If you’ve never researched a translation oddity in a text localized from a very different language, it is an adventure. Here’s an example.

A few years ago I got into a Final Fantasy 4/2US speedrunning, followed by a randomizer called Free Enterprise. The game has its share of translation oddities, most of which were covered by Legends of Localization. But that project did not make it to the end of the game, and possibly the oddest translation is in the final dungeon.

It’s this thing:

はくりゅう (hakuryuu) in hiragana. It would be 白竜 in kanji, but the original release only contains kana. It means “White Dragon”.

Yet in English, we got this puzzle:

White Dragon was somehow translated as Pale Dim, a name that makes no sense in this context. Or any other context.

But how? Most mistranslations are easy to understand, like machine translating 先 as “future” instead of “the area ahead” or “past this line”.

But the case of Pale Dim is not as easy. “White” to “Pale” is straightforward. But the word dragon used (りゅう, 竜, ryuu) isn’t similar to any Japanese word meaning dim. Options include “kazuka”, “hono”, “honoka”, “usugurai”, “yuubi”, “aiai”, “moko”, “mourou”, “ourai”, “oboro”, “oboroge”, “boyakeru”… None of them are like “ryuu”, none can mean “dragon”, and none have kanji that look like 竜.

I was frustrated, but I noticed something in the dictionary for “ryuu”— it can also mean a promoted rook in shogi. It was a longshot, but I thought: what if it has to do with shogi? Or mahjong? I know practically nothing about either game, but after careful reading on Wikipedia, I finally found it. (It doesn’t have anything to do with either game, but the answer was there by luck.)

Mahjong has three tiles commonly called the dragon tiles. They are red, green, and white. Red is usually represented as 中, green as 發, and white as either a blank tile, or a tile with a blue border. That’s not so helpful for relating mahjong to the white dragon in FF4.

But the red tile does not always use 中; sometimes it uses the traditional Chinese character 龍. This character does exist in Japanese, as an outdated kanji for “dragon”. In the vast majority of cases, dragon is written as 竜 instead. But there are situations relating to Chinese mythology that prefer 龍. For example, there’s… 白龍 (Báilóng, White Dragon).

Revisiting those selections for the word “dim” earlier, there are these three: 朦朧 (mourou), 朧ろ (oboro), and 朧気 (oboroge). They share a character: 朧.

龍: dragon. 朧: dim. Exactly the same but for the 月 radical in the latter character. Because Pale Dim is probably based on Báilóng, there’s a reason for the writer to have chosen 白龍 over 白竜. And because 龍 is an outdated, rare kanji, there’s a reason for the translator to have mistaken it for a more common character.

But isn’t the game entirely in kana? Yes, but I suspect that the script used for translation included kanji. Kanji usually makes the translator less likely to make errors, because it removes ambiguity for homonyms.

Besides, this is the only plausible explanation I’ve ever heard.

Translation is an art. Languages have elements that can’t be copied to other languages, so there’s always a subjective quality in any translation you read. Even in a high quality translation, text is read as in a mirror dimly. Mistranslations are even dimmer.