Im weirdly attached to the Chinese Fire Emblem Bootleg “Reincarnation of Light and Dark”, which doesnt have a proper translation (yet). I dont know Chinese, and would feel bad using Google Translate to translate it, so i would like to ask if anyone who can speak Chinese can translate the names of the playable Characters? Probably the most important part to have translated properly
I know these characters by heart. I can tell who they are even if I can’t read their names.
Top right to bottom left
Leif
Ronan
Fergus
Midayle/Midir
Karin
Chulainn
Safy
Asbel
Alec
Lara
Finn
Shiva
Halvan
Azelle
Osian
Tana
Dalsin
Ethlyn
Raquesis
Altena
wait are these guys from vanilla?
I can’t read hanzi (especially not phonetically), but it’s interesting how many repeated hanzi there are. They’re not at the front either, so they’re likely not family names. I get the impression these aren’t actually character names but are, like, Thunder Sorcerer or something. A job description
This is a bootleg. they have the same portraits as the fe4 & fe5 characters but are different characters with different names that is what i was talking about
They are definetly not the class names bc characters with the same class have different names, though i dont really know anything about the language, the gameplay would imply these are their names?
i can give you the pinyin but some of them i have no idea what they actually correspond to in english
chinese transliterations of western names can have a pretty big departure sometimes bc sometimes closer characters just sound kinda ass, i run into this issue a fair bit going the other direction myself
anyway left to right then top to bottom, i might make some mistakes with pinyin involving s/sh or c/ch or z/zh or n/ng bc dialectic stuff, but it should be close enough for westerners either way
Ma Lu Si (i guess this could be Mars/Marth)
Di Ou (Dio)
Jie La (i have no idea about this one, Jie is pronounced like Jeh ig if i have to write it out)
Fa Lu Ke (idefk bro, ….Falco is my closest guess?)
Ma Qiu Ya (Qiu is pronounced like chiyo but you kinda blend the i and y together, so this is likely Machuya the fe5 name)
Ou Ke Ma (Okma? Ogma? i wouldn’t use ke for ogma but there isn’t like a hard rule for this stuff ig)
Fa Na (Fana is pretty straight forward but i dont know this as a name)
Bu Ji Ke (no idea lol, go off Bujik I guess)
Ka Li Si (Kalis…?)
Xue La (X is pronounced like Sh and i always have a hard time describing ue to eng speakers bc im 90% sure eng just doesn’t have this sound, Shyuela i guess for about as close i can get to the chinese, but likely it’s for something more like Sharla? but I’d also use Xia for Sharla over Xue)
Xiu (Shio like the ramen is the closest you get to pronouncing this. Idk what the hell kinda name is this.)
Ya Lun (This could feasibly be an Allen)
Ou Ji (This is whatever they translated Oujay from fe6 to probably, check his FEH listing or something)
Kai Ya (Kaya, a sane name for once)
Ha Lu Bang (ok this is Halvan FE5)
Ke Li Si (fairly standard for some variation of Chris/Kris)
Fu Lun Si (Franz isn’t a bad guess here)
Lin (Lyn, or if you dont want to FE7, Lin is fine as is)
Ai Lian (Eilene maybe, i only figured this out bc we have one in do5 lol)
Ni Yi (lol i’d pronounce this Knee i really dont know what kinda name is this. Maybe Lene?)
feel free to type the pinyin i gave into google translate and then make it play out to see how it’s pronounced in the real and make a judgment from there
for the record; these are the names i got from google translate, shouldve probably posted them alongside that? idk
Malus
Dio
Jela
Farooq
Majua
Okma
Fana
Bujik
Caris
Sheila
Xiu
Aaron
Oogie
Kaia
Harubang
Chris
France
Lin
Elaine
Niyi
and most of them are very similar to the split up ones. im generally averse to having different characters called the same, but i should probably cross-check how many characters names are the same as the official chinese ones because those should probably be the same?
for the ones that have existing FE character overlap i’d probably recommend using FEH (TW) as a reference bc chinese official translations didn’t happen until IIRC SoV. That should give a fairly decent amount of coverage, though might not be all.
and yeah most of these would be reasonable matches, just a bunch of them aren’t really english names so i couldn’t come up with it myself haha (or are but is harder to figure out in the cn→en order)
I don’t have any knowledge of the language, but I played up to like Chapter 18ish (the one where you recruit Altena’s lookalike) using Google Translate for the story. There’s a moment relatively early on where the MC (named after Marth) meets a princess (Deirdre’s lookalike, don’t remember what name they gave her though) and it is revealed that he was her long lost brother. I think his birth name translates to something like Leif but it doesn’t update his name as a unit or anything, it’s just part of the story.
As the person who made the menu patch all those years ago, it’s rough, to say the least. Character names use FE equivalents, and weapons and items likewise (a few I couldn’t figure out and are still in Chinese. One menu command is blanked out because I couldn’t get it to do anything!)
My own Chinese knowledge is nil, so I wouldn’t be able to translate the actual story. I’d like to fully translate the game at some point - I did a brief look into how the dialogue was stored, but I never dumped the text due to the many, many characters I could not identify. After that, the biggest hurdle would be editing the font: one line of eight 16x16 characters is simply unacceptable for an English translation. Two of 16 8x8 characters isn’t that much better, but it would be tolerable.
Im in a similar situation to be honest bc i really would love to translate this game but have no knowledge of the language, and looking into it, the way text is displayed there makes it very hard to translate. My best idea was, since the chinese characters are 2x2 i think, you can use each of those for one character, so youd have 4 letters per chinese character, but theyd be on different lines and that seems like a nightmare to get to work tbh
