I like puns, and I like card games. So it’s no surprise that I like puns in card games. While I unfortunately don’t have much time for actually playing card games these days, I do like to pay cursory attention to them, as I find it endlessly fascinating what they do to succeed in the Japanese market. Translation of any game is a difficult task, but things become doubly hard when you involve rules and card types and game text as things need to be consistent across expansions/sets/cards. And then things become harder still when the game involves humor. In a TV show or film you can, in theory, explain a joke, rewrite a joke, or even add a joke to make up for one you deleted. But with smaller space what do you do? With less area for flexibility, explanation, or expansion, when you see a joke that isn’t simple to translate do you just toss it to the wayside?
Well, I’m sure that some games do. But one game that actually spends quite a lot of time making sure that it’s humor transmits across cultures is Hearthstone. I know this because I’ve actually written about Hearthstone’s translation of puns into Japanese before for a formal journal article. But recently I noted that Hearthstone is really leaning onto a specific pun group over the last few years: jokes about imps. So I was curious… does the Japanese localization still bother to keep these going, or have they given up since I last checked? Furthermore, did they bother to maintain the same consistency as English? Imp certainly isn’t a Japanese native word after all, and who knows if the English team was kind enough to say “hey, there’s a bunch of imp puns coming”. Well let’s find out the answers to these questions, starting, of course, by just looking at how Japanese Hearthstone deals with the very concept of imps at all.
Impressionless Imps
Here is one of the first imp cards in Hearthstone: Imp Gang Boss. There’s no pun, it’s just an imp that, I suppose, is the boss of a gang of imps itself. This card appeared quite early on in the game, during an expansion from 2015. But as imps are a card type, they need a consistent name. So what does a Japanese translator do? Use tengu? Just some version of akuma? Well, as you can see below, they decided that “imp” would be transliterated as インプ (inpu) on both the card’s name and in reference to the tokens it spawns. Pretty straightforward so far!
As of the time of writing, there are now a total of seven “imp” cards with no puns available in Hearthstone (including Imp Gang Boss, and across all game modes). On all of them the trend we saw with Imp Gang Boss continues, with the game using just a simple imp to インプ change. As you can also see, there’s no addition of puns here, so the translators aren’t using this space to “make up” for lost puns (imp or otherwise) elsewhere. These translations are therefore perfect… in the sense that the cards aren’t funny in English or Japanese.
Impunning with Impunity
But actually, Imp Gang Boss isn’t the first imp card in Hearthstone. That honor goes to Imp-losion (see below). As you can tell by the title, this card not only has a pun but, unlike most imp puns that follow it, specifically tells you “HEY there’s a PUN here” by the imposition of a bar separating “imp” from “(ex)plosion”. So Imp-losion presents us with an interesting case study: what did Japanese translators do when they noted an imp pun, but well before there was any hint that imp puns would become a common feature of Hearthstone? Well, they just found another loan word with the “インプ” sound sequence in it and used that. And hey, it works pretty well! As you can see below, in Japanese an “imp-losion” became an “imp-act”, which is a joke I imagine we’ll eventually see on an English card in the future. And then, whoa, won’t the Japanese localization team be sad they already used it up? Like that time in Magic when the German localizers translated a card called “Storm Spirit” as “Sturmgeist”, which put them in a pickle when years later Magic just named an English card “Sturmgeist” (the German version became “Unwettergeist“).
But what happened once it became clear that imp-puns were not going to be a one-off thing? Did the Japanese localization team just flip open a dictionary and look for every loan word that has the sound sequence インプ in it? Not quite. To date there have been nine imp puns created after Imp-losion in English Hearthstone. You can see them all in this next image. I need to note though that “Imprisoned Scrap Imp” is perhaps not actually a pun, as other “Imprisoned” cards appeared in the same expansion as part of a mechanic. I’ll return to that later. On the other hand, while “Impatient Doomsayer” is not itself an imp or a demon it does make imps, so I’m pretty sure it is an imp pun and I’m going to keep it in analysis.
Out of these nine cards, how many complete non-translations do you think we will see? If your guess is more than one… I’m sorry to inform you that whoever works for the Japanese Hearthstone localization team is working overtime (and, if you are somehow reading this Blizzard, should get a bonus and a raise). Out of all the cards listed, the only one that has no joke in it whatsoever is the translation of the aforementioned Imprisoned Scrap Imp. The “imprisoned” in the card name is simply 封印されし (fuuin sareshi), which is a ye-olde way of saying “sealed away” with no inpu sound or pun in it.
Now you might be saying, “hey wait a minute, fuuin does have an in sound in it… is that a pun kinda?”. Well, probably not. As I mentioned, “Imprisoned” cards were part of an expansion-wide theme. So what is the translation of every other “imprisoned” card? 封印されし. Basically the English version lucked out here, getting a free pun that maybe wasn’t even intended, and Japanese (along with probably every other language?) kind of had to throw its hands up in the air. If you use a pun for “Imprisoned Scrap Imp” specifically somehow, you break the cycle. Maybe, maybe, they chose fuuin for the whole cycle because of the in– link… but I do doubt that. And it’s a pretty weak link. Regardless though, the reason why there’s no pun translation here is therefore not simply laziness – they had to be consistent to link the “imprisoned” cards.
That said though, the team didn’t completely abandon humor when translating our scrappy imp friend. In addition to their names, Hearthstone cards also often use humor in their “flavor text”. This is just joking information that comes up when you examine the card in the game itself. For Imprisoned Scrap Imp, the English flavor text is: “His impish imports imply impressively impetuous impropriety”. So even if “imprisoned” isn’t intentional, there sure is punning surrounding the card.
The Japanese translators clearly recognized this word play, changing the sentence to “インプのスクラップで凡夫もシェイプアップ、あとは運否天賦♪”. This is something like “Imp scraps help even the unenlightened shape up, but everything after is up to chance”. Huh? Where’s the wordplay? Where’s the repetition of “imp” words? Well, when we Romanize this we get “inpu no sukurappu de bonpu mo sheipu appu, ato wa unputenpu“, which is a really impressive number of ぷ sounds jammed into a single sentence. Yeah, it’s not really a pun, and yeah, it’s not “impu” in its entirety. But it is a wordplay-to-wordplay translation that somehow still makes sense as a sentence, which makes it pretty impressive overall. Oh but wait, what’s that little ♪ doing at the end there? Is this a song parody? I don’t think so, even though there is certainly a song called 運否天賦, because the words don’t fit that song’s rhythm. Rather, the name for a “note mark” in Japanese is an onpu, so why not jam that in too? That’s 8 pu sounds in one go, not bad.
Out of the remaining eight imp puns, two are then of the “ah, heck, why not just transliterate it?” variety. There’s no shame in this! Sometimes a localization team is at their best when they just grasp what is there. So in Japanese Impferno just became インプェルノ (inperuno) and Impbalming became インプァーミング (inpaamingu). There’s a bit of cool stuff going on here: the use of プェ and プァ is a nifty way to insure インプ is still visibly present in the word despite the ~pu sound disappearing, for instance. But do Japanese people find these funny? Do they even recognize the source term that’s being punned since they are based on rather uncommon loan words? Major dictionaries do list エンバーミング as a word, so maybe that one is common enough that it works right away. The Japanese word for “a big fire” is not インフェルノ though, nor is it the title of the Japanese translation of Dante’s Inferno, so I don’t know how common that loan word is. Certainly, there is a disambiguation page for the word on Japanese Wikipedia so… well… anyway, at least the localizers thought it was common enough to work, and they certainly know more than me. And hey, if a pun just works, why not keep it?
While these translations might not be the most exciting, the localizers certainly did some extra work with the flavor text on Impbalming. Impferno’s text in English has no jokes, so the Japanese matches in also having no jokes. Both are just literal statements that imps like warm places. The English flavor text for Impbalming, on the other hand, is “With your complexion, Imp Balm is a great demonizer”. I actually have no idea what the pun is here in English specifically, but maybe detoxifier? It’s a joke about something -izer that relates to skin care for sure. The Japanese actually goes above and beyond though, as while it’s not a skincare pun it actually kind of helps people get that there is a pun, which I think is really smart given the use of a obscure-ish loan word for the pun’s base. The flavor text is changed to something that translates as “Making a body not rot is called enbaamingu, but making your deck rot is inpaamingu“. Which is great, really. If a person doesn’t realize that エンバーミング is a word, now they learned both the word and its definition, and the phrase actually works with the card’s abilities, as part of what it does is shuffle terrible cards into your deck. It explains the joke and the card! Really an A+ job here.
The next set of translations are then very clever in that they sneak インプ somewhere into a text through novel uses of kanji rather than using katakana. The first is the localization of “Imp-poster” as 変身婦. So the 変身 at the start, or henshin, is “change”. The final 婦 means “wife” or “woman”, but is often attached to words to indicate “woman who does job”, as in 看護婦, 家政婦, 売春婦, 婦警, 酌婦, 賄い婦, 炊婦, etc. Now in most of these cases, 婦 is read as ふ (fu). But sometimes it does becomes ぷ (pu). When? Well, mostly after an ん sound, as in 妊婦 (ninpu) or 助産婦 (josanpu). So putting this all together, what do we have here then? An henshinpu! What I like about this pun is that it literally splits a kana, taking the i sound from し, rather than forcing in an kanji that just straight up reads as in (like 印, 院, or 韻).
There is a case where the localizers just go with kanji read as インプ though. Impending Catastrophe is the case in point, where two novel terms are created just for the Japanese title 災運の陰風: 災運 is presumably saiun, but it’s not a word so I can’t check for sure. I don’t see a pun, but it’s something like “calamity luck”. Then 陰風 is read as inpuu, and I guess means “dark wind” although it again isn’t a word. Now this is one sound (puu) longer than inpu, but you can do that in Japanese puns. It’s not a problem. So yeah, can’t find a word you need for a pun? Make it up. And it can even change the vowels a bit too, fine! As long as you get there.
Alright, we are leaving the straightforward realm now. The last four localized puns are then interesting as they aren’t really imp puns. They are puns, or at least wordplay, and some are quite obscure, so clearly someone was keen to ensure that some kind of joking or play existed in the Japanese versions. But the focus on “imps” drops more and more as we go along. Check out the Japanese Impfestation for example:
Obviously that イン (in) that starts the word stands out right away. But what’s the second kanji? Well, it’s one that isn’t used very much anymore: it means “corrode”, “spoil”, or “get eaten by bugs”, and it’s onyomi is pronounced shoku just like the 食 that its radical comes from. Okay, so what’s an inshoku? Well… “food and drink” or “eating and drinking”, which is normally written as 飲食 not 飲蝕. So there’s no real joke, outside of that maybe 飲食 does rhyme with 侵蝕 (shinshoku, corrosion). Certainly, in contemporary Japanese 食 often replaces 蝕, so you can write 侵蝕 as 侵食, but it’s not supposed to go the other way around. Like a cafeteria is always a 食堂 and never a 蝕堂. So why is this card’s name homophonous (but not kanji-matching) to “food and drink”? To figure out what’s going on here, again we have to go to the flavor text:
イン蝕業は、飲食業とよく聞き間違えられるが、意地汚くすばしっこい小型の生き物が蝕事にあたるイン蝕業界で衛生面が配慮されることはない。
inshokugyou wa inshokugyou to yoku kikimachiegarareu ga ijikitanaku subashikkoi gogata no ikimono ga shokouji ni ataru inshokugyoukai de eiseimen ga hairyo sareru koto wa nai
“The restaurant is impservice” is often misheard as “the restaurant is in service“, but the “impservice industry” where greedy, nimble, small things get food poisoning has no consideration for hygiene.
There you have it. The card name is a joke that pays off in the flavor text… which is really hard to translate for many reasons, but especially that “food poisoning”, normally 食事にあたる, also uses the “corrode” kanji. I did my best above, but maybe there’s even more going on than “get food poisoning” that I can’t get through in the English.
Was that difficult? Well it’s going to get worse. Or better, if this is kind of joke makes you imp-assioned rather than so angry you become imp-rudent. Certainly, it’s going to get more complex. Let’s look at Impatient Doomsayer. Again, this isn’t an imp, but I think it is an imp pun, and I guess the Japanese localizers agree because there is a pun here too:
However, there is no “imp” pun. While イン蝕 had a tenuous imp-link via the in– sound, here there’s nothing: the card is pronounced shuumatsuu yogensha, with no inpu, in, or pu in sight. We are down in the “just make sure there’s wordplay” level of localization for sure. What’s going on with this card then? They’ve again made up a word: 終魔通預言者 is literally an “end-devils-through prophet”, but 終魔通 (shuumatsuu), which again isn’t a word, sounds almost like 終末 (shuumatsu), just with one less u at the end, and this word is real. It means “the end”. A 終末 can just be a normal end, but it can also be “the end of the world” as in 終末論, so a 終末預言者 would be a “doomsayer prophet”. Imp related? No. Although imps are 悪魔 and there’s a 魔 in the name. But is there a pun? Yeah, for sure.
Let’s get even more imp-ressive, or perhaps imp-ractical, with our friend the Impulsive Trickster. Can you read this Japanese name?
If you answer with “no”, well you aren’t alone. This Japanese blogger, for instance, has to make guesses too. They go with toritsuki-sutaa, or a kind of butchering of “trickster”. How did they get there? Well the Japanese word toritsuku means “to possess” (like a ghost or demon does)… it’s normally 取り憑く, but you can write it as 取憑く. So okay, the first two kanji can give us toritsu. But we want toritsuki not toritsuku, so cut off the final ku and change it to 鬼, which is read as ki and also gives us a “demon” or “monster” meaning (it’s the kanji for oni). Then slap sutaa on the end and you have a torikisutaa. But actually I’m not 100% sure that’s the accepted pronunciation by all players, although it definitely is a “trickster” joke no matter how you spell it out. In this YouTube clip you can clearly hear a player call it a “torikkisutaa” instead. Things are a bit… imprecise, as Blizzard doesn’t provide official Japanese pronunciation guides. But yeah, no matter how you read it it’s a really roundabout way of saying “trickster”, using specific kanji to impart the meanings of “possession monster” into the name. No imps again, no. But wordplay? Yes.
Our final imp card, Imprisoner, is then just really, really odd. So when this card dies, it leaves behind a small imp. Lots of cards do this sort of “die and leave behind another creature” thing in Heathstone. One, called Safeguard in English, has nothing to do with Imprisoner. It isn’t an imp. The cards didn’t come out in the same expansion, and aren’t even used in the same game mode. But the Japanese “Safeguard”, on the right below”, came out as 金庫番. Literally “safe+guard” and read as kinkoban. Kind of a pun translation? This new Imprisoner came out as 禁固番, the kanji 禁固 being a rare word for “imprison” and 番 again being a guard, but it is also read as kinkoban. So it’s… a pun on a card that already existed? Or did they not notice the overlap? Unlikely, since they used such a rare word to translate “imprison”. But now you have two cards with names that are phonetically the same, and the reason why only makes sense if you spent the time reading this article because how would a Japanese player ever realize that this is 1) wordplay and 2) exists to make up for the loss of an imp-pun in the English? I have no idea. It’s simply imp-lausible.
So there you have it! Are all these puns good? Maybe not. A few seem to have taken the hardest path possible to completion. Are some genius? Oh yeah, sure. More importantly, when taken together, does this show that whoever is localizing Hearthstone into Japanese is working their butts off? An even more emphatic “yes”. I’m not sure about having two cards end up with a phonetically same name, and I do wonder why they didn’t just decide to consistently slap on loan words with インプ in them, but I have to say I’m imp-ressed.
But what about other card games? Like Magic: The Gathering? Well, while this game does have imps, none are puns. But the game itself does have puns. Here’s a list of the “objective 20 best” and if you check the Japanese translations… almost none are localized? Like a bear that “bears arms” just says it “holds weapons” in Japanese; a card called “Goblin Offensive” which has the flavor text of “They certainly are” is instead “Goblin Attack” and mentions only “they are an awful group”; the card “Late to Dinner”, punning “late = slow” against “late = dead”, just becomes “Slow to arrive at dinner” (with no ambiguity); “Body of Research” literally becomes “Research Body” but that doesn’t work as a pun because you don’t call someone’s research output a “body” in Japanese, etc., etc., etc. At most you have transliterations, like “Metrognome” to “metoronoomu“; or cases that are “maybes” like “Foresee”, which lets you “see 4” cards being yokan, which is just “foresight”, but I guess yo could reference “4 (yon/yo)” in Japanese too. So does M:tG just not care about maintaining, or not pay localizers enough to translate, puns? If only there was perhaps a way to compare the two games… like maybe if each had an expansion built around an academia theme that was filled with puns? Maybe in that case I could compare the two to see which is investing the most into maintaining humor across languages? Ah well, perhaps an idea for a future article, if that set of conditions is somehow ever met (update: it was met)!
If you enjoy my writing, considering subscribing to get articles sent directly to your email! We also appreciate contributions via Ko-Fi to help keep this website ad-free.
Scripting Japan 
3 Comments