Found in Translation

Schau Mir in Die Augen, Kleines
Talk to any German movie buff about great movie quotes and “Schau mir in die Augen, Kleines”
(Look into my eyes, baby) will almost certainly appear among the top five. Germans love that über-
cool line from the classic American film Casablanca. If you’re scratching your head in confusion,
you’re in good company on this side of the Atlantic, for there is no such line in the English version.
The beloved quote is how the translator of the first version dubbed into German rendered that
equally iconic line, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Not what you’d call a direct translation, but it’s
one that’s made cultural history.
A Virtual Creation Story
And the translator said, “Let there be Sheng Long: and there was Sheng Long!”
Well, sort of. In the 1991 arcade version of the Japanese video game Street
Fighter II, the character Sheng Long was launched into virtual reality because
of a translator ’s misunderstanding. This creation story began when the game’s
main character, Ryu, exclaimed, “If you cannot overcome the Rising Dragon
Punch, you cannot win!” (
).
Unfortunately, the hapless translator misunderstood the rising dragon (
)
reference as the introduction of a new character with the Chinese name of
Sheng Long (also:
). The resulting translation: “You must defeat Sheng
Long to stand a chance.”
Now, as any passionate gamer could easily recognize—you know who you
are, fanboys and fangirls—this is the kind of message that makes your heart
beat faster. It’s the long-awaited hint that indicates how to reach the next level
of the game. But no matter how many bleary-eyed days fans spent searching,
Sheng Long was nowhere to be found. Gradually, rumors began circulating
from shadowy gamers who claimed that they had long since found and easily
defeated Sheng Long, only strengthening the others’ resolve. The hunt was far
from over.
When the popular magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) upped the
ante by giving a detailed description of how to find and defeat Sheng Long in
their April 1992 edition, the frenzy reached its climax. In December of the
same year, after avid gamers spent months trying to track down the elusive
character, the magazine “disclosed” that the instructions for finding Sheng
Long had all been an April Fool’s gag. The character never existed, so of
course could not be found.
It’s a funny anecdote, but it does make you wonder how any translator could
have made such a mistake. One word: context! As most game translators will

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testify, completely isolated and discombobulated segments of text are the norm
rather than the exception. This was especially true during the heyday of arcade
games that could not be easily installed on a computer and played along with as
they were translated. If you’ve ever played translated games, you know that
these kinds of mistakes still happen today, though possibly in a less dramatic
fashion.
In fact, Nora Stevens Heath, who specializes in the translation of Japanese
games, says that, even today, she frequently deals with missing context,
outrageous space restrictions, and a predefined syntax that worked well for the
Japanese original but not for the English translation. And added to those
difficulties, her audience is picky, to say the least: “Fanboys and -girls can be
brutal in a loud and very public way,” she says. Still, she feels passionate about
her job, knowing that the gaming community is not limited to kids in shady
arcades but cuts across all demographics and gender.
8
And while there may still be some mistranslations, there are also translation
triumphs, such as one in a video game called Animal Crossing: Wild World (
). The translators were truly put to the test with a multilevel
Japanese pun: the Japanese word kabu can mean “turnip” (
) or “stock” ( )
as in “stock market.” The turnip-selling boar in the game is named Kaburiba,
which therefore has several possible meanings: “stock/turnip market” (
), “stock/turnip-selling old woman” (
), and “an older
woman wearing (the kind of) headgear” (that the character actually wears) (
). It would be no problem to translate one of these meanings, but all
three? In a stroke of genius, the translator came up with a “Sow Jones” who
was in charge of the “stalk market.”
Unlike the mistaken creation of Sheng Long, this is an example of true
creation, in the almost mythical sense of the word: “And the translator saw that
it was very good!”