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

Doc von Schmeltwick

Doc von Schmeltwick

Multi-hat Koopa cutie
(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.
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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

RjfZ8YD.png


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...
 
By the way, sorry if I sounded rude toward the translators, there's actually something bigger going on that just this.
First, the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe PRIMA guide was horribly inconsistent, with even some incorrect information about how the items are obtained coming the then wrong PRIMA Mario Kart 8 guide, then we had the Official Home of Mario whose history section was filled with game stories that came from different sources than the original manuals passed as if they came from the original manuals, now we have this. What's wrong with NOA? Is it really possible that at NOE they are much more competent on the matter of non-in-game-text-material about the Mario universe? Are they missing internal proofreaders?
EDIT: oh, yeah, we also had the fabulous case of the SMB3 Tweesters in the PRIMA NES Classic Edition guide, as a sign of things to come...
 
Well, I honestly give Prima a bit of a pass, mostly because I don't think people should be taking what is said about the characters/lore in those guides, seriously at this point. Do they still call Daisy Peach's cousin?
Other than that, what else is there to say? Surely there are Japanese translators at Dark Horse who could, oh I dunno, reference the Japanese version of the guide book that has been out for three years before reaching for the wiki?
That said, it's always fun when a big company is revealed to be using non in-house material for their references. Remember the Okami IGN cover debacle?
 
All this tells me is that we should double our efforts to ensure that the wiki remains factual and not opinionated.
 
Glowsquid said:
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!
Click to expand...
This is also my thought that went into mind. It's just not fair that we do all the hard work of jumping through loops to make sure the information presented are not official English names, and we work for free, but a published book that goes for money is basically clipping our names off for money.

Mcmadness said:
All this tells me is that we should double our efforts to ensure that the wiki remains factual and not opinionated.
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I'm not sure what this means. Yes, we should rely on our sources and all, but some enemies either don't have an English name or don't have ANY name. We have to make it up to fill in the gaps sometimes. We just can't name the articles as "Unnamed fish enemy" among several unnamed fish-like enemies, especially when the enemy happens to have a Japanese name. It's not our fault for doing conjecture.
 
Uh, that's why we slapped a huge template on the top of all the Japanese-named enemies...

Did they simply just ignore that template that's there for a reason?
 
I more meant other things like inconsistencies or articles that say something about a character that is clearly speculative or opinionated but tries to pass it off as fact.

Like some of the older articles for major characters before they got re-written.
 
I have no quams with then taking the names from the Wiki. I think its cool that Soarin' Stu's name is offical now! My issue, is that from looking at the English Amazon book preview, this book is outdated on fucking print.

Check the last page of the preview and you'll see that, while this was written in 2015 (I think), this English print came out in 2018, and the "All 17 titles" list for some reason does not include Super Mario Odyssey.

Are you serious? £24 for a hardcover copy, and they didn't bother to make the edit?
 
There's nothing wrong with that. The book was originally slated for an earlier release, prior to Super Mario Odyssey's release and the huge delay was most likely the publisher's doing, not the writer's.
 
Mcmadness:
We have a big ol' template that says that an article name is conjecture or the source is from an English name. And simply putting disclaimers on things apparently don't work because, I repeat myself, people seem to be complete morons when it comes to filtering information (remember the Ashley thing that Glowsquid posted; he put clear text showing it's wrong and people STILL link to his posts). I assume this is either spectacularly moronic, inexcusably lazy, or outright malicious, but Hanlon's Razor, blah blah blah.

Parakoopa144:
The book was delayed for IPU knows how long. I don't know why, but that happened. So I'm not going to harp on dates and all that much, especially when the delay involved adding several new pages for Super Mario Odyssey.
 
Mister Wu said:
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.
Click to expand...
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...
[/quote]

In a follow-up comment, he added:

@Glowsquid That's a good point, but let me add that whenever a doubt like that emerges, the original company usually prefers the transliteration. I suffered it in Dragon Quest encyclopedias for instance, as a proofreader with knowledge of the series. A lot of games don't have Spanish translations and they asked for romaji transliterations of clearly Japanese titles and names. It's definitely ugly, but it's what they asked for.
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That could account for some of the problems here, but it would be very odd for Nintendo to give creative freedom to the French and German translators but not here

Ian Flynn also chipped in

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Maybe it's a NOE and NOA difference?
 
Princess Mario said:
Mcmadness:
We have a big ol' template that says that an article name is conjecture or the source is from an English name. And simply putting disclaimers on things apparently don't work because, I repeat myself, people seem to be complete morons when it comes to filtering information (remember the Ashley thing that Glowsquid posted; he put clear text showing it's wrong and people STILL link to his posts). I assume this is either spectacularly moronic, inexcusably lazy, or outright malicious, but Hanlon's Razor, blah blah blah.
Click to expand...

Hey I ain't blaming the wiki makers.
 
Russian Baby Luigi said:
Uh, that's why we slapped a huge template on the top of all the Japanese-named enemies...

Did they simply just ignore that template that's there for a reason?
Click to expand...

Honestly they probably mostly used the game pages with the enemy lists on them and not the enemy pages themselves.

Why can't more adaptation-writers be like Flynn, anyways? He's more than proven his own competence.
 
The enemy lists are just names, though, in Super Mario Land 2's case. Unless they know the game like the back of their hand, they had to have seen the images accompanying the character name in the article or in a gallery.

Look, Nintendo, just goddamn make a remake of Super Mario Land 2.
 
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