Kazari’s Translation Notes and Other Things

General
Names and honorifics

All the names and terminology used in this fan translation are the original Japanese names, rather
than the names popularized by the US English dub. There are a few reasons for this:

 From the very start I abandoned any prospect of potentially trying to make this look like an
official localization of any sort, simply because it's completely impractical (and it's also why
this game has an incredibly miniscule chance, if at all, of ever getting a localization). Many
parts of the script are taken word-for-word from the Japanese version of the anime, which,
in many cases, diverges from the English dub script in character portrayals and certain plot
beats. Since I wanted to translate in a fashion faithful to said script rather than attempting
to insert divergent dub lines or make lines up, I saw no purpose in even having pretense of
emulating the English dub version. Note that I would be perfectly willing to go with dub
names if I felt like it was worth retaining the sense of childhood nostalgia and immersion,
but because those who are expecting a recreation of that will already have their hopes
dashed, it didn’t seem like it’d be possible to begin with.

 Many of the players who would be using this patch may not have grown up with the
American English dub; there was in fact a Southeast Asian English dub that retained the
original name (and also was the precedent used for naming in the now-defunct Digimon
Heroes), and I also expect that unless this patch gets released in every language Digimon
was ever dubbed in, a lot of people who can read English but didn’t grow up with English
as their native language or with the English dub will be using this. Since they have a right
to a childhood too, and many of the other foreign dubs didn’t actually change names, at
the very least the original names provide a baseline. Of course, other than Heroes, most
English-language media holds a “localization” standard of English names, but see the first
bullet point on appearing remotely professional.

 The voiced lines all use the Japanese names, and using dub names would cause a feeling of
discomfort where the text noticeably mismatches. This is done in official products (most
recently with Cyber Sleuth), but I am personally not fond of it and I’m also aware that this
made a lot of people uncomfortable.

Honestly, it’s a tough issue, and even with the above bullet points there are a number of
reasonable arguments you could make against me – most recently Digimon Adventure tri.’s
Crunchyroll subs pretty much ignore the entirety of the above, although I suppose I should bring
up the fact that this translation was in production long before it even existed. In the end there’s no
right or wrong answer, I think, but this was what I ultimately decided to go with based on my own
judgment.

(If it makes you feel better, though, I definitely did not go with the official Japanese romanizations
for the names, because I am accepting “Picklemon” over my dead body.)

Knowing that this would ultimately look like a fan translation anyway, I decided to be very strict
with translation style. I did not remove any references to Japanese culture, given that I could just
include details in this guide – although I also didn’t want to use too many Japanese words that
would force the viewer to have to check Wikipedia too often, since some of them are more
obscure to non-natives, so I did take the liberty of avoiding them when possible, replacing them
with understandable English descriptions. For the most part, I tried to go by a system where “if it's
a Japanese word, and it can be translated accurately into English, we'll go with the English unless
said Japanese word can appear in the title of an English-language Wikipedia article”.

Foul language

Strictly speaking, words like kuso and other things aren't swearing in the same way they are in
English. They have the same level of severity as general expletives, without the whole taboo/kids-
shoudn't-say-this marker that you'd normally see with things like “damn it!”

This put me at the level of juggling whether I wanted to use stronger expletives (and thus have
them come out of the mouths of elementary-school children) or use weaker ones (and risk
sounding overly goody-goody or cheesy). Complicating the issue further is that the intended
audience for the original anime (young children) does not match up with the people most likely to
play this fan translation…

In the end, at the risk of removing the expletive-ness of some instances, I decided to keep the
language G/PG-rated, in the extremely remote off-chance anyone does decide to have a kid play
this game. It's not quite that likely, especially since one would have to teach said kid the honorifics
involved (which I did not feel comfortable removing for the above-stated reasons), but it just didn’t
feel right to lock out the original audience.

Explosive Evolution! Greymon

Kansai dialect

Tentomon speaks in Kansai dialect (or, at least, a corrupted version used in media to make it
recognizable to a general audience). I haven't really tried to translate it in any special sort of way
(various game localizations and anime dubs have certainly tried, with varying degrees of success),
other than the occasional word choice that I wouldn't normally use.
Gummy Gomamon

The original Japanese text has Jou ask Gomamon if his name has relation to the phrase “open,
sesame” – the Japanese word for “sesame” being goma. Taichi then compares Gomamon to a
sesame dango (dumpling), since it’s small and rolls around.

Cousins

Onii-chan, which Takeru calls Yamato, literally means “older brother”, but it’s got a variety of other
applications, including older male cousins. I figured “big bro” would suffice if Persona 4 could get
away with it.

The Rampaging Piyomon

Piyomon or Pyocomon?

I’m pretty sure this is a typo in the original game, since the Pyocomon village decides to thank Sora
and Pyocomon for saving them when it should logically be Sora and Piyomon. Since I felt I was
going to get complaints about this if I followed through with the typo, I’ve corrected it.

Onwards! Escape the Snowfields

Onsen mania

A lot of this stuff remains unexplained thoroughly in the text, mainly because it’s extremely
Japanese and perfectly understandable to a native. I wanted to retain the references to what they
were referring to without just throwing Japanese words everywhere and leaving people confused,
so I opted for using English words. The Japanese specific words are listed below, and a bit of
Wikipedia will help you if you want to know more:

 Taichi’s “snow huts” specifically refer to kamakura – it’s basically a snow igloo.

 “Hot springs” (onsen), in Japanese, generally refer to the bathing facilities commonly found
accompanying them, which often include, yes, table tennis. Eggs boiled in hot spring water
(onsen tamago) are also a traditional thing in Japan, meaning the fact the refrigerator had
eggs was probably the least weird thing about the entire scenario.

 Takeru asks Jou if he prefers the bath clothes (yukata) or the Japanese-style rooms
(washitsu).

 Koushiro says that he likes souvenir onsen manjuu.

  Mimi likes her eggs with natto, known mainly for its extremely strong flavor and smell. It’s
quite a polarizing food, as you can probably imagine (I personally have a taste for it, but it
depends on the person). That said, most people probably don’t eat it with sugar.

 Koushirou’s favorite thing to put on his eggs is ponzu sauce – a mixture of soy sauce, citrus
sauce, vinegar, and other things. As you can imagine, it’s…definitely not something you’d
normally put on eggs.

Adventure! Patamon and I

“Coddling” / “A grain of pepper...”

To the wonderful people at Ryuu-Rogue: I'm sorry, I stole your calls on these; no translation that I
could come up with for those two quite captured the line as much as I’d hoped.

A Forgotten Item at the Church

Flower arrangement

Sora's mother specifically practices ikebana (flower arrangement). It's a traditional Japanese art,
hence Mimi's comment about kimono.

Très bien

Lord Bakemon peppers his speech with English everywhere. I don't know why I picked French as an
alternative, but I felt like it'd work.

Departure – For a New Continent!

We're being consumed!

Originally: “We must be in Whamon's esophagus! And I don't mean 'restaurant'...”

“Esophagus” (食道) and “restaurant” (食堂) are both pronounced shokudou.

Illusionary Ship Captain, Cockatrimon!

-gya and -ga ya

This is part of Cockatrimon having Nagoya dialect, as “-ga ya” is a sentence ender in it. Of course,
this is an incorrect application of “-ga ya” (and condensed derivative “-gya”), since the text pretty
much just appends it to sentences without any rhyme or reason – like the Kansai dialect corruption
mentioned above, it's to make it understandable to the general Japanese audience. It sounds kind
of like a chicken squawking as well, which is why I left it in rather than opt to simply smooth it out
into dialogue like Tentomon, but maybe that wasn’t the best idea?

By the way, a similar process is also applied to Armadimon in the sequel to the anime, Digimon
Adventure 02. Now where’s my game of that?

The Fairy! Piccolomon

Bit Bomb

Yes, I am very aware the attack is named “Bit Bomb” in the franchise and Piccolomon only says it
like Pit Bomb, but since he says it like Pit Bomb and it even says Pit Bomb in the Japanese text, Pit
Bomb is how it's getting translated.

We’re Friends! WereGarurumon

Friends and friendly friendship

The sentence of Yamato saying he still hasn't forgotten about the feeling of friendship, transcribed
in Japanese: nakama wo...tomo wo shinjiru kimochi, yuujou wo! (You can hear it in the voice clip.)
As you can see, that has no less than three distinct Japanese words dealing with friendship, but
because there’s only one word that works here that doesn’t sound awkward in English, the
resulting sentence comes out as the incredibly redundant and extra cheesy-sounding “my
friends...the feeling of believing in my friends, friendship”.

A better translator probably could have come up with something like that, but unfortunately I
couldn’t. Sorry.

Shining Wings! Garudamon

Jou’s Crest

I swear the name of Jou’s Crest (誠実, seijitsu) has been translated at least five different ways over
the course of this fanbase’s existence, and even more confusingly it has quite a few official names
as well. “Honesty” is my favorite out of the official translations, so there you go.

Ikebana and iemoto

I covered ikebana above in the Forgotten Item sub-quest, but let’s be more specific about Sora’s
mother’s occupation here: Sora’s mother is an iemoto, or basically the head of a school of a
traditional Japanese art such as tea ceremony, dancing, and yes, ikebana. The title is typically
hereditary, which means that Sora is indeed next in line to her mother.
Although I said I wanted to avoid too many specific Japanese terms, translating iemoto as
“teacher” would have caused the next lines to explain that a flower arrangement teacher is a
teacher of flower arrangement, which sounds phenomenally stupid. It’s no secret that Sora’s at
odds with a very traditional Japanese setup, and it’s explained within text anyway, so please forgive
me for just this once.

Food for Thought

Kimchi fried rice and fresh cream

I’m 99% sure this will be obvious to most people, but since I actually have met people in my life
who have never heard of kimchi, I’ll put it here anyway: it’s a Korean dish that involves spiced and
fermented vegetables. Kimchi fried rice is perfectly common. Fresh cream on kimchi fried rice…not
so much.

Pursuit! Hurry to Japan!

Can they even read this?

The sign for soldier recruitment is entirely in Japanese kanji (兵隊募集, read heitai boshuu). There
are three writing systems in Japanese used in various places; two of them are phonetically-driven
and quite easy to learn, while the last one – kanji – is basically Chinese characters, of which a
couple thousand are used in general Japanese. This obviously makes Japanese writing pretty
difficult to learn from scratch – children often don’t know a lot of kanji – so what Taichi asks is if
Digimon can read kanji (since most of the native script used in the Digital World is the DigiLetters).

Actually, what is a Japanese sign doing in the middle of the Digital World, anyway?

Reunion! Taichi and Hikari

Morning glory observation

This is a common Japanese summer homework assignment for elementary school kids, in which
they have to observe a morning glory plant at different stages of its growth and draw and take
notes on it.

Beetles

Yes, Kuwagamon’s name is pretty much “StagBeetlemon” if you were to literally translate it (if the
appearance didn’t tip you off already).

Snowglobe
Summer greeting card

A bit of this got lost – it’s supposed to line up completely in context, in that the summer greeting
card (shochuu mimai) is a card specifically meant to ask how the recipient’s health is in the hot
summer weather (hence why Taichi and Agumon keep talking about how Yukidarumon’s doing,
and why Agumon says he doesn’t really get it – a literal translation of shochuu mimai would be
“midsummer health inquiry”, but “summer health inquiry greeting card” is a bit long).

The Meeting of Fate! Tailmon

“Tailmon is Hikari’s Digimon.”

You might think I’m being overly literal with the third-person here, but in fact this is an outlier even
in the Japanese version. Typically this kind of quirk (in Japanese works) is reserved for girls trying to
act cute or very young children, but while Hikari may technically fit the latter, in every other
context she refers to herself with the first-person atashi. (More specifically, her – and the other
main female characters’ – first-person pronouns in the game are watashi or atashi in the text and
atashi in all voice-acted lines.) This exact same line incidentally crops up in the anime, in which she
also uses third person for this line and this line only.

Perfect-levels Attacking Together! The Odaiba Fog

“You know, until recently this area used to be part of the sea.”

Odaiba, where the children live and where most of the real-world scenes take place, is an artificial
island. Although Odaiba had started construction in the 1800s, long before the timeline of
Adventure in 1999, it wasn’t before the late 90s (and therefore, right on the tail end of before the
story) when the area started to gain population and attraction for tourism and personal leisure.

Trapped outside Odaiba

Getting into a bit of geography: as mentioned above, Odaiba is an artificial island, meaning that
getting there from mainland Tokyo requires some work (typically by crossing the Rainbow Bridge).
However, because of the fog, all the normal transportation channels are cut off, so Jou (who
presumably has his cram school outside the island) and Takeru (who lives in Sangenjaya) are
trapped outside.

The International Exhibition Center

Also known as Tokyo Big Sight. Comiket is held here! Perhaps if the timing had been a little
different, Vamdemon could have met his easy defeat by being crushed at the feet of doujinshi-
thirsty event frequenters.
The King of the Seas, MetalSeadramon
Those guys

The Japanese text makes it a lot clearer that Mimi’s referring to the Numemon because the “slimy”
onomatopoeia (from which the Numemon get their name) is numenume.

MetalEtemon’s Counterattack
Crocodiles have real tears

The original line is “It’s like what they say about there being tears even in the eyes of a demon.”
This is a Japanese saying that essentially means that even the most hard-hearted and ruthless
people can have compassion. My attempted repurposing is a little awkward (and makes Jou look
rather rude), but it was the closest thing I could think of.

-gecko

Yes, that’s right; the Geckomon have mysteriously changed their verbal tic between episodes! It
has nothing to do with me, I swear!

In the first episode they appear in they use -kero (translated as “-ribbit” here); in the sub-episode,
they use -gero (also translated as “-ribbit”), and in this episode they suddenly switch to -geko
(transliterated as “-gecko” here). This inconsistency exists in the anime as well. Don’t ask me, I just
translate the thing.