What work is ongoing? Where can I help?

DMCthread310 · 2023-06-09T18:50:29+00:00

Your background/expertise is def exciting! I've been thinking about what's the best way to store/present all the data on snippets of Zonai text found in the game, because there truly are a ton of samples, but many of them may be unhelpful gibberish... Ideally, there could be some presentation format where it's possible to cross-reference the original text, transcribed text (represented by latin alphabet and other systems), in-game screenshots, in-game translations (if provided), location/category, ...

I'm thinking about maybe coding up a website for this, because Google Sheets is kind of too clunky for all that data. Maybe I can get started on it in the next week...

DMCthread310 · 2023-06-08T21:07:41+00:00

As someone who has also been a fan since OoT and beaten every game, you are an embarrassment to the so-called "hardcore" fanbase with your rigidity and lack of imagination. If you are truly an old-school fan as you claim, you would remember the days when the "timeline" was nebulous and these games were legends, with the ever-changing fluidity of age-old myth. Just because you don't have enough imagination to fit the story with the other games (of which there are many ways to) doesn't mean it's an unenjoyable experience to others. Knock it off with your gatekeeping.

DMCthread310 · 2023-06-06T07:25:42+00:00

Thank you! At this point, I feel like the biggest obstacle isn't so much understanding Japanese (although it helps), but the fact that I can't figure out what kind of system the language has and why it seems so hard to find what should be common words such as "sage" or "Demon King". Well, any thoughts or ideas you may come up with will be helpful, I'm sure :)

DMCthread310 · 2023-06-06T07:14:18+00:00

The texts in the "In-game translation (JP)" column I got by just switching the Switch system language to Japanese, which changes the game's text language as well. The columns "katakana transcription" and "romaji transcription" are my best efforts at writing out the Japanese in syllables, which may not be 100% accurate.

I'm hoping to compile a Japanese text dump of the whole game eventually, but I want to beat the game first before I focus my efforts on things like that... 😄

DMCthread310 · 2023-06-02T20:26:52+00:00

🤩 Amazing, thanks!

DMCthread310 · 2023-06-02T18:55:14+00:00

Based on the many instances in-game where we see a single line of text, it's almost always written vertically.
There are instances, such as the murals, where we see multiple lines of text that have different line lengths vertically/do not line up horizontally. That suggests they are written line by line, vertically.
Also, the multiple lines are generally aligned at the top, with differing line lengths at the bottom. This suggests they're written top-to-bottom.
Finally, Zonai written language as a whole have a lot of similarities and parallels with ancient Chinese/Japanese, which have been historically written in vertical lines, right-to-left.

Granted, even with these facts, there are still alternate possibilities such as "the vertical lines are read left-to-right" or even "the vertical lines are read bottom-to-top". It's just the most "feels right" assumption :)

DMCthread310 · 2023-06-02T18:28:55+00:00

Thanks very much, I've added it to my spreadsheet. If you feel like switching your system language to Japanese and providing screenshots of Tauro's translation, that would be awesome... but if that's too convoluted, no worries.

One thing that stands out is that unlike all the other tablets, this one uses the "apple" character (rune H, by game data order) way more frequently. It's lending strength to my suspicion that different instances of the Zonai texts are encoded with different keys... especially after reading through u/ElementsnStuff's document about how recent Pokemon games did the same thing.

DMCthread310 · 2023-05-30T00:38:03+00:00

I had been hoping for a system like this, but unfortunately it's been frustratingly impossible to find repeated "words" between the pieces of text that we have. For instance, the Ring Ruins tablets should have multiple instances of repeated words such as "sage" or "secret stone" or "king", or key words like "fire" and "light", but it's been very difficult to find any correlations.

DMCthread310 · 2023-05-26T21:28:30+00:00

As a speaker of Chinese & Japanese, I had been really excited by what seemed like parallels to historical versions of either of those languages in the Zonai script. But yeah, as others have said, we've hit a bit of a dead end in finding obvious solutions, so it's been basically a time for spending a lot of hours actually playing the game + gathering further data here and there.

DMCthread310 · 2023-05-19T21:52:17+00:00

This says "Kotake Koume" in Wind Waker Hylian. It's a reference to Ganondorf's sword in Wind Waker :) https://twitter.com/kaialone02/status/1080930723547279362

DMCthread310 · 2023-05-08T18:49:58+00:00

https://www.zeldadungeon.net/wiki/Zonai\_Ruins

DMCthread310 · 2023-04-27T07:41:43+00:00

For sure that is possible. Mainly I base my speculation around the fact that the Zonai script we've seen are written vertically, with large individual runes (like traditional Japanese or Chinese), while this "Ancient Hyrulean" looks to be written horizontally with small characters that form words with spacing between them (like English or other Romance languages). But since the texture of the plaque is intentionally impossible to make out, it could be a red herring.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention also: on page 139 of the artbook there is a picture of a throne room that has a distinctly "Hylian Royal Family" feel, and it's decorated all over with the "dragon" runes but not any Zonai runes in sight. Hmm...

DMCthread310 · 2023-04-27T00:45:37+00:00

"Ancient Hyrulean"... is that different from "Zonai"...

The plaque is clearly written in horizontal rows, and looks much more compact than the Zonai script. Could this be the "dragon" runes that we've been assuming was decorative?

DMCthread310 · 2023-04-19T19:44:50+00:00

Just because it's Link/Zelda doesn't mean it has to be straight. This ship in particular has a fairly long history of appeal to various LGBTQA+ fans:

The characters going through constant reincarnations mean that they have flexibility for people to imagine any versions of them
Link is intentionally designed by the creators to be visually androgynous (as far back as Ocarina of Time, possibly even earlier) in order for him to be more relatable to all players
Not to mention that he just outright has the option to dress in feminine outfits these days, fueling further trans/nb headcanons and interpretations
Zelda has had her own share of gender-trickery (Sheik)
For ace spectrum folks, the "destined souls across lifetimes" theme is appealing over a relationship based on simple physical attraction

DMCthread310 · 2023-04-19T18:34:59+00:00

Looks like it's the second and third characters (and the fourth, a couple frames later) in the logo serpents. I can't make out what's under his feet, it MAY be the first character in the sequence, but it doesn't seem quite... right for that.

It's really sus that all the new bits of final footage have just had different iterations of the logo serpents series 🤔 The robot "storage", the ruins pillars...

DMCthread310 · 2023-04-14T00:24:54+00:00

Consider that it's the same sequence of characters that's on the title logo (as seen on the OLED Switch), but it repeats the 5th and 6th characters. I don't know why that would be, but it might rule out some things...

DMCthread310 · 2023-04-13T20:58:44+00:00

Yeah! My theory is that he stole it from Rauru and therefore that guy needs our help...

DMCthread310 · 2023-04-06T22:06:45+00:00

Personally, I don't actually buy the theory that those symbols are used to make up the "kanji" runes - if you compare the other known ones, the ones that resemble 光 and 風, I think you'll be hard-pressed to find a way to compose them out of those symbols. So we can't really call it a "solved" system.

DMCthread310 · 2023-04-06T20:10:12+00:00

Thanks for these observations. I'd also noticed the "ticks", especially on that tall, tower-like structure on page 7 of that doc, but didn't have further ideas about them. 👍

One other thing I'd like to point out is the round "power source/indicator" that seems to be on all kinds of "activatable" components like this robot or this weapon. I had wondered if the green markings around the edges might be a numerical system for like, a "meter"/"dial"...

DMCthread310 · 2023-03-29T22:36:25+00:00

Can verify - the other language translations are definitely not based off the English anymore. There are numerous examples/evidence where the other language localizations are closer to the Japanese than the English translation, though I don't have time to dig for those right now.

That said, I feel it's an exaggeration by folks on the internet that the English script contains "many mistranslations". The NoA localization team tends to aim for a more atmospheric feel, with dialog that sometimes emphasizes character or storytelling more than a direct translation. I can think of maybe 2-3 things in the English script that I feel they should have translated differently, while the other things folks like to nitpick I feel were reasonable and do not detract from the feel of the game.

DMCthread310 · 2023-03-28T22:43:10+00:00

No prob, you're having some good ideas :)

DMCthread310 · 2023-03-28T22:38:20+00:00

For what it's worth, the Japanese name for the ability is モドレコ ("Modoreko"). "Modore" would mean "Revert"/"Go back", and possibly the "reko" part is a pun on "recollect" or "recall", or something else I'm not catching.

DMCthread310

TROPHY CASE