Commentated German Club Nintendo translations, Mario edition (Patreon)

In addition to the regularly scheduled Supper Mario Broth: The Lost  Levels articles and Supper Mario Broth Supper Show podcast, this Patreon also features exclusive posts available to all patrons, including  those not signed up for any membership tier. The previous such post has been "Supper Mario Broth: A History, Part 1", with Part 2 coming next week. For now, however, a different topic.

As some of you may already know, I am a native speaker of German. I have used my knowledge of the language to translate many pieces of German-only Mario content, such as advertisements or articles. However, one series of German Mario works is of a particular interest to the worldwide audience: the German Club Nintendo comics.

If you have ever read an online article about "strange Mario content", chances are, you have seen isolated panels from those comics. They feature such outlandish scenarios as a giant Mario laying waste to New York City, Princess Peach turning into a horrifying zombie, or Wario making a deal with the devil:

When I came into possession of the scans for the comics, most of them had already been translated by various Internet translation groups. As I did not want to repeat the work of others, I translated only the comics that were remaining at the time, four in number: two featuring Mario, and two featuring Yoshi. Today, I will post the Mario-focused translations here and give my own commentary below each page, clarifying aspects of the translation; the next time, I will tackle the Yoshi-focused ones.

First, we have the 1997 comic "Die Jagd nach dem Nintendo 64: Krawall im All", which I have translated as "The Hunt for the Nintendo 64: Ruckus in the Cosmos". The source for the 6 following images is Club Nintendo Germany, Issue 1997/2, 1997.

Right away, I must note that a lot of the dialogue in the original comics is slang, which is often a strange type that does not correspond to any real-life slang, but is rather a parody of it. Mario's "cool thing" in the third panel is a translation of "coole Sache", literally "cool thing", but which could have been translated as other sland, e.g. "cool beans". In the same panel, "right behind the next Milky Way" is a pun in the original, "Milchstraße", Milky Way in German, translates literally as "milk street", so Luigi is saying that the Earth is at the crossing after the next street. Also, in the original version, Luigi calls Earth "Planet Terra" in this panel, which I somehow neglected to include.

In the original version of Panel 4, Wario says "This area is more than boring. Boring as stink!" which I have attempted to make more natural-sounding. While it may sound like Bowser's "airmail" in the final panel is my own addition, it is a direct translation of the original.

In the first panel, Bowser's original phrase is "What must my little eyes behold?" which has a connotation of seeing something you'd rather not want to see. I attempted to find another phrase in English that used "little eye", even if it has a slightly different meaning. In the second-to-last panel, Bowser's "Now you gotta believe it!" is a literal translation, although a more appropriate one would be "Now you have to deal with this!" or similar. Finally, Bowser's puns in the final panel were my attempt to localize the original pun, "Abstecher ins Grüne", literally "a trip to the green", meaning a trip to the countryside. The original pun referred to the grass on the side of the road being green; my translation referred to Mario being pushed aside.

In the second panel, Mario originally says "Vitamins are great to calm you down", which I found to be excessively bizarre, as I could not find any information on this being either a scientific consensus or a popular belief. In the thind panel, Wario calls Bowser a "Kröte", which could either be a short form of "Schildkröte" - turtle, or the word for "toad", as in the amphibian, not the Mario character. While it is most likely to be the former, it would be humorous if it were the latter, but we have no way of knowing. Finally, in the final panel, Mario originally says "Would you like to see a surprise?" which I found to sound too bland when translated.

In the third panel, Mario originally says "Let's go for a ride over the waves!" I thought a reference to the Nintendo 64 title Wave Race 64 would be appropriate given the topic of the comic. In the fourth panel, Wario originally calls Mario and Luigi "you tears", which sounds just as bizarre in German and was changed to "you crybabies". In the sixth panel, Wario's move is made-up in the original, but I have replaced it with a real aerobatics maneuver, the reverse half Cuban eight. Finally, the most interesting part of this page is Wario's "D'oh, I missed!" in the seventh panel. 

The original text is "So ein Mist!", translating roughly to "What a bummer!" or "Darn it!". What makes it interesting is that this phrase is what Wario says in Mario Party when he loses - contrary to the popular opinion that his voice clip is "D'oh, I missed!", it has been confirmed by Thomas Spindler, who voiced Wario in Mario Party, that he indeed speaks German in that clip, and that he says the German phrase "So ein Mist". I translated it as "D'oh, I missed" as a reference to this affair; however, since I neglected to explain it in the original post, it is likely that not many readers would understand the joke.

In the third panel, Mario originally adds "and hop!" to indicate that he is jumping. Note that it is ironic to have Dixie Kong be among the characters congratulating Mario on the Nintendo 64 as she has never appeared in any game on that system.

Next up, the 1996 comic "Mario in Mariozilla", which did not need to have the title translated as the word "in" is the same in German and English.  The source for the 4 following images is Club Nintendo Germany, Issue 1996/2, 1996, and the 4 afterwards is Club Nintendo Germany, Issue 1996/3, 1996.

The phrase "zappity-rap" is nonsensical, and an attempt to localize the equally nonsensical original "zapp-zarapp"; it is not an existing phrase in either language, which is why Mario repeats it incredulously. 

Mario's "it's just me, the Mario!" in the seventh panel needs explanation. In formal German, it is incorrect to put articles before a person's name, just like in English. However, informally and in some regional dialects such as Bavarian, it is very common to refer to a person as "the [person's name]". While translating it directly produces a much more peculiar phrase than excluding it, I thought it would be fitting for the tone of the comic. 

Also of interest is the name Mario calls Peach in the original. It is "Toadie", a shortened form of "Toadstool". By a remarkable coincidence, the enemies called Toadies - Kamek's propeller-headed minions - also appear in the comic, and leaving the name untranslated would cause much confusion, especially if the comic was reposted elsewhere on the Internet without my commentary. Therefore, I chose to avoid that potential issue and went with "Peach".

In the first panel, Mario originally says "Oops, it's narrow here", which I decided to shorten. In the seventh panel, he then simply says "Oops" again, which I decided to underscore by having him point out that he is saying it a second time. 

In the first panel, Dr. Light originally says "stealth cap" instead of "stealth suit", which is a preexisting phrase in German, but not in English. It is coincidentally the German name for the Vanish Cap from Super Mario 64, although I felt having Dr. Light say "I have a Vanish Cap for you" would have been out of place. In the second panel, Dr. Light and Link are "pressing their thumbs", the German version of crossing your fingers, which is why their fists are clenched. 

This page contains two instances of a gag popular in German Club Nintendo comics, where a character would completely repeat a narration box, so please don't think this is an error on my part. Finally, in the original, Kamek calls Mario "you Huber" in the second-to-last panel, Huber being a common German last name; it is an insult that is either made-up or extremely uncommon, and rather than localizing it as "you Smith" or similar, I decided to make Kamek use Mario's own name as an insult.

In the fourth panel, Kamek calls Mario a "bad one" or "evil one" in the original; I could have translated it as "villain" but the phrasing implies a childishness that would not be present in "villain".

In the sixth panel, Mario says "Quatsch mit Soße", literally "nonsense with sauce", in the original. To preserve the "sauce" theme, I chose "applesauce and baloney", two food-related words with secondary meaning used to denote "nonsense" or "foolishness" in English. 

The last speech bubble in the first panel originally contains a slang word meaning "cool", e.g. "bodacious". I chose "wicked" because it is unclear who is saying it, and it could be used in both its "cool" meaning and its regular meaning in this context.

The second panel contains an inaccuracy. Dr. Light's dialogue should have been translated as "Wait, Yoshi! Would you stay here and kindly lay an egg?!" I am not certain why the original called Yoshi's egg "cute" in the third panel, given how it looks exactly like normal Yoshi eggs, although this could have been a general statement about Yoshi eggs. Mario's rhyming dialogue in the original translates literally to "Hey, how splendid! We are big again!" I chose to retain the rhyming instead of the exact meaning.

This concludes this commentated look back at the translations. Next time, I will analyze the Yoshi comics, among them the famous comic where a black Yoshi is ostracized due to his color.

I would like to note that I am always available for translations from German - and if you somehow know any Nintendo-related content in Russian, from Russian. If you have any German piece of Mario-related text, simply contact me over Tumblr, Twitter or Patreon and I will be more than happy to translate it for you!

Thank you very much for reading.