zephiX, did you write this?
Peculiar Translations of Game Manuals - Luigi's Mansion (12.6.2026)
You can check out the full scan of the manual on Archive.org
Hello and good day to anyone reading this! I do apologize for the absence again, I will try to have somewhat of a schedule for these posts, but it will also depend of the amount of stuff I can show/talk about. We don't have a PlayStation 2 game today, rather its competitor, the GameCube's launch title Luigi's Mansion.
This release was what would be the standard back in the day, even though eastern Europe finally opened up in the 90's, many companies wanted to tap into that market, but not really, so they just outsourced their stuff to different companies and act as their distributor instead. So it was basically up to them to do the localization job and they weren't that involved.
Luckily, distributors still operate as if the real company was present, it's just not them technically speaking. So for Nintendo, we got their products through "ConQuest Entertainment" and the neighbors down south got it through "Kon Tiki Multimedia".
But why am I mentioning this, especially the latter part? Well, when I got my copy, there was an included copy of a translated manual with the original one also, but it is in Slovak. It is not a problem for me, since the language is very similar, I was just surprised, didn't expect to come with anything extra really.
Where I wasn't surprised was the quality, it is just a grayscale photocopy of the original with presumably overlayed text with a generic template as the cover. I'm not complaining though... Sorry for the poor quality of the scan, it really looks like that even in person.
Visual things aside, we should focus on the actual content of the booklet, starting of strong with this very interesting interpretation of the word "whippersnapper":
(original: Look here now, whipper-snapper! You’d better learn these moves so you know what to do when you meet a ghost!)
The word is translated back to "triggerwhipper", which, I would say, is one way to put it. But it seems very rough and not thought out. And that is the main problem with this overall, it just looks like the distributor had like 15 minutes to write everything with no grammar checking and approval whatsoever.
You can see right on the previous image, the title of section has Luigi normally, but in the table of contents, it includes a hyphen to emphasize the grammatical case (plus capslocked for unknown reasons).
Similar inconsistency was on a previous page, the introductory one, where they almost flipflop on using either Mario or more phonetically accurate Mário.
The worst cases are the ones I'm gonna show below, which I was surprised this went through, like nobody in the process said "Yeah, we should fix that before including it.". It is almost baffling, this wouldn't happen under direct supervision, or at the very least not today. They really did not bother back then.
Boo Radar + Boo Counter
Not only did they misspell Nintendo (although only one time, but still? Look at that!), they even misspelled Pikmin and CORRECTED THEMSELVES AFTERWARDS BUT DID NOT BOTHER TO CHANGE IT!!! And the Boo Counter, I am baffled, really. The Boo Radar is translated fine, but they had the need to change the name right after?
It's not even close, it is translated as "Bulge Counter" and I don't know if I should genuinely laugh or cry at the sheer absurdity of this. How they even came into conclusion on that term, I will not know the answers to sadly.
With this somewhat aside, this manual has the case of literal translations with the first case being the word "feller", which is really out of place here, since it's referring to the profession (apparently a lumberjack?) and NOT the derived word for fellow, along with a misinterpreting and mistranslating of the source. A combo, I would say.
original: OK, feller. So now you know exactly what you’re supposed to do, eh? What's that? You've still got questions, you say?
Same misinterpreting right here, although not that bad, just weird to put the "right" as a separate sentence. They wanted to say "Now you know how to catch ghosts, correct?" but for some reason had the need to separate the word and it's now "Now you know how to catch ghosts. Correct?"
original: Now you know how to catch ghosts, right? So let’s get started already!
But... I've left the best one at the very end, I've checked if this is a reoccuring thing in other countries, in some cases yes, but it is not that common. This booklet refers to Toad as a literal toad and not the Toadstool mushroom. I think I've seen enough from this.
In conclusion, if we tryy to ignore these issues, the overall job wasn't that bad, especially in the more important areas that you would use the manual for. But I will certainly not be excited if I stumble upon another copy from this distributor. Next time, we're gonna be looking at a PC release: Blizzard Anthology + Diablo II.