Masahiro Sakurai’s quick comment turns into a hurdle for automated translation tools.

Though he’s never been a direct employee of the company, the vast majority of the games directed by Masahiro Sakurai have been published by Nintendo. So with the Kyoto-based publisher holding its latest Nintendo Direct online presentation on Thursday, and with the Switch 2 hardware launch somewhere on the indistinctly shimmering near-future horizon, many fans of Super Smash Bros. and Kirby, Sakurai’s two biggest hits, were no doubt hoping that we might be getting a glimpse at new titles in those series.

▼ Nintendo of Japan’s official Twitter announcement for Thursday’s Nintendo Direct

Of course, Nintendo itself tends to be pretty tight-lipped about exactly what it’s going to be showing in the Nintendo Direct presentations until the moment they begin on the company’s official YouTube channel. So those wanting advance info instead often go looking for clues in statements from individual creators and third-party publishers instead, and when Sakurai himself retweeted the Nintendo Direct announcement, fans around the world took notice, even those who can’t read Japanese.

Anxious to know what the Japanese text of Sakurai’s tweet, ほうほう, means, many took to using automatic online translation tools, which in many cases gave them a translation that raised as many questions as it answered when they spat back “method” as the translation.

Now instead of trying to figure out what ほうほう means, many were trying to figure out what “method” was supposed to mean.

Others, figuring that Sakurai couldn’t possibly have tweeted something so cryptically nonsensical as “method,” instead reacted by venting their frustrations at Twitter’s Grok AI for the quality of its translation attempt.

However, AI’s biggest stumbling block is that it has a hard time understanding context, and context, it just so happens, is a big part of communication in Japanese.

Getting back to the original Japanese text of Sakurai’s tweet, ほうほう is pronounced houhou, and yes, houhou is one of the ways to say “method” in Japanese. Written in kanji, the Japanese characters used to express vocabulary-based concepts, “method”/houhou would be written as 方法.

Sakurai didn’t write the kanji 方法, though, He wrote ほうほう, using the type of script called hiragana, which is used to write things phonetically. Technically, anything you can write in kanji you can also write in hiragana, and there are some Japanese words that actually have kanji but are much more commonly written in hiragana, such as arigatou/”thank you,” which you’ll much more often see rendered in hiragana as ありがとう than in its stuffy-feeling kanji form, 有難う.

However, for native Japanese speakers/writers, 方法 isn’t considered an officious-feeling or difficult-to-write pair of kanji, and so it would be very, very strange for an educated adult to write the “method” houhou as ほうほう. So what we’re really looking for here is a houhou that isn’t necessarily a vocabulary word (thus no kanji) and more of a general feeling, and what Sakurai was actually tweeting was just the sound of someone giving an amused and intrigued chuckle, since Japanese speakers will often verbally react with houhou in the same way that we might in English convery the idea of “Let’s see what we have here” by making a noise along the lines of “Ah ha,” or even “Ho ho!”

▼ ほうほう = Houhou = Ho ho. Yes, sometimes translation can be easy (for human beings who can understand context anyway).

So ultimately, all Sakurai was doing was reacting to the Nintendo Direct announcement in the same, outsider-looking-in way that ordinary fans were, a happy little sentiment of oh wow, I wonder what sort of cool stuff we’re going to see. The last thing he’d expected was for his casual off-the-cuff comment to attract international scrutiny, and in this characteristic good-natured way, he later sent out a follow-up.

▼ “Guess I can’t tweet so carelessly…”

So in the end, Sakurai learned a little about just how seriously the international game fan community takes his statements, and hopefully the international game fan community learned a little about how spotty AI is at translating. And if you’d like a more in-depth explanation, from a human, as to why the Japanese language needs both kanji and hiragana (as well as a third set of characters), we’ve got one for you right here.

Source: Twitter/@Sora_Sakurai via Hachima Kiko
Top image: Pakutaso (edited by SoraNews24)
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