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Has anyone heard of, or played the Vida Translations Pokémon Silver as a kid?

Novia

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I don’t see early obscure fan translations like these being discussed widely, so I thought I’d make a post about it. I used to have a couple of multicarts for the GBC as a kid, and one of them contained the Vida Translations (or Vida Trans) Pokémon Silver, as well as the ‘Pokemon World’ Pokémon Gold.

I found some videos of them here:

Vida Translations Silver:

https://youtu.be/eWBCNf4kGoY

Pokémon World Gold:

These early fan translations were based on the Japanese roms, and some features include Pokémon having only 5 characters in their names, and in the case of Vida Trans Silver, quite a number of garbage text in dialogue and menus.

In Vida Trans Silver, I remembered that the translators totally made up a lot of the stuff, and it was as if they didn’t understand Japanese at all, and just came up with whatever sounded suitable for the occasion.

Some other points I remember:

  • Oak and Elm mentioning Ash at the start (and by extent, Blue is called ‘Gary’, and Red, ‘Ash’ when you go to Kanto later)
  • The girl living in one of the houses in New Bark Town calls Silver her brother.
  • The free Shuckle in Cianwood City has garbage text in its name, which started with an ‘X’.
  • Whitney refuses to give you the badge at first because she thought you cheated, and as you try to leave, the girl who stops you tells you to talk to her again to convince her you didn’t cheat. (However, Pokémon World Gold got it right - Whitney cries and forgets to give you the badge in that version.)
  • If you try to use any Key Item where you shouldn’t, it says ‘No cycling allowed indoors’ regardless of what item you used.
  • Mareep’s Pokédex entry says that it was so called because it sounds just like Mary, who had a little lamb.
  • Pokémon which English names weren’t revealed at that time were given their Japanese names. For instance, Unown was called ‘ANNON’.
  • Pokémon move names were shortened, too, like how Quick Attack was ‘QUATTCK’ or something.
  • The girl in National Park gives you the Quick Claw because her Meowth is stubborn.
It seems like a lot of people do remember Vida Translations, just that they don’t know it by name:




Man, how I wish I could talk to one of the translators from the Vida Translations team someday, and tell them all about how their work made my childhood, even if most the translation is just made-up stuff. They used to have a site, but it’s been down since a long time ago.
 
Gotta admit I haven't heard about it till now. The ones I knew about were the infamous Vietnamese and the lesser known Hong Kong translations. This one looks better done than both of them.
 
I'm pretty sure that I played the Vietnamese translation, which didn't have much to it other than weird names. I caught or at least encountered a shiny Seaking, which oddly enough, resurfaced in my English copy not much later. It was obsessed with me.
 
By the way, I was super excited to play Gold in English despite having defeated Red in Vietnamese. Language does matter, as does playing on a GBC.
 
Yeah, I wish more people knew about these obscure early fan translations. Everyone knows about Vietnamese Crystal, and to a lesser extent, Hong Kong gold, but nobody talks about these more obscure ones. These translations were my childhood, so they hold a special place in my heart. I even took the trouble of typing out all the Pokédex entries from Vida Trans Silver and posted them on my blog.
 
By the way, I found a download of the Vida Trans Silver here at last, and was so elated to have reclaimed a part of my childhood.
 
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