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  "path": "/metaphor-refantazio-some-comments-about-its-brazilian-translation/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-23T04:48:00.000Z",
  "site": "https://whateverthewindbrings.com",
  "textContent": "> **Note** : This covers only creative decisions. I can't give any backstage details and will not talk about them. Also, keep in mind that there might be **spoilers** in the text.\n\nI've been thinking about Metaphor: ReFantazio a lot in the last few months due to some talks I've been having with other translators. In my career as a video game translator, this game is a high point, mostly because it's one of the few titles where the translation team had almost complete creative freedom and delivered a highly polished text that feels as if it was written straight up in Portuguese, instead of being translated from a foreign language, so I want to talk about a few of the creative decisions we took. I wish I could talk about _every_ creative decision we made, like archetype and ability translations, but I don't have access to the game right now — my desktop is out of comission for the foreseeable future — so I'll have to rely on memory.\n\n* * *\n\n# Onomatopoeia\n\nThe first thing that comes to mind is the onomatopoeias that float around NPCs' dialogues while walking around in cities. One of these is the word \"chat\" floating around in English, but in Portuguese, a literal translation would've been too long — something like _conversa_ or _bate-papo_ , which would also seem strange anyway because they are nouns, and we don't use nouns in onomatopoeias. After some back and forth with my co-project manager, she suggested \"Tititi\", which is commonly used for gossiping, and it was pure gold.\n\nNow, here's the funny part: almost no one writes this word. If you were to ask ChatGPT or whatever for an onomatopoeia for gossiping, it would never suggest this one. \"Gossip\" in Portuguese is _fofoca_ , a completely different word, and very, _very_ few visual media feel the need to put an onomatopoeia for it because the context always makes it clear that people are gossiping. It has almost no written record anywhere1 and dictionaries give multiple definitions. However, almost every Brazilian knows its meaning — it's one of those cases where a word is present in \"oral history\", so to speak. It's a human creative choice that a machine would never make.\n\nNow, when you play Metaphor in Portuguese and walk around in crowded places, you'll see \"Tititi\" floating in dialogue boxes from gossiping NPCs, working perfectly with the context, being highly regionalized for the market, but without breaking immersion.\n\nAs I said before, it doesn't give the impression of being a translation, but something written from scratch by a Brazilian writer.\n\n* * *\n\n# Gauntlet runner\n\nPeople travel around the world of Metaphor in a ship with legs called \"gauntlet runner\". This one, I'm not gonna lie, gave us a bit of trouble, but after the team chiming in and chatting for a while, we arrived at _trotador couraçado_ in Portuguese, which is, again, something that feels perfectly natural and fits great in the game without looking like it was \"translated from English\".\n\nSo, \"trotador\" is a noun with the same root as the verb \"trotar\", which means something like a horse's gait2, while \"couraçado\" means armored, but it's also the Portuguese name for armored battleships — so we killed two birds with one stone.\n\nLike before, the name just _feels_ right, like something a Portuguese speaker would come up with on their own, instead of something that was adapted from the words \"gauntlet\" and \"runner\".\n\nIt did take some iterations on other names until we arrived at this one, tho, which goes to show how important it is to have _time_ to think about stuff.\n\n* * *\n\n# Days of the week\n\nIn Metaphor, the week has 5 days — Flamesday, Watersday, Arboursday, Metalsday, and Idlesday — and they all feel pretty good in English, using the same logic as the English names, but based on elements instead of gods (except for the last one, obviously). All of the Romance languages follow the same logic. Except Portuguese.\n\nIn the 6th Century, a Portuguese Bishop decided to change things up for religious reasons. Except for Saturday and Sunday — _sábado_ and _domingo_ , respectively — all the weekdays are just numbers with the suffix _-feira_ , so Monday is _segunda-feira_ , Tuesday is _terça-feira_ , Wednesday is _quarta-feira_ , Thursday is _quinta-feira_ , and Friday is _sexta-feira_.3\n\nIn this case, we just changed the first word and kept the suffix, fitting in perfectly with our linguistic roots. The result is:\n\nEnglish | Portuguese\n---|---\nFlamesday | Flama-feira\nWatersday | Aqua-feira\nArboursday | Bosque-feira\nMetalsday | Metal-feira\nIdlesday | Ócio-feira\n\n* * *\n\n# Protag's name\n\nFor those unaware, the canon protag's name in English is \"Will\", because it's based on European royalty (yeah, I know...). In Portuguese, \"William\" is the same as \"Guilherme\", since they both have the same linguistic roots and all but, in Metaphor, the canon Portuguese name also had to invoke a sense of royalty for those playing. There's an issue, tho: Brazil has almost no history of nobility, much less _European_ nobility.\n\nObviously, Brazil never went through the Middle Ages, because back then, nobody from Europe even knew Brazil existed, and the indigenous people in what's currently Brazilian territory were doing their own thing. After colonization, Portugal did create some titles, but Brazil, as a colony, was pretty much left to its own devices, so that didn't mean much. Like, yeah, someone from the other side of the ocean gave you a title, but what are you gonna do with it? It's not like there's any royalty to impress nearby or make alliances or whatever. Only after the Portuguese royal court moved to Brazil (while fleeing from Napoleon) and made Rio de Janeiro the empire's capital, titles kinda meant something, although the king was in so much debt that he gave titles away left and right for money. Still, those were _Portuguese_ titles, not Brazilian.\n\nBut! After some shenanigans and whatnot, the king's son declared Brazil's independence, fighting against his own father and, thus, created the Empire of Brazil, a proper monarchy such as they had in Europe. And this dude was called Pedro I. Then, he had to go back to Portugal (where he's known as Pedro IV) because of some political shenanigans there and left his son, Pedro II, in charge, still a teen. Some decades go by, the monarchy is abolished, Pedro II is exiled, and Brazil becomes a democracy (kinda), ending the brief history of the Brazilian monarchy.\n\nSo the protag's canon name in Portuguese became _Pedro_ , because that's the only widely known cultural reference we have of European nobility and struggle for power. Anything else would've felt like a cultural import, to be honest, and the romanticized view of monarchy that the game brings matches a bit with the romanticized view some people have of both Brazilian emperors.\n\n* * *\n\n# Other stuff\n\nI wish I could talk about ability names and archetype translation, but without access to the game, I can't really confirm how stuff was translated, and the game files we translated aren't accessible anymore (as expected). I do remember we had a bit of trouble with archetypes because some references to other Atlus titles were lost4, and there were some constraints on word size.\n\nWorking on this project and SMTV:V — another one I'm proud of — at the same time was quite the challenge, but it was fun at the same time. You have to thread a fine line between \"making it seem like a local product\", \"keeping the dev's original vision\", and \"avoiding making it too Brazilian\".\n\nHonestly, it's this aspect I enjoy the most in this field: it feels almost like a cultural puzzle.\n\n* * *\n\n  1. Except for a gossip magazine that was called \"Ti ti ti\" and, supposedly, some comics from _Turma da Mônica_ , which are for children and teens.↩\n\n  2. Did I use this word correctly? I don't know if it's ok to say that a horse has a gait in English (lol). I don't know anything about horse terminology in English.↩\n\n  3. If you speak any other Romance language, or at least understand them a bit, you might notice that Monday is the \"second day\". And that's correct. Our week calendar starts on Sunday, which used to be called \"Prima Feria\" in the distant past.↩\n\n  4. Those titles were never translated to Portuguese, and we would never keep the archetype names in English.↩\n\n\n",
  "title": "Metaphor: ReFantazio: quick notes about its Brazilian translation",
  "updatedAt": "2026-03-23T09:09:39.682Z"
}