As you can see this is the 2 title screens from US and Japanese versions of the game Battle of Olympus. The Japanese version is called Olympus no Tatakai in romaji. ƒIƒŠƒ…ƒ\ƒ|ƒX ‚Ì ?í‚¢ , In full romaji this title screen is orixyusoposu no seni. orixyusoposu is Olympus is Japanese. Notice that Katakana is used for this name, also it's rather confusing. Lets break it down some. o is o and so that's clarified. ri is " L" in this case since the L constinent is not used in the Japanese language. With XYU some common sence must be used. In this case XYU will be Y. So far you have Oly, and so we go on. SO used for the M sound and I dont know why since something else could be used for that possibly. I could be wrong on this. Next is PO that is used for the pu sound. And last but not least and you will see this quite often. For the S sound SU will be used in Japanese. So you have orixyusoposu and is broken down to oriysoposu. And translated to Olympus in English. So oriysoposu = Olympus. So the first word has been translated.

  The next word in the title is ‚Ì or NO in romaji. This is not actually a word. It's a particle. A particle is what structures a sentence in japanese. In this case NO would indicate possesion. You could also substitute the particle for OF in some cases. And in this case it makes sence to use it in such a way.

  And the last word in the title is broken down to it's shortest form in the japanese langauge. Kanji is used for part of the word battle. ?í‚¢ or seni is as follows. ?í is sen. I is used at the end of the word. sen itself means war,battle,match by itself. If you break the word down into hiragana you have ‚½‚½‚©‚¢ or tatakai which means the same thing and that's battle.

So you almost have the translation. And that's Olympus of battle, however this doesn't make sence. So you change it arround some to Battle of Olympus, The , and there you have the final translation.

And now that you have title translation skills, lets try and tackle some of the dialog.

Here is the dialog in it's japanese form.

(name here)‚Þ‚©‚µ‚æ‚è
‚±‚Ì ?uƒMƒŠƒVƒƒ?v‚Í ‚©‚Ý‚ª‚Ý‚Ì
‚¿‚©‚ç‚É‚æ‚Á‚Ä ‚Ü‚à‚ç‚ê‚Ä‚³‚½?B

And now in it's english form.

(name here), first you must
go to the Temple of
Arcadia to meet Zeus.

  Now we will break down the japanese dialog to romaji, so that we can get somewhat of a feel for it.

(name here) mukashiyori
kono ?u girishixya ?v ha kamigamino
chikaraniyot-te mamoraretesata.

Lets break down some of the words to english if possible.

‚Þ‚©‚µ‚æ‚è (mukashiyori) = no dictionary translation.
‚±‚Ì(kono) = this
?uƒMƒŠƒVƒƒ?v(girishixya) = Greece
‚Í ‚©‚Ý‚ª‚Ý‚Ì(ha kamigamino) = gods
‚¿‚©‚ç‚É‚æ‚Á‚Ä(chikaraniyot-te) = force,strength,energy,might/therefore,consequently,accordingly.because of(2 words with particle NI)
‚Ü‚à‚ç‚ê‚Ä‚³‚½(mamoraretesata) = no dictionary translation.

  This could end up very confusing indeed since some of the words do not translate from some of the dictionaries that I'm using. You could possibly use all kinds of different books and programs and not come up with anything conclusive. This is where you need to get creative or guess, and that could be a problem in interpretation. You dont want to give up so you try something anyways.

‚Þ‚©‚µ‚æ‚è (mukashiyori)
  This is the first word that has not been translated. Lets give it a go. I looked at the main map of Greece before you enter Arcadia, and I see nothing that indicates this word. And nothing tells me what it could be. Also I see nothing familiar about the word. The only thing that clues me in to a possibility is that it's used right after your name. This could be a indication of your taking the action of what could be decribed in the words following.

‚Ü‚à‚ç‚ê‚Ä‚³‚½(mamoraretesata)
  This is the next and last word that doesn't seem to translate for me. And once again I have no clue what this is.

  So now we try and peice it all together and this is the hard part. First of all you should remember that the japanese like to eliminate redundencies, and anything that can be decribed by a picture clearly in this case will be eliminated. You should remember that the first place you enter is Arcadia, the Japanese word on the menu to the right of the overhead map clearly translates properly to Arcadia. However this is not used in the dialog, also note that this is the only place you can enter at this time. That's about the few clues you have at this point.

  My initial translation would be:
(name here),The gods of Greece are
very strong here.

  This is based on the few things that I actually know about this particular dialog. And yes it's far from accurate. However lets look at the professional localization.
(name here), first you must
go to the Temple of
Arcadia to meet Zeus.

  I actually see nothing mentioning Zeus or Arcadia in the Japanese version of the game. I believe that what's being assumed here is that you're already in Arcadia and that your mission is going to move you foward in this level. And so your going to probally meet the gods. And so after that assumption you could even say with the folowing translation.

(name here), You must go see
the gods in Arcadia.

  This would probally be my final translation from just looking at this dialog. And you never know how accurate you really are. However you need to guess sometimes and that's that. If you did manage to review all the dialog in this level you might be able to come to a clear choice about what the translation really is. If you did encounter Zeus at the end of this level then it might be appropiate to use his name in the dialog. However I would be rather judicious about it.

  This was quite interesting to me as I learned something myself about how the game was translated and why and how the English localization came up with the current translation. Also I believe that possibly some more was added to the dialog to give a english feel to it. I will play the rest of the level just to see what's going on. And so this raps up this learning experience for myself.