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About This Translation

This mod adds Japanese language support to The Thaumaturge — the isometric narrative RPG by 11 bit studios and Fool's Theory, set in 1905 Warsaw. It translates approximately 30,000 strings (roughly 250,000 English words) into Japanese, covering the entire game: every dialogue, journal entry, codex page, ability tooltip, item description, UI label, and ambient NPC bark.

The translation was generated using AI through a custom pipeline that includes a 660-term in-world glossary, 39 character voice profiles, an audited per-line speaker map (22,158 entries), scene-coherent batching, and strict style discipline. It is not a professional human translation — you may encounter occasional awkward phrasing — but it is far closer to "literary fan translation" than to raw machine output.

Translation Coverage

• Main Quest Dialogue (Q001 — Q401) — ~10,000 lines, fully covered
• Living World side quests (Praga / Powiśle / Śródmieście / Grzybowski / Powązki / Bazaar) — ~6,500 lines, fully covered
• Codex, Journal, Readables — ~2,500 lines (newspapers, letters, identity cards, lore)
• UI, menus, ability tooltips, status effects — ~1,500 lines
• Ambient NPC barks (vsets) across all districts — ~1,800 lines (beggars, fishermen, soldiers, soiree guests, students, etc.)
• Conclusions, Visions, Imprints, Flaws, Gestures — ~3,000 lines of meta / progression content

~30,000 / 30,000 lines — 100% of all translatable content covered.

What Makes This Translation Different

A previous Japanese fan translation of The Thaumaturge already existed — a competent AI-assisted pass that's playable and has its place in the community. This project tried something different: take character voice, code-switching, and period register seriously across all 30,000 lines, and enforce that consistency programmatically.

Character voice profiles

Every named character has a profile specifying first-person pronoun, register, sentence endings, how they address the player, and personality. Wiktor uses 僕 (never 俺) with a sardonic だ調 narration; Tsar Nikolai II uses the imperial 朕・〜である; Rasputin uses archaic 〜のじゃ・〜であろう and addresses Wiktor as 我が子よ; Skalon the brutal commissioner uses 俺 while Lazarev the cold spymaster uses 私/儂 — two Russian officers, two distinct voices. The previous translation defaulted most characters to a flat 私.

Code-switching: Russian stays Russian, Yiddish stays Yiddish

The English script is dense with code-switched dialogue — Russian soldiers swearing in Russian, Tatars invoking Allah, aristocrats dropping French, Yiddish prayer fragments in synagogue scenes. The developers wrap each in a language-flag tag (<ru>, <fr>, <yd>, etc.). This translation treats those tags as inviolable: foreign-language content is preserved untranslated so the player gets the same multilingual texture the developers intended. In one scene, the previous translation rendered an Ariel Rofe Yiddish prayer of despair as "I want to prove my abilities. I want to prove my abilities. I want to prove my abilities." — this work keeps the Yiddish romanization exactly as the developers wrote it.

Glossary enforcement: ヴィクトル is ヴィクトル, in all 30,000 lines

A 660-term glossary covers proper nouns (Warsaw districts, salutor names, all 39 named characters), in-world jargon (ソーマタージー, サルートル, 飛翔大学), and technical terms. Every term is enforced at translation time so there is no "the translator forgot" — ヴィクトル is ヴィクトル, ラスプーチン is ラスプーチン, ブカヴァツ is ブカヴァツ, in every appearance.

Style discipline: zero forbidden punctuation across the corpus

The corpus was scanned for forbidden punctuation (em-dash —— and horizontal bar ―― are non-Japanese typography), runtime placeholder integrity ([DAMAGE], [FOCUS], {name}, etc.), markup tag preservation, untranslated leakage, and cross-character voice consistency. All issues were caught and fixed. Final state: zero violations across all ~30,000 lines.

📖 Read the case study: What Polish Taught Us — a source-language audit of the EN-derived JP, with 160 things English quietly lost in translation.

📖 Read the case study: How Context Shaped the Voices — a character-by-character comparison of two AI-assisted JP translations of the same game, showing what per-character voice profiles do at scale.

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Found a bug or translation error? Have feedback? Send us a message

Or email directly: mitsurugikenji[AT]gmail.com