Mock-up of a potential Swedish logo for Fate/Stay Night, titled "Ödet/Nattligt sällskap" List of many key terms in Fate, along with potential Swedish translations thereof.

I wonder how common it is for bilinguals to think about how a creative work could look in translation, while just reading/watching/playing it for fun. I do it a lot, especially with text-heavy things like books, visual novels, RPGs, manga, etc.

Specifically, I've recently pondered Fate/Stay Night, including how to render the title in a hypothetical Swedish translation. I assume its subtitle is meant to be read as "staying the night", but the obvious translation "övernattning" feels too casual and simplistic for the name of a work. "Nattligt sällskap" (lit. "company at night") is more title-like, while conveying a simliar idea. By comparison, the translations of the other route/game/etc titles, such as "En himmelsk känsla" for "Heaven's Feel", are pretty straightforward.

I also thought about some potential translations of key terms, which vary in how confident I feel about them - there isn't really any good, short, all-purpose, go-to equivalent to "spell" in Swedish, and I'm not 100% satisfied with "ordersbesvärjelse" for "Command Spell", while I think "trolltyg" for "magecraft" is very fun.

All just for fun, anyway - F/SN is too long for me to actually work on in my free time. As much as I'd like to, even just the prologue would take quite a while.

Originally posted on Cohost.