Hon Fu
I appreciate any character where if you do the move right it's really cool and if you fuck up they smack themselves in the crotch.
Story
Story 1
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| Ripper: Here's the current winner's picture, Mr. Geese. | Mr.Geese,we got this graphic of the guy. |
| Geese: ... | Geese: Hmph! |
Story 2
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| A kung fu practitioner? You're just a Hong Kong police dog... | A kung-fu disciple? You're just a Hong Kong flatfoot! |
The basic difference here is if Geese calls Hon Fu a dog or not. "Flatfoot" is old-timey slang for a policeman, so that's another instance of SNK using weirdly dated slang in their translations. I feel it's somewhere below "dog" in terms of "vaguely insulting things to call cops", but the idea is there and it's certainly more localized than my version.
Story 3
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| I'll test your strength. Hurry, advance through the tournament and face me. Ahahahah... | I can't wait to see how strong you are,big boy. |
Story 4
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| Hon Fu: This sure is a sketchy skyscraper, huh? It reeks of evil! | Hon Fu: This looks suspicious. I smell evil, too. Phew! |
| Geese: That cop...he's strong. It seems I may have to get serious. | Geese: Looking tougher than ever, Boris. Too bad,you're gonna be meat sauce after this. |
Kishi and I worked together on Hon Fu's line.
Hon Fu specifically thinks it's the building that looks suspicious in Japanese, but that's dropped in English and makes it sound more like the situation is suspicious. Which, well, it is. The line about him smelling evil is also made a little less specific and more jokey, which fits in with the rest of the localization.
Geese...well, "Boris" is pretty easy to explain. In Japanese, he says ポリス/porisu, or "police". But that first character, the ポ/po, looks very similar to ボ/bo - they're the same except that po has a little circle and bo has two little dots. Can you see them? As you might expect, this is hard to see, and would probably be even worse on a 1995-era CRT monitor. Someone going fast and not checking their work could absolutely mix them up. Context would tell you that Geese probably means police here, but since when do translators get context?
Without that, the rest looks like a pretty typical punching up. "[y]ou're gonna be meat sauce after this" is a heckuva image, but there's a connecting line between that and Geese saying he'll have to get serious. It's a punching up to be sure, but it's not out of line considering where we've gone with Geese in this game series.
I wonder if the editor took extra care with all of Geese's lines. It would make sense.
Win Quotes
vs Terry
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| Woo-hoo! I can brag I beat Terry! This's great! | Wow,I beat Terry. Now I can really brag! |
...yep.
The English makes Hon Fu sound a little more surprised he beat Terry than the Japanese does. That's all I got.
vs Andy/Franco/Billy/Hon Fu/Chonrei
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| Whaaat, everyone's so weak. I beat 'em all without trying! | Nothing but weaklings. I just could win it all! |
Yep, Hon Fu doesn't get a unique line against himself, just like Billy. You can kind of tell who the Japanese devs thought were important and they didn't.
"I just could win it all!" sounds just slightly off, to where I can't tell if it's on purpose or sloppy editing. It could be either. I'm really not sure.
Overall, though, you get about the same effect in English as Japanese.
vs Joe/Bob/Sokaku/Chonshu/Duck King
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| Yer pretty good! | Hey,not bad,pardner. |
This is where it starts feeling like SNK wanted to give Hon Fu a unique voice too. They went with something a bit more cowpoke than I did, but I can see how you could get "country boy" out of Hon Fu's Japanese dialogue - it's got some similarities to Hokutomaru's over in Garou, and he's definitely supposed to be a bumpkin.
So even if it doesn't quite fit in with a cop from one of the most urban cities in the world, they were trying, and it's a reasonable assumption from the Japanese in isolation. It suggests that the translator or the editor noticed the lines had an unusual voice and did their best without being sure who they were translating/editing for. Taking that into account, it's respectable.
vs Mai/Mary
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| Yer jes a girl, but ya did pretty well! | Not bad for a philly. How'bout lunch sometime. |
On one hand, "philly" is an absolutely atrocious attempt at "filly" (a young female horse, also occasionally slang for a girl), on the other it backs up my guess that SNK was trying to give Hon Fu a bit of a country/cowboy voice. "Philly" more usually means something relating to the American city of Philadelphia, so possibly that's the source of confusion.
Hon Fu hitting on Mai/Mary is added in the English translation.
vs Yamazaki
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| Shaddup and come along quietly, ya bastard! | Now you jest go home,kid. |
Okay so. Hyper literally, this is "[(dialect) you bastard],[just like that][obediently][do it]!" The point here is that Hon Fu isn't specifying what Yamazaki should be doing, just that he do it quietly/obediently. Given that he's a cop trying to bag Yamazaki for various crimes, it's a reasonable assumption that he's putting Yamazaki away, like in Hon Fu's FF3 ending. But without context it's hard to tell what's going on, so the official translator just kind of guessed at "go home" (of course, that's my guess...). After that it's just misreading or guessing at what キサン/kisan means. (pretty sure it's a dialect version of kisama, which is a rude way of saying you)
It's probably Hon Fu's most changed line, but it's not just made up. At least, I don't think it is.
vs Kim
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| Yahoo! I can't believe I beat Kim! | Whew. Glad I got rid of that Kim dude! |
Kishi got this one!
Wow, Hon Fu. Rude.
The only explanation I can think of for this is that the translator, going quickly, got as confused as I did, saw something about "Kim", "lose", and "happy", and made some assumptions. It does feel a little cheap to blame it all on translator confusion, but I'm not seeing a better explanation.
vs Geese
| My translation | Official translation |
|---|---|
| Whew! That guy Geese is one tough dude! I'm beat. | Whooee! That Geese was one tough hombre. Whew! |
This is...pretty much the same.
I wrestled a bit with what Hon Fu would call Geese. Honestly, "one tough hombre" is really good, even if again, very cowboy.