I like the English line a bit better myself, ‘cuz it’s cheeky. Like to “Is this girl transgender?” or something.) (That said, you might want to consider changing it to prevent unnecesary reactions from people stumbling upon it. As pointed out, the title of this entry is somewhat offensive (and actually miseading! Since as you know, crossdressing characters, that identify as male, have been censored out in other games), so your consideration is a nice change of pace to how these problems usually end up. (And you probably do have many things to say about the later topic.)Īlso I’m glad you’re taking your time on learning about proper etiquette on these things to avoid making mistakes.
I’m very excited for a future post on Vivian, since the way she was dealt with on the different versions actually says a lot about both transgender impact on different societies, and the impact of society on the localization process. (These are often quite interesting, since many censorship changes actually do get reversed, and modified in different ways appropiate for the place. Unfortunately, I haven’t played XY myself, so I can’t provide a contrast on how further localizations fold out. One shudders when thinking about certain other… well-known disastrous examples best not to bring up right now. It’s pretty neat to see more positive transgender portrayals recently. So that bit of consistency makes sense – in fact, if you read between the lines of the English localization and piece things together yourself, it’s still clear that a gender reassignment happened! It’s an interesting case of not fully removing something but making things a little fuzzier instead, much like how the Pokémon and marriage stuff was handled. In the official English translation, the NPC in question uses the term “Black Belt” instead of “Karate King”… and it indeed looks like that enemy was renamed to “Black Belt” in the English versions of the game.
I might be wrong, but there doesn’t seem to be one – the only female equivalent I could find was this type of enemy, called “Battle Girl”: Still, just to be safe, I wondered if maybe there was a female version of Karate King. So, doing a quick search, it turns out that the phrase “Karate King” is what these guys are called in the Japanese games:īecause of this, it sounds like the NPC in question is basically saying, “I was one of those generic karate guys a half year ago I’m not anymore thanks to medical science!” I’ve encountered this sort of unusual usage many times in my career, so it’s important to dig a little deeper than that. Still, it’s important to note that this Japanese word 王 おう can sometimes refer to someone in power without any specific implied gender, similar to our word “ruler”. Just from a quick look, we see the English localization definitely leaves out the mention of medicine/medical science, which doesn’t seem like a big change at first glance.īut the real confusion and questions seem to stem from the fact that the Japanese phrase translates to “Karate King”, which would make you think it’s referring to a male. Yes, a mere half year ago I was a Black Belt! Quite the transformation, wouldn’t you say? I was a Karate King just half a year ago the power of medical science is awesome, wouldn’t you say?!
I thought it was a translation mistake at first, but apparently not!įrom the tumblr post, it sounds like this is a hot topic among Pokémon fans, so let’s take a look! First, here’s a look at the line in both versions of the game:Īnd here’s all the text side-by-side: Japanese script In pokemon x/y, there’s a character in the random battle place who is apparently transgender, and I was wondering if you could confirm the translations posted here and maybe confirm what’s going on on this fanart page (NSFW!)? asked an interesting question that involves Pokémon and a possibly transgender character: