about a week ago i decided to translate japanese deltarune because i was curious and bored. i found a lot of stuff that i haven’t heard anyone talk about before!
i only translated chapter 2 because i got to the cliffs and remembered that watching/playing chapter 1 over and over again is really boring to me. might do it when/if i finish writing the post.
uhhh a few warnings. i’m not fluent in japanese whatsoever (i’m like n4 level? i think?), and i might not explain this very well to people who don’t know anything about the language. if you’re confused about anything i say, just ask and i’ll explain it in better detail.
i got all of the gameplay from tsuwahasu’s playthroughs of chapter 2 (pacifist and weird route), so all of the screenshots will be from his vods. i picked his vod to watch somewhat randomly so i was very surprised when he not only got all the easter eggs/secrets on a blind playthrough besides the egg room, but also beat spamton neo in one try, god damn
also i’m not the first person to look at the jp version of deltarune. please look at these posts/videos if you want to see stuff that’s already known in better detail:
skellfamily (light/dark world writing, characters’ pronouns and speech patterns) | suzyundertale (ch2 character names, some jokes) suzyundertale again (the gonermaker sequence) | duxarcana and halfbreadchaos (character in the code) | kazarinn (comments from the translators)
reblogs highly appreciated—this took a ton of time!!!
NOW.
LET US BEGIN.
first things first. the gonermaker sequence is one of the most well-known differences in the japanese language among lore fanatics like myself.
in japanese, the first character speaking to you (gaster/Geoff) speaks in kanji (normal) and katakana instead of hiragana (not normal, incredibly strange sounding). the character who hijacks the gonermaker at the end speaks differently, with kanji and hiragana (normal). as suzyundertale mentions in their post, the patterns are extremely similar to a certain fallen child from the end of the undertale genocide route.
another well-known lore Thing in the japanese version is that the hidden “scrapped” lines (AKA the person trapped in the code) use very feminine and childlike speaking mannerisms. this makes it very likely that the person is dess holiday
i’m not going to be going over much personal pronoun stuff, because other people have already covered most of that, though i haven’t seen one thing mentioned by anyone else:
seam uses the pronoun “atashi” (あたし), which is normally a very girly pronoun but in this case it’s meant to make them seem old and wise, since it was a more common pronoun in olden times. their other mannerisms are gender neutral and not feminine, but their name is localized to “nui” (ヌイ)— the word for “seam” in japanese, as well as an actual feminine given name.
does the use of “atashi” combined with having a fem name confirm that they are female? i’m 95% sure the answer is no. do those two things lead native japanese speakers to believe that they are female? i have no idea.
light and dark world
skellfamily mentioned all of this in the post i linked, but i have something small to add
undertale uses mainly hiragana in its text for the japanese version, with some small exceptions for when the fourth wall is broken. this is referencing earthbound, which also did this. this carries over to the light world of deltarune, but kanji is used liberally in the dark world. this is explained by toby fox wanting the light world to make the player think deltarune would be like undertale.
that’s all
small jokes and stuff in the localization
the “librarby” misspelling joke carries over, with it being named “toshonka” (the japanese word for library is “toshokan”).
the AGREE2ALL puzzle was changed to say “YEEES20!!”. this can be read as “yes ni maru” (with the number 2 being read as “ni” in jp and “maru” being the word for a circle), meaning “yes to all” just like in english!
the “apple” keyboard puzzle still says “apple” though ralsei mentions that apple means “ringo” (the japanese word for apple) if you talk to him for a hint.
funnily enough, this joke was kept as is! (“kris, type as i say. f…” “…un!”)
the tasque’s battle lines in english are binary codes, with “me” being 0 and “ow” being 1. this is similar in jp. “nyan” is the equivalent of “meow” in that language, so “ny”=0 and “an”=1. cute!
the “bosom” joke is about the same, if anyone was curious
“breasts / annihilation”
“b…breast?”
“it means tity”
probably my favorite joke in the entire japanese version: in english, before the berdly fight on the roller coaster, he incorrectly refers to lightners as “Light Nerds” . in japanese this is changed to make him use ateji (a combination of kanji that doesn’t mean anything but sounds like an already existing word with their combined readings), calling the lightners 雷斗奈悪 (raitonaa, phonetically similar to the transliteration raitonā which the translation uses). it has the exact same effect (of berdly trying to sound smart but actually being very incorrect), but it’s localized in an outstanding way
“you are filled with the power of not knowing what sugarplums are” is changed to “you are filled with the power of not knowing what christmas pudding is”.
when berdly incorrectly calls susie “susan”, she says “who’s susan?” instead of “my name isn’t susan”. japanese people likely don’t know that “susie” is usually short for “susan”, so it makes sense for her to be even more confused in this version.
the spelling contest in berdly’s flashback is still an english spelling contest, with berdly specifying that it’s english.
instead of saying “susie… a real dragon blazers reference?!” when susie references dragon blazers 2, berdly says, “susie… you’re… a serious dragon blazers player…?!”
on that topic, dragon blazers is instead called dragon blader in japanese. was it called that the whole time? am i misremembering? i legitimately don’t know
the ice-e keysmash puzzle is changed so that you can type it out in japanese as すふぎおろてにぺけなも. it still does not mean anything.
right after susie referenced godzilla with the susiezilla line on the ferris wheel, she references ANOTHER tokusatsu. i think. here (while about to fall on ralsei) she says “ore, sanjou!!!!” (i arrive!), which is a famous catchphrase from kamen rider den-o. i’m like 85% sure it was an intentional reference. den-o is one of my favorite rider shows so this is amazing to me
and lastly. the name of minecrap is changed to マインクシャット (mainkushatto), which seems to be a play on some word plus “minecraft” like in english. i’m not sure what the wordplay is. i’ll get back to you on this
lore-y important stuff
about dess
in japanese, the december typing puzzle still spells out “december” in english.
noelle refers to dess as “onee-chan” (older sis)— it’s common for japanese people to refer to their older siblings like this, and it would be extremely weird if noelle called her “dess”. she could have called her “dess-neechan” or some variation of that, but i highly doubt that the name “dess” is being obscured, especially because “dess” transliterated would sound extremely close, if not alike to “desu” as well as the transliteration of “death”.
the knight
(i took the screenshot and forgot to turn auto captions off, sorry)
this line from a swatchling says something like “it captures the moment where the ‘knight’ creates a ‘fountain’ themself, with their own hands”, but the word for “themself” (みずから/mizukara) is written in hiragana, and “mizukara” could also technically be read as “from water”. was this a deliberate water-darkness parallel? i have no idea.
speaking of water!
the roaring knight is referred to as “咆哮の騎士” (houkou no kishi), the knight of the roaring. the word for the roaring itself, 咆哮, means roar or scream. which eliminates the alternate meaning of roaring (also being possibly defined as the sound of rushing water), but that probably doesn’t solidify “roaring” as solely meaning that. there are a lot of terms in undertale that had multiple meanings, but had to be changed to have only one in the japanese localization. “roaring” might be similar to those instances.
angel
spamton calls noelle an angel just like in english, referring to her as “angel-chan”. if there’s somehow anyone out there that didn’t think that line was important, i am here to prove you wrong!!!
more interesting:
this is the line where noelle says that if this was a dream, she would grow wings and fly away— but in this version, she says “big angel wings” specifically. very interesting!
the two (2) other notable changes in weird route
the infamous “you whispered noelle’s name…” line is slightly different. slightly.
the “kris called for help” lines still say that kris is the one doing it, but this one does not say the subject at all. this is normal for japanese, regardless, it’s still very interesting that it doesn’t say “you”. it is still differentiated from the “kris” lines, but not specifically referring to you (the player).
the other difference is so minor that i’m not even sure what it is or if it’s different from the english version.
translation
EVEN IF YOU [Shout] AT THE [Receiver]
YOUR [Voice] WILL EVENTUALLY WITHER
YOUR [Voice]
THEIR [Voice]
AND YOU WILL realize you’re alone.
i do not know who “THEY” is that spamton’s referring to. the term he uses is gender-neutral and singular. is he talking about the player? idfk probably not
miscellaneous spamton-related stuff
spamton’s speech patterns are entirely different in the japanese translation, but they get the same message across. they include:
switching between formal and informal language
using weird mixtures of hiragana, katakana, english letters and kanji
using katakana re (レ) instead of hiragana shi (し)
cutting off words
random spacing
and occasionally using “die” and “death” as homophones for “dai” and “desu”
it’s so wacky and unnerving and strange, i love it :D
other spamton lore bits:
mike’s name is the same (マイク maiku). i somehow forgot to translate the mike-related dialogue. i will get back to you all if there’s anything of note.
the word for “garbage noise” is 雑音, with about the same meaning. unsurprisingly, the same word (the exact same phrase, in fact) is used for both the addison’s line and the gaster phone call line.
the last thing (i think)
in the roaring cutscene, the japanese word for “chaos” is said (in the “all will be plunged into chaos” line), but then says the transliterated version of the word (カオス) in parentheses. tsuwahasu noted that it’s “keyword-like” in the playthrough i watched. is this important? i have no idea
i’m sure there are things that i missed here, so (again) if you want to know about something, don’t be afraid to ask!! the jp version of deltarune should be looked at a lot more—not just for the lesser-known lore tidbits, but also for the cool stuff that was changed to fit the language. it’s a really cool localization!
I've been playing through Japanese Deltarune as well, and there are actually a BUNCH of interesting things I wanted to point out.
For instance, Chapter 3 (which I'm playing through right now).
Tenna not only replaces the "しょう" endings with "SHOW", but he also separately refers to each of the Fun Gang with an interesting suffix... At one point, he refers to Kris as "クリスちゃ～ん" (before the Rock Concert). He also uses this suffix for Ralsei before his breakdown (when he introduces the Third Board), as well as using it for Susie when the gang confront him backstage. What's interesting about this is the situations these suffixes are used for, typically being used for *girls*, young children, close friends, or lovers. Now, this doesn't outright confirm Galsei or AFAB Kris (though I'm choosing to believe it lol), but it's just something interesting to point out, especially since Tenna uses it extremely sparingly and mostly refers to them by name (or not at all for Ralsei), and for a majority of the game ONLY refers to them by name. The only character Tenna consistently seems to use suffixes for is Mike. Interestingly again, both of these suffixes (-chan and -kun) are not only (typically) gendered, but also are used when referring to someone the speaker has some sort of seniority over. For instance, one would use "-kun" when speaking to their younger coworker, or use "-chan" when talking to your friend's child. In short, Tenna is really fucking old lmao.
(Also something to point out: Kris [and Tenna by extension] refer to Asriel as "おにいちゃん [in Kris's case] or お兄ちゃん [Tenna, and I think Alvin?]. While this is sort of a feminine connotation, I think it's mostly just showing how close Kris was to Asriel. One thing that I will say is that Kris only ever uses the hiragana variant, which kind of gives a childish connotation to them. They also use mostly hiragana in their dialogue too.)
about a week ago i decided to translate japanese deltarune because i was curious and bored. i found a lot of stuff that i haven’t heard anyone talk about before!
i only translated chapter 2 because i got to the cliffs and remembered that watching/playing chapter 1 over and over again is really boring to me. might do it when/if i finish writing the post.
uhhh a few warnings. i’m not fluent in japanese whatsoever (i’m like n4 level? i think?), and i might not explain this very well to people who don’t know anything about the language. if you’re confused about anything i say, just ask and i’ll explain it in better detail.
i got all of the gameplay from tsuwahasu’s playthroughs of chapter 2 (pacifist and weird route), so all of the screenshots will be from his vods. i picked his vod to watch somewhat randomly so i was very surprised when he not only got all the easter eggs/secrets on a blind playthrough besides the egg room, but also beat spamton neo in one try, god damn
also i’m not the first person to look at the jp version of deltarune. please look at these posts/videos if you want to see stuff that’s already known in better detail:
skellfamily (light/dark world writing, characters’ pronouns and speech patterns) | suzyundertale (ch2 character names, some jokes) suzyundertale again (the gonermaker sequence) | duxarcana and halfbreadchaos (character in the code) | kazarinn (comments from the translators)
reblogs highly appreciated—this took a ton of time!!!
NOW.
LET US BEGIN.
first things first. the gonermaker sequence is one of the most well-known differences in the japanese language among lore fanatics like myself.
in japanese, the first character speaking to you (gaster/Geoff) speaks in kanji (normal) and katakana instead of hiragana (not normal, incredibly strange sounding). the character who hijacks the gonermaker at the end speaks differently, with kanji and hiragana (normal). as suzyundertale mentions in their post, the patterns are extremely similar to a certain fallen child from the end of the undertale genocide route.
another well-known lore Thing in the japanese version is that the hidden “scrapped” lines (AKA the person trapped in the code) use very feminine and childlike speaking mannerisms. this makes it very likely that the person is dess holiday
i’m not going to be going over much personal pronoun stuff, because other people have already covered most of that, though i haven’t seen one thing mentioned by anyone else:
seam uses the pronoun “atashi” (あたし), which is normally a very girly pronoun but in this case it’s meant to make them seem old and wise, since it was a more common pronoun in olden times. their other mannerisms are gender neutral and not feminine, but their name is localized to “nui” (ヌイ)— the word for “seam” in japanese, as well as an actual feminine given name.
does the use of “atashi” combined with having a fem name confirm that they are female? i’m 95% sure the answer is no. do those two things lead native japanese speakers to believe that they are female? i have no idea.
light and dark world
skellfamily mentioned all of this in the post i linked, but i have something small to add
undertale uses mainly hiragana in its text for the japanese version, with some small exceptions for when the fourth wall is broken. this is referencing earthbound, which also did this. this carries over to the light world of deltarune, but kanji is used liberally in the dark world. this is explained by toby fox wanting the light world to make the player think deltarune would be like undertale.
that’s all
small jokes and stuff in the localization
the “librarby” misspelling joke carries over, with it being named “toshonka” (the japanese word for library is “toshokan”).
the AGREE2ALL puzzle was changed to say “YEEES20!!”. this can be read as “yes ni maru” (with the number 2 being read as “ni” in jp and “maru” being the word for a circle), meaning “yes to all” just like in english!
the “apple” keyboard puzzle still says “apple” though ralsei mentions that apple means “ringo” (the japanese word for apple) if you talk to him for a hint.
funnily enough, this joke was kept as is! (“kris, type as i say. f…” “…un!”)
the tasque’s battle lines in english are binary codes, with “me” being 0 and “ow” being 1. this is similar in jp. “nyan” is the equivalent of “meow” in that language, so “ny”=0 and “an”=1. cute!
the “bosom” joke is about the same, if anyone was curious
“breasts / annihilation”
“b…breast?”
“it means tity”
probably my favorite joke in the entire japanese version: in english, before the berdly fight on the roller coaster, he incorrectly refers to lightners as “Light Nerds” . in japanese this is changed to make him use ateji (a combination of kanji that doesn’t mean anything but sounds like an already existing word with their combined readings), calling the lightners 雷斗奈悪 (raitonaa, phonetically similar to the transliteration raitonā which the translation uses). it has the exact same effect (of berdly trying to sound smart but actually being very incorrect), but it’s localized in an outstanding way
“you are filled with the power of not knowing what sugarplums are” is changed to “you are filled with the power of not knowing what christmas pudding is”.
when berdly incorrectly calls susie “susan”, she says “who’s susan?” instead of “my name isn’t susan”. japanese people likely don’t know that “susie” is usually short for “susan”, so it makes sense for her to be even more confused in this version.
the spelling contest in berdly’s flashback is still an english spelling contest, with berdly specifying that it’s english.
instead of saying “susie… a real dragon blazers reference?!” when susie references dragon blazers 2, berdly says, “susie… you’re… a serious dragon blazers player…?!”
on that topic, dragon blazers is instead called dragon blader in japanese. was it called that the whole time? am i misremembering? i legitimately don’t know
the ice-e keysmash puzzle is changed so that you can type it out in japanese as すふぎおろてにぺけなも. it still does not mean anything.
right after susie referenced godzilla with the susiezilla line on the ferris wheel, she references ANOTHER tokusatsu. i think. here (while about to fall on ralsei) she says “ore, sanjou!!!!” (i arrive!), which is a famous catchphrase from kamen rider den-o. i’m like 85% sure it was an intentional reference. den-o is one of my favorite rider shows so this is amazing to me
and lastly. the name of minecrap is changed to マインクシャット (mainkushatto), which seems to be a play on some word plus “minecraft” like in english. i’m not sure what the wordplay is. i’ll get back to you on this
lore-y important stuff
about dess
in japanese, the december typing puzzle still spells out “december” in english.
noelle refers to dess as “onee-chan” (older sis)— it’s common for japanese people to refer to their older siblings like this, and it would be extremely weird if noelle called her “dess”. she could have called her “dess-neechan” or some variation of that, but i highly doubt that the name “dess” is being obscured, especially because “dess” transliterated would sound extremely close, if not alike to “desu” as well as the transliteration of “death”.
the knight
(i took the screenshot and forgot to turn auto captions off, sorry)
this line from a swatchling says something like “it captures the moment where the ‘knight’ creates a ‘fountain’ themself, with their own hands”, but the word for “themself” (みずから/mizukara) is written in hiragana, and “mizukara” could also technically be read as “from water”. was this a deliberate water-darkness parallel? i have no idea.
speaking of water!
the roaring knight is referred to as “咆哮の騎士” (houkou no kishi), the knight of the roaring. the word for the roaring itself, 咆哮, means roar or scream. which eliminates the alternate meaning of roaring (also being possibly defined as the sound of rushing water), but that probably doesn’t solidify “roaring” as solely meaning that. there are a lot of terms in undertale that had multiple meanings, but had to be changed to have only one in the japanese localization. “roaring” might be similar to those instances.
angel
spamton calls noelle an angel just like in english, referring to her as “angel-chan”. if there’s somehow anyone out there that didn’t think that line was important, i am here to prove you wrong!!!
more interesting:
this is the line where noelle says that if this was a dream, she would grow wings and fly away— but in this version, she says “big angel wings” specifically. very interesting!
the two (2) other notable changes in weird route
the infamous “you whispered noelle’s name…” line is slightly different. slightly.
the “kris called for help” lines still say that kris is the one doing it, but this one does not say the subject at all. this is normal for japanese, regardless, it’s still very interesting that it doesn’t say “you”. it is still differentiated from the “kris” lines, but not specifically referring to you (the player).
the other difference is so minor that i’m not even sure what it is or if it’s different from the english version.
translation
EVEN IF YOU [Shout] AT THE [Receiver]
YOUR [Voice] WILL EVENTUALLY WITHER
YOUR [Voice]
THEIR [Voice]
AND YOU WILL realize you’re alone.
i do not know who “THEY” is that spamton’s referring to. the term he uses is gender-neutral and singular. is he talking about the player? idfk probably not
miscellaneous spamton-related stuff
spamton’s speech patterns are entirely different in the japanese translation, but they get the same message across. they include:
switching between formal and informal language
using weird mixtures of hiragana, katakana, english letters and kanji
using katakana re (レ) instead of hiragana shi (し)
cutting off words
random spacing
and occasionally using “die” and “death” as homophones for “dai” and “desu”
it’s so wacky and unnerving and strange, i love it :D
other spamton lore bits:
mike’s name is the same (マイク maiku). i somehow forgot to translate the mike-related dialogue. i will get back to you all if there’s anything of note.
the word for “garbage noise” is 雑音, with about the same meaning. unsurprisingly, the same word (the exact same phrase, in fact) is used for both the addison’s line and the gaster phone call line.
the last thing (i think)
in the roaring cutscene, the japanese word for “chaos” is said (in the “all will be plunged into chaos” line), but then says the transliterated version of the word (カオス) in parentheses. tsuwahasu noted that it’s “keyword-like” in the playthrough i watched. is this important? i have no idea
i’m sure there are things that i missed here, so (again) if you want to know about something, don’t be afraid to ask!! the jp version of deltarune should be looked at a lot more—not just for the lesser-known lore tidbits, but also for the cool stuff that was changed to fit the language. it’s a really cool localization!
webseries that starts as an object show in the first few episodes to introduce the character personalities and world building and whatnot just for the omnipotent host to turn them all into humans mid season
after theyre done freaking out over breathing from one spot and having their faces disconnected from their torsos the host transports them all to normal earth and the challenge for the rest of the show is to blend in as much as possible
so then it's like one person is eliminated each episode if they did the worst in trying to blend in like they go to jail for murdering someone or like maybe one of them starts to have a cult following for spouting nonsense
normal mcgee at the end of the season wins the prize of hmmm invading earth with sentient objects. or maybe its like batch 2 from hfjone and so when they become president they announce that all objects are living and should have rights. its like a bee movie situation
“And if you’ll give me 40% of the MOST POPULAR VOTE, I’ll give you my SPECIAL REWARD... A year’s supply of NON-GLOOBY SLIME!!! Never or BARELY used!!!” Tenna concluded his speech with a huge smile, jetting his hands up in double peace signs.
The crowd roared in confused enthusiasm as Tenna gave a gracious flurry of low-FPS bows, pausing only for the occasional stink-nose at his audience plants who weren’t throwing enough 3D roses.
Eventually, the room fell silent. It was Senshi’s turn to speak.
He puffed out his chest, took a long, sweeping look over the audience… and shook his head.
“I can see not all of you are eating properly.”
The crowd murmured with embarrassment.
“I don’t know who needs to hear this, but it’s time to take the turkey out of your icebox. I have seen the ingenious technology with which your people store food... and I have also seen the waste which results from such convenience.
“The food you take had a life. Beasts grew fat on the grass of the field, plants grew from the sun’s rays, and mushrooms grew from minerals in the cracks of caves. And yet, it sits in your iceboxes, collecting moisture until it perishes.
“Eat what is given to you. Because its life will make you stronger, too.”
Without another word, Senshi left his podium and stepped away from the stage. The crowd murmured in confusion. “Is he really like that?” somebody said. “I only remember reblogging the photosets of him tripping and showing ass.”
--
Back in the Green Room, Tenna wrung his antennas nervously.
“Y-y-you think they liked me!? They HAD to!! I mean, I don’t know what Asgore was thinking, getting that weird haircut and running that food waste campaign, but… YOU thought I did good, didn’t you, Kris?”
Laios nodded aggressively, a streak of blue face paint peeling from his forehead.
“You did AMAZING, Tenna! By the way, now that we’ve seen all your insider campaign secrets, do you have any more videos of Susie? Especially her tail... If I could get a look at that, I could finally tell if she’s a dinosaur or --”
THWACK. Fake antlers butted Laios’s head.
“LAIOS?? Weren’t we dressed up to help SENSHI???” Marcille hissed, gesturing awkwardly with her hooves.
Suddenly, Tenna turned to the two adventurers.
“Hey, WAIT a second. SOMETHING’s not right here...”
Laios and Marcille held their breath.
“Where the heck are my POINTS!?”
Just then, the door opened. Chilchuck took one step into the room, whistling and holding a large bag.
Everyone turned to him.
Chilchuck paused, took a step backwards, and closed the door.
“CHILCHUCK!!!” yelled Tenna.
“How come Chilchuck got to stay Chilchuck!?” yelled Marcille at the same time.
--
Meanwhile, in outer space somewhere, some guy was making out with a rock.
