User talk:Bakeneko

Adding shadows to images
Hello, Bakeneko! First of all, thank you for your contributions to the wiki! They are very much appreciated. The recent images you uploaded are all fine, however, could you remove the drop shadow? (specifically, these two images: Zeldatmc.png and Link-MM.png) We like to keep the image as it was originally released by Nintendo, so I'm afraid the shadows don't quite just fit! Thank you, and we hope you stick around! :) --Dany36 13:05, 30 January 2012 (EST)

Images
Hey there,

Just wanted to congratulate you on all your awesome image contributions lately. Can't want to see more from you :) 08:41, 12 February 2012 (EST)


 * Thanks. Glad, I can help out and make some contributions to this awesome site. However, since I mostly deal in images I probalby won't be able to make that much contributions like before. I've already checked all the Character and Enemy sections of the games and most images are already fine. Those left which are in need of background removal have either low quality or are inappropriate for effective background removal. Unfortunately, I do not own a capturing device otherwise I could get new images myself. Bakeneko 15:19, 13 February 2012 (EST)


 * I'll have to join in HK on this one here... All I can say is, WOW!! Those transparency removals on the SSB trophies are incredible, and pretty much all the other images you've uploaded with background transparency are awesome as well. Keep up the awesome work!! --Dany36 00:57, 22 February 2012 (EST)


 * Thanks. Glad you like it. Bakeneko 03:38, 22 February 2012 (EST)

Zelda II Dungeon names added!
I took them from the Futashiba guide, which can be found on Zelda Legends, if you're curious. The names seem to match up almost identically with the English ones so I gave them priority. Do you know where the names already there were from? I'm assuming they're from the game text due to them being in katakana and being a bit shorter. Interesting that the Island Palace is on "Island of Gods" or "God Island" (I wasn't sure which is most accurate). Obviously they left that out when translating...

I'm starting to see why people don't like kanji since the translations of them varies, but I think having both is the best way to go.

If there is anything else you're curious about just feel free to ask. 13:03, 14 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Awesome, Thanks! I was looking for that guide but was unable to find it. The katakana names are from the game. I can only assume that they probably made the in-game names shorter due to technical restrictions. The text window had no option to scroll through text, maybe that is the reason. The name for the third temple is completely off, however. Another thing I find interesting is that the guide lists the correct spelling for Mittsume Iwa while the game uses Mitsume Iwa. I initially wondered about that while I was playing it. I have to make some corrections to the stuff you've added, though.


 * As for the varying names in-game, in the manuals and in the guides, I think this is mostly a problem of the older games. I'm still unsure on how to deal with that. Listing both in-game and manual/guides texts works on the Translation pages but on the regular pages in the Names template this will look overloaded. Anyways, thanks for the help. :) Bakeneko 08:47, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

I have to say...
I rather like the romanji and I think it's a vital tool in understanding Japanese if you don't already, so I undid your edit. I know it must of been a pain in the ass to do, but I really think that it looks better the other way. The translations we put are NOT official and are in some cases guesswork and can be highly variable due to the nature of the Japanese language, thus we give them lower priority than the romanji, which is fixed. That's the logic behind it.

Also, the thought of editing all the other pages to fit that style makes my head hurt. 15:19, 17 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I don't really see why. The Romaji is useless to everyone but people who want to learn Japanese as a foreign language. People who know Japanese don't need it to read kanjis and kana. People who don't care about Japanese won't care about Romaji, however, they may be interested in the translations to see how it differs from the official NoA ones. I think it goes without saying that the translations we provide are not official as the NoA translations are listed right next to them. Furthermore, most of our Japanese translations are spot on from what I've seen and pretty much every translation from one language to another takes a bit of guesswork, although I know what you are trying to say. The Romaji isn't fixed either. It can vary on many occasions. Here's a quick example out of my head: 　 and I could list more. Here's another one since Hylian King asked for it on another page and I will edit this page next. Check the different readings for that. There are kanjis out there with more than 20 different readings - One and the same character but more than 20 ways to spell it.


 * And don't worry. It wasn't that much work. Just around 5 minutes of copy & paste work on that page and I'm willing to do that for the other pages if necessary. The other pages would take a bit longer of course. As time goes by, I intend to work through those pages anyways depending on which Zelda games I will be able to play in Japanese. I think there are many good reasons to go for this change since the Romaji is less important to most people. Bakeneko 06:56, 18 December 2012 (UTC)


 * I personally like the Romaji because it's an understandable form of the language for people such as myself who are not familiar with kana and especially kanji. But yeah, I guess most people probably don't care. If we were going to change the standard, I'd say we should go for format 3 if anything. First of all, it saves on space, which is good for Template:Names, and second of all, it would make our translations pages more uniform; right now, the way we display the Japanese names and their translations is inconsistent with how we handle the other languages. 12:32, 18 December 2012 (UTC)


 * I don't think we should assume that "most people probably don't care". That's just nonsense, I'm not sure where this idea is from, it's a bizarre and it's just not true for any fandom I've ever come across. Romanji, for most people, is the only understandable form of the language they EVER see. The Japanese text itself means nothing to them, but romanji is at least READABLE and pronounceable. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to really argue this point. Virtually every fandom that cares about the Japanese side of their franchise is knowledgeable about romanji more than anything else. Terms like "kaitengiri" (Spin Attack) are virtually only understandable as romanji because it can be translated in a number of ways. The Street Fighter fanbase for example knows half of the moves in the game by their Japanese names, and uses romanji to discuss them (Hadouken, anyone?).
 * Romanji shows a non-native speaker how to pronounce the Japanese. It's VITAL for a layman to understand it. Bakaneko, you are more knowledgeable than most people and I feel like this might be clouding your judgement. Romanji should NOT be dismissed and I think it's crazy to be acting like it's unimportant. 13:20, 18 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Ok, let's not assume that most people don't care about Romaji. I suppose most die-hard Zelda fans who have been around in the theory forums, probably know what a Daimaō is or what Kaitengiri means, but isn't it just as wrong to assume that every reader who is visiting this Wiki knows those Japanese terms?


 * I can understand that some terms are more common and known by people, but what about all the regular Japanese terms that have no special meaning and which clearly represent the bigger part of the translations?


 * When a non-Japanese speaker sees something like then the Romaji will mean nothing to them. The only thing they will probably recognize is Gōma. It definitely makes it readable and pronounceable for them, but in no way understandable unless they know the Japanese pronunciation which is highly unlikely the more generic the term is, but at the same time makes it more likely that the reader can actually read Japanese. Not to mention that Kōkaku for example, can mean different things. Only the Kanji and thus the Japanese characters make the meaning clear. The reason why the non-Japanese fanbase uses those terms on some occasions is because they are short and have a clear meaning because there are no words for it in the English language. To be honest, I think, sometimes it's just out of nerdiness or to show how much immersed someone is into the universe. However,only people who already know the translation for this term will profit of this and the reason why they write it in Romaji is simply because most of those people can't read Japanese or don't bother typing it in Japanese because it requires you to install a Japanese IME. And I never said we should dismiss the Romaji. It is still there and people can hover over the Japanese text to read it. I'm just trying to point out that the Romaji is less important and thus the translations should be more accessible by not having to hover over the Romaji.


 * @Hylian King. I agree that the '|3' format would make the pages look more clean but it also makes information less accessible for people.


 * @Fizzle: It's . Bakaneko could mean 'stupid cat'. I'm gonna assume that is a typo, which I find pretty amusing ;) Bakeneko 06:31, 19 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Let me explain my position further, because I kind of just ranted a bit last time. I have some issues with the idea beyond simply hiding the romanji, which I obviously don't like.


 * Firstly, most things in the Zelda universe have pretty accurate official translations. It's very rare for the NoA translation to be entirely off-base. Therefore a lot of the translations you're suggesting should take priority are redundant, and will simply just repeat what the viewer already knows. This is more and more true of the newer games, and will essentially mean you're hiding the unique part of the translation in favor of repeating information, which just seems like a waste.


 * Secondly, our translations are not perfect. Many things in Japanese have multiple meanings and can be translated in multiple ways, and we can't say which one is more accurate. Is it Demon King, or Devil King? Is it Spin Attack, Spin Cut, Whirlwind Attack? We can't always say, and the translators of the games sometimes change their mind every five minutes too, but we do know that it is always "Daimaō". Knowing that Ganon's title is Daimaō across numerous sources where he is otherwise known as a Demon King, a King of Evil, a Dark Lord or Prince of Darkness is much more useful to the reader, because it shows that it is actually just one title in Japan in most games. Coming to a consensus on which translation is more "accurate" across multiple pages sounds like an absolute nightmare to me, thus lowering their visibility makes this less of an issue, and we can just focus on a game-by-game basis and let the romanji, which as I mentioned before is largely set in stone, do the talking.


 * Thirdly, a lot of Japanese names are completely meaningless anyway. Dodongo is what it is. It doesn't mean anything else. The vast majority of enemy and character names are like this, which often cover over half of most translation pages on their own. I know what you did didn't really change this, but it does cause the pages to be inconsistent, with romanji for half of the page and direct translations for the rest. It also kind of implies that some of the Japanese names were literally in English, which could easily confuse a layman viewer.


 * Finally, mouse-over text has an issue of being invisible on mobile devices. This is obviously a problem for BOTH methods right now, so ideally we'd want a solution that doesn't hide anything, however, doing that elegantly is difficult. I think this would need a larger scale discussion too, as it feels wrong to go through any change like this without discussing it with someone like Pakkun, who has done a lot of work on translations on the wiki.
 * And yes, that was a typo, sorry! It wasn't some snide joke, haha. I think you're a very good editor, so I hope you don't take any of this personally. I just do genuinely have reasons behind being against this, at least for the moment. I'd really urge towards fixing up our translation pages a bit further before we do any big overhaul of this nature, too. I'd like to get to a point where the work-in-progress templates do not need to be there anymore. I think something like this could just confuse things at the moment. 13:23, 19 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Regarding the hover-over issue: What if clicking the text revealed the hidden stuff, kinda like Template:Hide, but more streamlined. Would that change anything? 14:41, 19 December 2012 (UTC)


 * That would be cool. The hover-over doesn't work on my Xbox browser, but I've tested the show/hide and it works on here. It also works on the 3DS browser, so I'm assuming it works on most mobile devices, as well. 16:08, 19 December 2012 (UTC)


 * It's true that the NoA translations change from time to time while the Japanese Romaji does not. You have a point there. However, we are still talking about a minor part of Japanese terms where keeping the Romaji would turn out to be beneficial. It's also true that alot of Enemie Names are the same in both Japanese and English and there would be no benefit to list it twice, so our two arguments pretty much nullify themselves in my opinion. We could always agree on an uniform translation for Daimaō and other terms and I don't think that this would be a very difficult task. I can only speak for myself and even I, with my knowledge of Japanese which exceeds that of the average reader, find the Romaji to be useless for understanding the meaning in probably more than 95%, whenever I don't know how it translates into English. When I have to guess the meaning of a Japanese term consisting of more characters, then the Kanji turn out to be the most helpful because I know the meaning for most of the regular Kanji characters. With that said, I can't understand how the Romaji would be more useful to the average reader than the direct translation, with the exception of such unique terms like Daimaō. So I'm still not convinced but I'm affraid, I have nothing more to add to the conversation as well.


 * I agree, that fixing up the translation pages in general has a higher priority, so maybe we should reconsider this later with more participants sharing their opinion. For now, I'm going to revert my edits regarding this matter since there seems to be no agreement.


 * @Abdullah: Depends on how it would look. I personally, don't think we need a drastic change like that. Sure, it's doesn't show properly on all devices but overall the hovering is an elegant solution. I just figured that the translation should be what is listed directly next to the Japanese because I think it is of much more interest. Like when you look at ALttP translations and you immediately see that Agahnim is a Priest in the Original and a Wizard in the NoA translation. Bakeneko 08:00, 20 December 2012 (UTC)