Hunchman801 wrote: Fri Apr 17, 2026 8:26 am
Great work, guys!
Interesting how this coincides with the recent release of Rayman 30th Anniversary Edition, in which the achievements were translated to Portuguese for the first time. They went for slightly different translations for Band Land ("A Terra das Bandas") and Picture City ("A Cidade das Imagens") though. Were you aware of that and what was the decision process for the names used in the fan translation?
We didn't know about the Brazilian Portuguese achievement names
! When I bought the 30th Anniversary release on Steam they showcase in English for me.
As for the names, when I begun writing the translation prototype I analysed both the English and French scripts. It was the same process back when I developed the European Portuguese Rayman 2 translation for PC/Windows systems. The francophone version was helpful for situations where the translated English name sounded a bit off, too long for the character space or not as logical as the French equivalent. This was the case for Pink Plant Woods name, where I used the French name (La Forêt Primordiale/The Primordial Forest). I was also mindful how the first Rayman Origins English trailer adopted the French term and never went back to the original English one.
Interesting to know that the Brazilians named the Band Land on its plural form, we did it in singular. Concerning Picture City, my prototype suggested "A Cidade das Imagens" since both languages use the same term. When Rubinho did a general checkup on the files and sent me over prototype builds to playtest, I noticed the change and questioned him why "Painting City". While it's true there's a lot of paintbrushes in the level I still believed it was more source-material accurate to use "Imagens" as there's other details that reinforce this would be the most correct decision:
- Rayman Designer, its Mapper and further MS-DOS core game expansions coded these levels as "Image".
- Accordingly to the very recent new information included in 30th Anniversary Release's Making Of section, Rayman's 1993 Design Document confirms the initial concept of the several worlds being based in different informatics sections, one of them being Image.
Despite of my founded arguments, Rubinho still went ahead with the alternative naming alleging "translation freedom". I also suggested that "Candy Chatêau" would be named "O Chatêau das Delícias", basing in the French name. It wasn't used as Rubinho was determined to exclude all foreign words with exception of a few character names, so he adapted as "O Castelo dos Doces" ("Sweets/Candy Castle").
I would say that the most interesting adaptation here was for Eat at Joe's, especially when Rubinho let me know that it was possible to change the establishment's sign textures and light animation. I suggested "O Diner do Joe" ("Joe's Diner") as a short character number adaptation that still makes sense.
There's just one minor issue here: I know that back in 1995, the Portuguese videogame distributor ECOFILMES translated the game's manual for SEGA Portugal in the SEGA Saturn copies. Sadly I don't have it and nowadays it's difficult to find some surviving copy of that. I do intent to locate it if any day one pops up so I can scan it to prevent it to become lost-media but also because I want to confirm what were the "official" translations for the worlds names so I can suggest Rubinho to update the build if we do find inconsistencies. When I got my hands on the ECOFILMES's Rayman 2 manual once, I updated my translation files to match some of their names included in it to be closer to official material considering this company was the national distributor of Ubisoft games for over a decade and there was at least one game that was fully localised in European Portuguese in 1997 (FR: "Les 9 Destins de Valdo"; PT: "As Aventuras de Vasco").
As a last trivia, although the PAL version of the game was used to apply the translation work, Rubinho went for the NTSC cover and manual translations especially because the latter has much more information than the European counterpart.
I hope I cleared the doubts.
), I was never a huge fan of that name and I understand why someone would use the native word instead. "O Castelo das Delícias" might have been more faithful to the original, but "O Castelo dos Doces" certainly doesn't sound bad at all. If anything, I would probably have pushed for Band Land to be called "O Céu Cromático", though. 
, you understood that! I still find curious how the English localization team back then kept the "Château" term instead of translating into "Castle". "Doces" means "Sweets/Candies" so it's pretty much the same meaning as the English source although I would have opted to be closer to the French with "Delícias". 
