Super Mario in: Aloha Hawaii
A crossover comic from 1998 issue 4 of Club Nintendo, Germany’s official Nintendo magazine. It features Mario travelling from New York(!) to Hawaii—accompanied by Bottles the mole from Banjo-Kazooie—to participate in a golf tournament, although it predates Mario Golf N64 by a year!
As well as editing etc., I translated this myself, which was a challenge as there are two allusions to specific songs that are well-known in Germany but not known to me. Still, with a bit of research I figured it out and did what I could with localisation.
In one case, Bottles is singing a traditional German folk song, “Schwarzbraun ist die Haselnuss”. Apparently it was popoular in the Wehrmacht and the Hitler Youth, but just taking it as a random song a character happens to be idly singing, I replaced it with the first English equivalent that came to mind: “She’ll be coming round the mountain”. Not very imaginative but there you go.
The other song was a famous show tune from the early days of filmmaking. In fact, the writer is known as one of Germany’s most famous lyricists, Bruno Balz. The song in question is “Das kann doch einen Seemann nicht erschüttern”, loosely translated “That won’t shake a sailor”, from the 1939 film “Paradies der Junggesellen” or “Bachelor’s Paradise”. I left this one but translated the words, as it’s important to dialogue and they replace “sailor” with “plumber”. Plus it’d be much harder to localise.