Only 7 SNES games had Dutch translations – and they’re bad
In the early 90’s, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) hit the European market and was an instant hit. At round the same time, I was born, ensuring I would grow up with a brightly colored SNES-pad clutched in my juvenile hands. Whilst the SNES games were wildly popular in the Netherlands, they would rarely be translated into Dutch. Instead, most games were shipped with a “Northern Europe” localisation, with the option to play the game in English, German or French. Were there any proper Dutch translations of SNES titles at all?
I was ready to embark on a thorough search, but I quickly realised it wouldn’t take that long to research every Dutch game on the SNES. That’s because only 7 SNES titles were translated into Dutch during the SNES’ lifespan (of which two are the exact same game):
- The Adventures of Dr. Franken
- Dragon’s Lair
- Eric Cantona Football Challenge
- Joe & Mac – Caveman Ninja
- Striker
- Tintin in Tibet
- World Cup USA ’94
The fist five titles were published by UK-based Elite Systems. Dragon’s Lair and Caveman Ninja have no translation errors, as their only text consists of a handful of menu options. Although, that didn’t prevent the translators of The Adventures of Dr. Franken erroneously translating ‘Music‘ as ‘Musiek‘ (whereas it should say ‘Muziek‘).
The main menu of The Adventures of Dr. Franken, with the option of turning off the ‘Musiek’.
While Eric Cantona Football Challenge and Striker are two distinct titles, they are actually the same game with a different logo, but with the same problems. Most menu options are correctly translated, but some are abbreviated because they wouldn’t fit on the screen otherwise. However, several menu options were left (partly) untranslated, creating several language amalgamations of which my personal favorite is ‘zaal football’ (nl: zaalvoetbal, en: futsal).
Outside of the main menu, the names of the countries are still in English when playing in Dutch (and the Netherlands is listed as Holland), although the game does let you change the name of all teams so you could manually translate them all if you are feeling particularly pedantic, like me. It also translates the text on the ‘finished’-button as ‘AFGELOPEN‘, which is an overly aggressive (though admittedly hilarious) way of letting the game know that you’re done, especially since it’s presented in all-caps (‘Klaar‘ would’ve been a better translation in this case). In addition, the last name of Helmonder right-back Berry van Aerle‘s misspelled as ‘van Earle‘.
The team editing screen of Eric Contano Football Challange. Note that I’ve changed the original team name ‘Holland’ into ‘Nederland’. Notice also that the stat ‘Injuries’ is left untranslated.
World Cup USA ’94 offers a Dutch-language option, though it cleverly gets around a lot of translation works by having all the menu options be represented by images of a cartoon dog and universal icons. Unlike Striker, the game did translate all the country names into Dutch, and correctly so, hadn’t they omitted the diaeresis on the e’s in all names that needed them (e.g. ‘Belgie‘ instead of ‘België‘). Additionally, Friday is mistranslated as ‘Frijdag’ (correct: ‘Vrijdag’) and the date is presented stubbornly in the American ‘mmmm dd’-format, instead of the European ‘dd mmmm’. Though, to their credit, I found no errors in the match stats screens or in the player names.
The game screen of World Cup USA ’94, where it is ‘Frijdag’, everybody’s favourite nonexistent day of the week.
Tintin in Tibet was published by the French publisher Infrogames Entertainment (nowadays know as Atari), and this is the only title I would consider properly localised in Dutch. There are no translation errors that I could find, and the game even features lengthy in-game narrative in the form of comic panels. Of course, this makes perfect sense as Tintin (nl: Kuifje) is a Belgian IP and is very popular in the Netherlands. At the very least, the Netherlands got one properly Dutch game for the SNES.
On the Dutch main menu of Tintin in Tibet, the game’s logo even changes to reflect your choice of language. A nice touch.
For those Dutchmen who did not enjoy platformers or soccer games, there was no option other than to learn English in order to play their favourite SNES games. It’s a shame that none of the text-heavy Role-Playing games were ever translated into Dutch so that the unique narratives could be enjoyed by young and old in their native languages. If you are a video game developer, consider having your game properly translated by a native speaker to properly widen your audience, and gain loyal customers all over the world.
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