from my POV, runs counter to the point of the original work.

Super Mario Bros. Encyclopedia was meant to be the final word on Mario, giving the "canon" names for even the most obscure item and enemies that would otherwise never appear again or be referenced in future litterature, all in one place. I know some people in the community picked up the book because they finally wanted a proper english name for many of these obscurities, and were very dissapointed to see what Dark Horse did, and judging from some of the hits the twitter thread got, many people *outside* the community also felt that way. To give a concrete example, there was an argument on the Lunacomète talkpage about wheter it should stay there (the French name) or be moved to the Japanese name. The solution proposed was to wait until the English SMBE gave the definitive answer. The whole thing ended up for naught.

Furthermore, the German and French translations of the book properly and consistently localized the content that had no official designation in those languages instead of relying on wiki articles. Why couldn't the English's?

If Zack Davisson and William Flanagan end up reading this, I'm sure both of you are perfectly competent translators and fine folks. If this somehow gets traction, I really do want to make clear I do not want to start a witch hunt. Part of the blame also falls on the Nintendo fact-checkers who really should've gone

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at some of the stuff in there, and didn't. But I think the wiki community needs to make clear that how the English translation of Super Mario Encyclopedia turned out is not satisfactory.
 
I thought I had seen the zenith in cartoonishly silly guide internet plagiarism with PRIMA's recent Mega Man anthology guide, which literally took whole sheets from The Spriter's Resource: https://twitter.com/Protodude/status/1047678502005346305
(And no, I don't consider leaving the ripper tag in in one place as "credit" if they aren't mentioned in the back of the book.)

Clearly, I was wrong. Ah well.

Gooby plz
 
Wow, just wow!


Let's see what a proofreader of the Spanish translation had to say (from here and here)[quote author=Moroboshi876]
Well, we had a glossary and some terms were defined, and they want to keep the names as updated as possible.


[..]

I hope we did a nice job and people like it and keep in mind how difficult it can be when glossaries are incomplete or have contradictions. Even coming from official sources! But of course there are mistakes because of this and the large amount of text in this kind of work.[/quote]
Needless to say , the glossaries were inconsistent because, as an example, NOE finally started calling the Magikoopas Kameks like they are called in Japan since SM3DL (possibly even before that), the German version was more faithful to the glossaries and you can indeed see the inconsistent naming.


With that being said, they had a glossary, is it really possible that NOA didn't even have one? Or was that glossary that incomplete that they couldn't even source the Japanese names? Or maybe they had multiple due to the inconsistencies between PRIMA and Nintendo Power?


Now, let's just hope I took good enough care for the pages of the characters I care the most on the wiki...