Swedish language games on NES

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This topic was a topic split from here: http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=16712
Apologies for the abruptness and to the first posts in this thread, if anything appears out of context, and for editing this post.
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Don't get me started on the SCN thing that's been popping up the last few years. As someone who's been collecting NES for a couple of decades now, it's one of the most retarded thing I have ever seen, and it just came out of nowhere with no justification. But hey, if people want to pay premium for a botched up version of a game, it's their funeral.

Don't you want to pay extra to get a slightly off-focus translation to swedish of Shadowgate or Déjà vu where the one patching the manuscript onto the game couldn't tell the difference between å and ä?

Or just pay extra for no difference at all (except if the manual and box is present) compared to NOE releases?

One exception i can think of where it matters: SCN Prince of thieves is in english (like pal A i suppose), NOE is translated to german.

US versions of all of these are in English and usually come without awkward timing changes that fit some parts of the game to a 50hz console but not others. I don't see why a serious collector would even want a PAL version of most of these games

Btw, I got my Shadowgate as a kid, and I quickly ended up regretting getting the Swedish version. The store had both Swedish and English.

The only reason I want a PAL NES is so I can use it for testing PAL mode in my games for development purposes, and to play any occasional PAL exclusive games (if there are any). I collect mostly only NTSC games.

Heh I'm curious is Swedish hard to understand for Danes? My friend had many books in his university course that was in Danish only, and while written Danish may normally be more or less understood by Swedes with some effort, academic level literature in Danish was very hard to read he said.

Well the CIC behaviour is widely known. Actually programming a microcontroller may not be so trivial if you haven't done it before. But then again there are pre-made CIC clones you can buy and the previously mentioned adapters that comes with region free CIC clones, so I think it's a relatively trivial matter.

Yeah I know some people don't care much about compatibility problems, but I'm not one of them. It has burned me too many times in the past to be ignored.

Isn't the only difference whether the label and/or box and/or manual get translated from english to other european languages ? Here most of the games early in the consoles are mostly EEC (everything is in english only) and the later ones are mostly FRG (some stuff is translated in german - but most certainly not the game !).


Well, the french translation of Schadowgate is abyssal too. I can't remember wether they got the diactrics right but I'm almost certain they didn't - most likely they didn't care and dropped them altogether. As for german I think they didn't even bother to translate it so german players had to play the game in english even if that means understanding nothing at all - which in a game like this basically removes any possible enjoyment.

Written Swedish is quite understandable. I struggle to understand when people speak it, but usually I'll get into the groove if I hang around Swedish people for some hours. Norwegian is much harder, I'll always have trouble understanding that despite its written form being almost identical to Danish.

But Swedish have a lot of words that are absolutely nothing like their Danish counterparts, or in some cases just mean completely different things ("roligt", "skratta", "glass"... and let's not forget the time I misunderstood a girl when she said she needed to pee). I laughed out loud in Shadowgate when I came across this huge snake, and the game described it as an "orm" (worm)
I picked the Swedish version because I was just a kid and didn't understand English at all, so it seemed like the logical choice. But there were a lot of these strange words that just had me stumped, and my parents had no idea either. I was stuck for months at the phantom that you need to burn with the magical torch. I mistakenly believed that the clue to beating it was in figuring out what the hell it even was, as I had absolutely no idea what "Skuggvålnad" meant. If the game had been English I would probably have had an easier time, especially as I was already beginning to learn the language from other games.

Heh interesting, I'd think Norweigan was closer to Danish than Swedish is. Orm has meant snake since a long time ago (like in Midgårdsorm from Norse mythology), but I think rolig used to mean calm instead of funny as in modern Swedish (orolig still means "uncalm" interestingly enough).


I read an interview with the guy translating the game to Swedish (same guy that translated all the manuals for NES games at the time). He translated the script and sent it to Japan. Then when they got a translated sample of the game they noticed that the diacritics was missing and immediately called Japan, but it had already started being mass-produced. I guess the Japanese people didn't think the diacritics was a required part of the letters or something. It was fixed in a later revision though.

I think Shadowgate and Dejavu were the only NES games translated to Swedish that I know of. All other games remained in English. Not that we had a lot of RPGs and Adventure games in Europe anyway.

Maniac Mansion was also translated to Swedish.
I didn't know there were two Swedish versions of Shadowgate? Do you have a video or screenshots from the one without diacritics? The one I played as a kid (and still own) definitely had them.

Sword of Hope is another interesting example. For Game Boy of course, but also a Kemco game, so I suppose it just underwent exactly the same localization process as the Macventure game. Probably the first "JRPG" I ever played, if it qualifies as one. And mine was once again in Swedish. Some of the phrases used in that are hilarious.

Compare English wyrm, which means "huge limbless and wingless serpent". You know, like a python.


"Try reading kana without dakuten." The diacritics are even shaped nearly the same:
ä – べ; å – ぺ

Me neither. The two copies i've played had the diacritics mixed up - for example "slä" (nonsense) instead of "slå" ("hit"), but a version missing them altogether is new for me. :O



ÖPPNA BEHAG

supposed to mean

"open chest"

but is using a specific (and archaic) word for the anatomical (and female) chest. bossom comes close... only that this word literally also means "pleasure", so it has contextualizing overtones.

Honestly, everything in that game is like google translate except google translate has a higher accuracy. I swear this game couldn't have had a translator on the job; more likely someone who didn't know the language and just looked up words in a dictionary. Maybe someone who knew just a little and scamped the rest.

I was reminded by some other classic moments by picture googling:

"En träd viskar"
=
an tree whispers

"Trädmyran gråter"
is translated like "the tree ant sobs" though it should be the lawsuit-evading D&D ent monster treant. Only it sounds much worse when translated because you don't have the tree ant / treant similarity anymore.

"är redan förgiftade"
(weird plural form of "is already poisoned")

I specifically remember "Trädmyran". I was so confused by that. I thought it was an ant hiding inside the tree - not a living tree.

Also, my favourite:

GONG!
"VAD GöR DU!

To be honnest when sitting at a reasonable distance of a CRT TV, the difference between both diactrics is very subtle. On an emulator with large pixels then yes indeed it's noticeable.
Also I bet the font is 8x8, then it's almost impossible to have a A letter with a mini-circle upon it, as it would require 3 extra pixel rows for the circle - wheras an umlaut only requires one extra pixel row (possible 2 as a blank line is required between it and the letter). Having just 5 pixels for the letter itself is not enough to draw a normal, readable font. The only solution here would have been to draw the circle on another tile, just like they usually do it with kana in japanese games. If however the game was japanese-developped and originally supported the dakutens, there is absolutely zero excuse not to have handled the diacritics correctly, which is basically the same thing.

EDIT : I am fairly sure there is no Swedish verison without diactrics - or at least not in the game. Maybe that was the manual or other material. All ROMs on Bootgod's database are SWE-3S-0 PRG, and the -0 indicates this is the earliest (and in this case, only) mass-producted version. If a version without diactrics exists, it had to be a prototype, and as such not mass-produced.

Also, there seem to be a warning about some words being misspelt : http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/image.php?ImageID=5002
I see the box is in english, which is.... wtf ?! It would have been way easier to translate the box than the ROM, having a translated ROM boxed in english makes zero sense. For instance, the german version has a box in german although I'm fairly sure the ROM is untranslated and left in english (I might be wrong - if the ROM indeed is in german then it's undumped).

There's a lot of 8x8 fonts that made an attempt anyway.

The Atari ST font used a solid dot instead of a circle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Atari_ST_character_set_8x8.png

Here's a different font that accommodates the circle by attaching it to the letter:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=111377

Both work fine. As someone who's used to these letters appearing everywhere in our words, it's perfectly legible.

Yeah, using a solid dot is pretty common (even outside tile graphics, we do it in script all the time) and is perfectly legible. Diacritics on the other hand will mess up the reading. Even on a crt where the difference may be somewhat smudged when using a circle, that difference is still enough to decode it as separate letters on the go. It'll just look a bit cramped.

I'd even prefer if they had used aa for å instead of ä. while aa isn't used much except in surnames and old place names, it's still decodable as å. It seems this spelling is also somewhat more prevalent in denmark.


If i were to do anything using å and ä (or â á à) on a 8x8 tile grid today, i'd definitely put them on separate tiles. Looks cleaner.

Nah same thing here. It only remains as surnames or city names. Maybe some old company names, too. Some old cities were even upgraded to the modern Å, such as Århus.

Oh i see. Well, i don't think "aa" would have worked today - i don't think kids are exposed to that form much at all anymore. I'm not sure but it could also prove problematic in finland even back in the day with its distinct use of double and single letters, where a can be spelled aa in words and å is called "ruotsalainen oo" and preserved in the alphabet for certain names only.

On a technical level, if you have a full chr-rom and want to make å and ä fit, removing w and z would work for a localization given how rare they are outside names.

I probably misunderstood the problem in Shadowgate. I never had the game myself. I did read however that there is a fixed version. The paper slip that came with the game is supposedly a note that explains this problem with mixed up letters.

Yeah a Scandinavians are probably very sensitive to the small differences between an å and an ä even in an 8x8 font so it would be a problem if they where mixed up.

Yeah one Japanese friend that majored in Swedish combined dakuten characters togeter with A and O to represent Swedish letters on his phone. This was before the smartphone era and monospaced fonts was common, so you could combine dakuten with any character.

Actually classic Japanese didn't use the diacritics as the sounds they represent didn't exist in Japanese when that writing was established. As the spoken language changed and got these new consonant sounds the written Japanese remained without a way to represent them for a long time. It was apparently Portuguese missionaries that invented the diacritics because they had trouble remembering when to change the consonant sound and not when learning the language. Thus old texts in classic Japanese don't use them, and so does certain machines that are printing in very low resolution fonts (like certain receipt printers).

Modern japanese already allows for an abyssal low amount of sounds to be represented (compared to other languages), without diacritics it would be even much worse, I can't imagine how it would be like to have a language with so few sounds.

Fortunately, the engine used for the NES MacVenture games double-spaces the text, leaving plenty of room on top for diacritics. I grabbed a random screenshot of Déjà Vu (English) off the Internet and added a couple diacritics (ring over broad A and dots over other accented A).


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Toki Pona has 14 distinct sounds: a, e, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, s, t, u, w
Hawaiian has 13: a, e, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, p, u, w, ` (glottal stop)
Central Rotokas has 11: a, b, e, g, i, k, o, p, r, t, u
Pirahã also has 11: a, b, g, h, i, k, o, p, s, t, x (glottal stop)

Flafi was supposed to have four (a, f, i, l), but it never got past the sketch stage.

Can we split this topic into each of the separate discussions? Talking about the Swedish language isn't about how to play Famicom games on a NES.

This topic was a topic split from here: http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=16712
Apologies for the abruptness and to the first posts in this thread, if anything appears out of context.

Dunno if I forgot to attach it or if the attachment didn't survive the split, but this is what I meant to attach with the double spacing. In the sample, I use ä for accented front a and å for accented back a.

A friend and I rented Shadowgate several times back when we were approx. 11 or 12 years old. This happened to be the Swedish version of the game; I never noticed there being an English language version of this game in Norway, if at all. With the exception of a relatively few words (can't remember which, unfortunately), we didn't have any noteworthy problems understanding what was going on in the Swedish translation.

In our childhood, we used to watch a lot of Swedish movies/television series like for example, 'Pippi Langstrømpe' and 'Emil i Lønneberget' unsubbed and undubbed on prime time telly, which I in hindsight find to have been a great influence. Younger people nowadays also seem to communicate quite well with the Scandinavian neighbours. I personally only know of a few fellow Norwegians who find the Danes to be difficult to understand orally.


I see what you mean there. For some reason, 'snake' in Norwegian translates to both 'slange' and 'orm' ('slange' is the more proper word, btw), but 'worm' is usually 'meitemark', 'mark' or 'makk', depending on which part of the country one is from.

Yeah Norwegians are known to understand both Danish and Swedish the best. In fact I heard Norwegian is the best language to study if you want to be able to communicate with more Scandinavians.

Slange is so funny because it sounds like slang (hose pipe). The Swedish word for worm is mask. Mark sounds like the Swedish word for ground so it kind of makes sense for something crawling on the ground.

Haha thät looks so funny!

Well.... Motörhead did it first. Never could pronounce that name like "Motorhead".

Yeah me neither. It feels so awkward to say.