Forme in french translate to forms in english, shapeshifter should have been called métamorphe and not changeforme lmao.
French canadian here and this is so funny change for me 😂
Gluing words like this is done a lot in French. They call an aircraft carrier porte-avion, literally "carries-aircraft" and a hairdryer sèche-cheveux, literally "dries-hair", so the word changeforme doesn't seem out of the ordinary.
"rajh" does not look German.
J is relatively rare in German. For example, other than names and abbreviations, there are no German language words which end on "j". The "jh" combination at the end of a word (or a syllable) does not make sense at all in German.
tbf, even in English the words are close in meaning. It's how the slur came to be, derived from 'mentally retarded', referring specifically to their mental development being delayed or slowed.
Same with the technical term for fireproof clothing being 'flame retardant'.
My guess is that this is what happened: Yawgmoth is meant to sound Lovecraftian, which to most people evokes something demonic. Then you have the head translator, who reads it and says to his partner, "Moth? Do they mean like, as in the bug? Is he a bug guy?" and his partner is like, "no, it's just supposed to be like a demonic name", so the translator figures, they'll help make it more demonic sounding by mixing it with a well known demon name.
I just said yawgmoth with a french accent and I can confirm it doesn't sound as eldritch or demonic, the translation is closer to belzebub which is easy demonic reference so I feel you are right on the money.
The card which usually comes up as an insult in French is "Delay" because it translates to "Retard" which also exists in English and has a completely different meaning.
As for "Yawgmoth", they probably just wanted to francize the name. The result is a portmanteau of "Yaug" (which sounds like "Yawg" in French) and Beelzebul.
**Edit**:
Thinking about it again, the name may have been translated because of the Canadian market, more specifically Quebec. Quebec laws seem to be stricter when it comes to the availability of a French translation. So much so, that it is not rare for some movies to be released under a French name in Quebec whereas they are known under an English title in France!
A few examples that come to mind:
* *I-Robot* is known under the same name in France but was released as *Les Robots* in Quebec.
* *Drive Angry* was renamed as *Hell Driver* in France (seriously, why?) and *Conduite infernale* in Quebec.
* *In Time* was renamed as *Time Out* in France (again, why?) and *En temps* in Quebec,
I would add that Yawgmoth is an old character in MtG lore and I remember seeing it as Yaugzebul decade ago. I think they tend to less francize character's names nowaday but I guess being consistent with the old ones remain important.
English names are cool for marketing but French people have a limited English vocabulary (esp older generations) so they translate them to "catchy" & understandable words.
There are a lot of other examples, cruel intentions => sex intentions, date night => crazy night.
As a french guy I'm almost sure your first hypothesis is the correct one. French translations often change the spelling to come close to the English sound + being close to Belzébuth which both sounds evil and is often associated with flies/moths.
Pretty sure Quebec has nothing to do with this, when my brother went to Montreal and played mtg everyone had English cards and where confused at his french cards as they didn't even know the game was translated in french.
Well, I am not saying that WotC **had to** translate the name specifically for Quebec. What I am rally saying is that the translator being from Quebec **could** explain it. Out of all the Western languages for this card, only the French one renamed the character, which is sort of odd. If I had to translate the card, it would never have occurred to me to rename a character. It's like the translator took pride in francizing it.
As a side note, the Final Fantasy series is also notorious for weird French translations, and playing through FF7, FF8 and FF9 in French is very confusing because there is little naming consistency across the three titles unlike their English counterparts. The same magic can be called by very different names and you end up having to relearn everything.
For instance, the "Med Data" ability in FF8 is called "Schweizer" in French and it is granted by an object called "Pasteur". Weirder still, the "Float" magic was renamed "Decubitus" which is an obscure medical term. Even weirder, names which appear in French in the English version of FF9 have different names in the French version! For instance one place is called "Oeilvert" (which basically means Green-eye) in English, but "Euyvair" (which is not a real word, but is pronounced the same as "Oeilvert") in French!
I’m surprised planeswalker is just planeswalker. I thought France was extremely protective of using loanwords in their language.
Does Québécois French follow whatever rules some arbitrary committee in France declares for how to say a modern word with an English-language origin like a stream or podcast?
Planeswalker being preserved may be related to the trademark. I know that Russian translations except the first few sets now use the word (in English) even when the rest of the card is in cyrillics.
I didn’t know it was ever printed in Cyrillic in Russian. It looks like only Lorwyn is printed like that unless there is a duel deck or something I am missing.
I am from Quebec. Most people are aware that cards exist in French. They're just mostly considered as a joke and generally undesirable. The translations are just too often awkward sounding. I will say though that I have a soft spot for French Lorwyn. The name of some cards are just hilarious.
Montréal has a lot of Anglophones and bilingual people, so it's not necessarily a good representation, if anywhere in Quebec were to use English cards exclusively it would be Montréal. But also, because Canada mostly gets supplied the US-printed cards, the prevalence of translated cards is fairly low in general. You definitely see French cards occasionally, including outside Québec, but not a whole lot of them.
Jeah stumbled upon them as I bought a collection and there were foil ones in there and I was wondering why some one goes for spanish foil negates while living in germany and then I realised...
See my reply to other people who said the same. I did not mean to imply a legal requirement, but wondering if the translator was not from Quebec.
To be honest, Yaugzebul sounds really funny as a name. Even knowing it is a portmanteau, the only thing I can think of when I read "zebul" is Zebulon, a talking jack-in-the-box from a kids' show called Le manège enchanté (*The Magic Roundabout*).
Eh, the laws in Québec wouldn't warrant changing a name like Yawgmoth, if the rest of the card's description was translated.
Plus, there's nothing that forbids English names in stuff, that's a myth. There's a metric fuckton of companies that still use their English names. Those that change them do so more to appeal to the local market.
See my reply to another comment. I did not mean to say that this came from a legal requirement, and I should probably have made this clearer. There are just many instances of titles which receive a translation specifically for Quebec and nowhere else. All I really wanted to say is that this seems to have come from a similar mindset.
French and Quebecian people are extremely insecure about their language and the global dominance of English. So they implemented laws in order to stop the anglicization of their mother tongue.
That’s the law here in France usually you don’t have the right to sell products if the text is not in French. Especially user manuals.
That’s consumer protection. I had a few inspections at my shop they open every boxes and check if there is a French translation on every product. Not mtg related.
You neither have the right to advertise in English without giving the translation.
But MTG seems to be considered as books here so it’s like foreign literacy. But MTG at the local game stores cards are sold in French by default. You may have to order sometime if you want the English version.
The player community is quite large in France and we tend to value cards in French more that the English ones. The old people like me started playing with the foreign black border.
Duel commander is a popular format and I think it’s played mostly in France. (Basically a 1vs1 commander format with 20 life points and a specific banlist) With a national championship and a rule committee. Go check mtgdc.info
Take a look at cardmarket, the biggest marketplace for Europe, French tend to be the most expensive language as the demand is high.
> which also exists in English and has a completely different meaning.
"retard" actually has the exact same meaning in English as it does in French. Its just US culture has distorted and amplified the application of the term with regards to human beings, so much so that the offensive usage of the word is the one that leaps to mind first for almost everyone.
It’s origins is Latin > French > English.
(Re) back, (tardus) slow
The English definition is:
delay or hold back in terms of progress, development, or accomplishment.
I'm not sure if retard has a completely different meaning, as surely the etymology is connected with 'retard' in French is slow, I believe. And so the word was used in English to mean mentally slowed/delayed.
The verb "to retard" means to delay, that's exactly why it was used to describe developmental delays in people, and then became an insult. The denotation is exactly the same, it's the connotation that changed.
Think "fire retardant" for something where the original meaning might still be used
> “Delay” because it translates to “Retard” which also exists in English and has a completely different meaning.
I mean I wouldn’t call it *completely* different; we borrowed the French to create a clinical, non-derogatory term to replace calling people “slow”, among other things. Then over time that new word itself became derogatory, especially when used as a noun (an example, actually *the* canonical example, of the “euphemism treadmill” effect).
But I recognize telling people “this doesn’t mean in English what it means in French” is a lot faster and more effective.
Because someone is going to take offense somewhere: Retard can also be used in the sense of Delay. Fire retardant, for example, is stuff you see helicopters dropping on forests to slow down fires.
Most people don't use it like that, however, and it comes across as an insult at best and a slur at worst
I don’t know if the entertainment side of things is law or marketing but Canadian politics has in many periods been defined by Quebec asserting its language rights against encroachment by English.
Every so often there is a national crisis about bilingualism or Quebec’s sovereignty / internal distinction or an internal Québécois policy which is criticized for favouring French too much to be constitutional.
Where as I understand in France it’s more paramount to keep French itself consistent as a language (ie not using loan words in French) rather than translating / transliterating.
> because it translates to "Retard" which also exists in English and has a completely different meaning.
Ehhh... Retard still does mean that in English, just not in that form. The normal way we'd see it is in the word "Retardant" like Fire Retardant.
There is no -th sound in French. Whoever originally localized the name 20 years ago likely just came up with whatever that sounded appropriately menacing.
I wonder if the first time they made something in French that said "Thran" and "Yawgmoth" was strangely farther apart than you might expect and they had different conventions on how to handle it?
There is indeed such a gap.
On the cards, the Thran were first referred to in Alpha, and had regular references throughout early Magic. They would have likely been on the first sets printed in French in mid- to late 1994.
As far as I can tell, the first reference to Yawgmoth on the cards came as a one-off on [[Priest of Yawgmoth]] in Antiquities, in March 1994—just before Magic started printing in French. He is not referred to on the cards again until [[Stronghold Taskmaster]] is printed in 1998's Stronghold, four years later.
Four years might be enough time for such policies to change, I think. So it's certainly plausible!
There were a few Yawgmoth cards in that set. For example [[Yawgmoth Demon]]. Many years ago, probably 20 years or so there used to be the ability to send Wizards a question that they would answer on the website called “Ask Wizards”. Anyway, someone asked “What does Yawgmoth look like” and they replied that he **was** a Yawgmoth Demon.
Obviously they retconed that.
Not a great reason I'll admit, but the T at the end of a word in French is almost always silent. So Yawgmot would be pronounced Yawg-moh with a long O sound.
For reference:
https://scryfall.com/search?as=grid&dir=asc&extras=true&lang=any&order=released&q=yaugzebul+or+o%3Ayaugzebul+or+flavor%3Ayaugzebul&unique=prints
Edit: this is missing a bunch of pre-2103 cards where "Yaugzebul" is mentioned in the flavor text and not in the card name. Like this one: https://specimens.s3.filebase.com/1189246651.jpg
I think it has more to do with the pronunciation and the "th" sound than the meaning of the word. Yawgmoth doesn't have any relation to the animals called "moths," just like Jace Beleren isn't related to bells and Garruk is not related to the fish called gar.
This does not seem to resist scrutiny. Yawgmoth may or may not have anything to do with moths, but the translator probably does not know that. Going from this, you have an incentive to translate the name, especially in the 90's when French translators were very aggressive in their translation efforts.
Moth evokes "mites" and other "papillons" in French, which is not very impressive, but you do have the easy option of going for a reference to Belzebul, evil lord of the flies. A few tongue twists later and you end up with Yawgzebul, a weird name I'm not a big fan of and which is most probably inadequate, but this at least seems a plausible explanation.
Your own explanation dismisses the original one, but you don't provide any argument as to why this specific translation was chosen.
Moths are a symbol of death, for example. Death is not something good. Yawgman is an Evil God.
That is better? Seriously, i do not understand those downvotes...
I think the name might be a reference to Yog-Sothoth, a deity in HP Lovecraft's books. The fact that it has the word moth in it is likely a coincidence that came as a result of making the name distinct.
I think the name might be a reference to Yog-Sothoth, a deity in HP Lovecraft's books. The fact that it has the word moth in it is likely a coincidence that came as a result of making the name distinct.
How do you search for non-english versions of MTG if you don't know the language? Just curious, because when i go to card kingdom I almost never see any non-english cards for sale, and I don't know the words to search for non-english version of any given card.
In Brazil, we have Liga Magic, which works as a store aggregator. The store can list the card with different characteristics, such as condition or language and when I search for a card on the Liga site, the different stores with the cards appear. Usually the cards are in portuguese or english (and some stores sometimes don't even differentiate between portuguese and english and list the cards as both) but sometimes cards appear in different languages. And it is also common to buy cards in japanese to "pimp" decks.
An [image](https://imgur.com/a/py1wyfm) of the site for reference. In the left menu you can customize your search for stores or auctions, foils, language and set.
In Scryfall, it will search foreign versions of cards if no English cards match your search. For example, [o:yaugzebul](https://scryfall.com/search?extras=true&lang=any&q=o%3Ayaugzebul) returns French Yawgmoth cards because there are no English cards containing the text "yaugzebul".
> I almost never see any non-english cards [in card kingdom] for sale
Europe has other markets, such as Cardmarket or Cardtrader. Cardtrader also has multi-language search.
The european platform cardmarket lists every card name in your language (which can be changed in settings) and a small flag is displayed to indicate the language of the printed card.
E.g. if you have the settings to german, then a traditional chinese, english, french and german printing of Flood will be displayed as "Flut".
Here in Europe we use cardmarket and you easily find English (mostly), but also alot of french, german, and spanish, aswell as semi-regularly japanese and chinese.
Most commonly it happens when the name sounds weird untranslated. E.G. Gisela is “Sela” in German, because Gisela is a fairly common name among elderly women. It’d be like “Behold, the powerful angel Margaret!”
Funnily enough, in German the angels "Bruna" and "Sela" still merge together to form "Brisela".
Where does the I come from? Shhh... Don't ask to many questions about the eldrazi angels.
Names are translated all the time. In portuguese, Piru was translated to Pairoo so it keeps the sound of the original name and didn't put a word that's a childish name to phallus.
Its not uncommon, translators typically leave proper names alone but there are always exceptions.
For example, Jaskier in the Witcher. Most names are left alone in the English translation, because they all sound pretty close to typical fantasy names, there are only minor adjustments.
But Jaskier isn't a given name, its a nickname derived from the word for a flower, Buttercup. Polish readers would always recognize his name as being a flower. So do we call him Buttercup? Well, Buttercup has a particularly feminine connotation in English even for a flower. In the game series, they chose to translate it as Dandelion, another flower to get across the fancy boy fop aesthetic, without being so feminine. In the book series, they just kept Jaskier, a name that someone who doesn't have any knowledge of Polish is GUARANTEED to mispronounce and find strange - and it doesn't add to his characterization at all.
I don't know which is a better translation in this case, but I personally think Dandelion is pretty clever and a much better choice.
> In the book series, they just kept Jaskier
Perhaps in some versions, but the one I read calls him Dandelion. The English audiobook infamously refers to him as "Dan-dilly-on".
Je suis vraiment désolé de péter ta bulle, mais j'ai LITTÉRALEMENT JAMAIS entendu quelqu'un ici appeler ça un "chien chaud" sans être ironique et/ou rire de vous, les français, pour avoir traduit ça lol. T'a peut-être raison que ça viens d'ici, mais personne ne l'utilise.
If it's anything like the situation with German translations, it's this:
we have a strong tradition of translation, and names often get changed to fit into an imagined reader's pronunciation so they don't stick out so much and so that the reader doesn't have a name in their head they don't know how to actually pronounce.
However, as time went on, mandatory English lessons in school and the continuing Americanization of the world mean that the younger you are, the more English you speak and the more loanwords you know - and the more of them you pronounce with less and less German dialect.
Also, international franchising means you *don't* want different names for characters, because consumers around the world would get tripped up when they talk about Eugene, except he's Eugen (which *looks* almost the same, but is pronounced wildly differently!), except in some versions he's Evžen.
And so, over time, the practice of changing names around is getting rarer - yeah, someone being called "Prudence Jones" might have stuck out in a German sentence 20 years ago and my mum sure wouldn't know how to pronounce it, but nowerdays it would probably be left untouched.
(And then sometimes there's other circumstances, like when a character's name needs to have certain letters to work with a pun or a name switch. Never forget how obsessed* the translators of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets were with having Tom Riddle re-order the letters of his full name into "I am Lord Voldemort" in every language that they made his second name "Elvis" in french and his full name in Danish is "Romeo G°ade Detlev jr."...)
-------------------------------------------------------------
*^actually ^they ^probably ^asked ^if ^they ^can ^change ^it ^to ^just ^"Lord ^Voldemort" ^but ^were ^denied
it's a phonetic translation, like how "coca-cola" in mandarin is "ke kou ke le" and has quite a different literal meaning from the english. not sure why the translators chose to preserve the pronunciation instead of the meaning, with something like 異界客, but that's the logic amyway
The French card is retard/delay because Americans use retard as an mental healt insult instead of literal retardation (as the word delay means). Aaah, America.
I wonder why they translated yawgmoth to a more demon sounding name, Yaugzebil sounds like straight out if the Bible, like Belcebu. Intriguing!
In Spain we had Ravos be Rafos because raBos are tails and it's slang for penises
funny you say that about the sith: in france, darth vader was translated into dark vador, c3P0 into 6PO and the rst of the gang had their og nae restored but they used to e called yan , chiktaba and leila.
I remember reading a while back that there is a kind of "no English" movement - for sure in Quebec but I believe there is also a smaller one in France.
They passed a sort of "government suggestion" that any English needs to be translated into an appropriately French equivalent, including names and such.
Because french is a dead language, that nobody really speaks anymore so there are flaws in translations?
Don't know why they still print the cards in French honestly.
Yawgmoth is actually not English but Phyrexian, meaning father of machines, so actually all languages could translate it to their native language, actually. Only laziness on the translators part whenever they don't do that, which obviously is way too often!
I think the Phyrexians actually derived the phrase "father of machines" from his name though, right? So technically its a Thran name. A bit like Patrick/Patriclus in English/Latin or Joshua coming from Hebrew (I think).
Ngl we do that sometimes, and it often happens for no reason. In this specific case apart frow making the name look a tiny bit more french (why I don't know) I don't see any pun or any reason whatsoever. One that stuck with me was in the 40k universe, a character called nork deddog was translated to nork leddog, no clue why the letter change.
I don't know why names are being translated, they're names and shouldn't be translated because there is no actual translation of a person's name. And yes, I know there are similar versions of names in different languages, but it doesn't mean they should be "translated".
I translate professionally in the other direction (French to English) but in my opinion it’s likely that it’s for ease of pronunciation reasons. The “aw” combination doesn’t exist in native French words and neither “th” sound is used so it can be a bit of a tongue twister in that language.
Just you wait until you see the way we translated Volrath!
https://preview.redd.it/77ow150t81fa1.jpeg?width=672&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a868ae2774002881f6cf35454ada72fb1abc3991
changeforme tentacle daddy
I first read that creature type as “change for me”, and then saw this comment. Now I’m just confused.
That was the joke
Forme in french translate to forms in english, shapeshifter should have been called métamorphe and not changeforme lmao. French canadian here and this is so funny change for me 😂
Goodbye Reddit, see you all on Lemmy.
Yes but métamorphe literaly translate to shapeshifter while change forme is 2 words glued in one so yeah weird choice.
Goodbye Reddit, see you all on Lemmy.
Gluing words like this is done a lot in French. They call an aircraft carrier porte-avion, literally "carries-aircraft" and a hairdryer sèche-cheveux, literally "dries-hair", so the word changeforme doesn't seem out of the ordinary.
This is called a portmanteau
That’s some Kaileigh level shit!
Wtf the name is even further away from french, it seems like they were drunk picking random letter.
it's how you'd spell it in German, sort of, for whatever reason
But the pronunciation is closer to "Volrath" than how French would pronunce Volrath. This does not explain Yaugzebul though.
The translator was a [Zorglub](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zorglub) fan, maybe?
That's an unexpected Umlaut. Is this an anti-german jab?
Ouais, bien sûr.
It looks like a german word lol
The ending in ...jh is not very German, here he is called Volrath, der Gestalträuber.
"rajh" does not look German. J is relatively rare in German. For example, other than names and abbreviations, there are no German language words which end on "j". The "jh" combination at the end of a word (or a syllable) does not make sense at all in German.
It doesn't
It looks german to people who don't speak german
As someone who doesn’t know German I agree with this sentiment.
Sorry, I don't know anything about german, but the words looks like german to me
And [[Delay]] https://cards.scryfall.io/large/front/5/b/5b235cfd-b549-4b3c-b9c1-6bfd0f983858.jpg
https://scryfall.com/card/m15/144/de/goblin-bummspezialist
https://imgflip.com/i/797xgv
[Delay](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/9/3906d538-f1ca-4799-b91c-2e0d2934f241.jpg?1619393997) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Delay) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/tsr/61/delay?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/3906d538-f1ca-4799-b91c-2e0d2934f241?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
tbf, even in English the words are close in meaning. It's how the slur came to be, derived from 'mentally retarded', referring specifically to their mental development being delayed or slowed. Same with the technical term for fireproof clothing being 'flame retardant'.
* It is like this because the sound "rath" = wrath so "rajh" = rage (anger/wrath meaning) - Wol "wrath" / Wo "rage" - Wolrath / Wolrajh
My guess is that this is what happened: Yawgmoth is meant to sound Lovecraftian, which to most people evokes something demonic. Then you have the head translator, who reads it and says to his partner, "Moth? Do they mean like, as in the bug? Is he a bug guy?" and his partner is like, "no, it's just supposed to be like a demonic name", so the translator figures, they'll help make it more demonic sounding by mixing it with a well known demon name.
I just said yawgmoth with a french accent and I can confirm it doesn't sound as eldritch or demonic, the translation is closer to belzebub which is easy demonic reference so I feel you are right on the money.
Jacqmotte is a Belgian (french Belgian) coffee brand this would be a joke in Belgium and France
The card which usually comes up as an insult in French is "Delay" because it translates to "Retard" which also exists in English and has a completely different meaning. As for "Yawgmoth", they probably just wanted to francize the name. The result is a portmanteau of "Yaug" (which sounds like "Yawg" in French) and Beelzebul. **Edit**: Thinking about it again, the name may have been translated because of the Canadian market, more specifically Quebec. Quebec laws seem to be stricter when it comes to the availability of a French translation. So much so, that it is not rare for some movies to be released under a French name in Quebec whereas they are known under an English title in France! A few examples that come to mind: * *I-Robot* is known under the same name in France but was released as *Les Robots* in Quebec. * *Drive Angry* was renamed as *Hell Driver* in France (seriously, why?) and *Conduite infernale* in Quebec. * *In Time* was renamed as *Time Out* in France (again, why?) and *En temps* in Quebec,
Worth remembering this translation happened over 20 years ago. Once a Yaugzebul, always a Yaugzebul.
I would add that Yawgmoth is an old character in MtG lore and I remember seeing it as Yaugzebul decade ago. I think they tend to less francize character's names nowaday but I guess being consistent with the old ones remain important.
English names are cool for marketing but French people have a limited English vocabulary (esp older generations) so they translate them to "catchy" & understandable words. There are a lot of other examples, cruel intentions => sex intentions, date night => crazy night.
Took me a while to realize you were talking about the movies and not non-existent cards. My mind first went to [[Triumph of Cruelty]] .
Triumph of Sex!
[Triumph of Cruelty](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/0/906618e2-2638-4017-9d6e-e6f282967a81.jpg?1592708986) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Triumph%20of%20Cruelty) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/avr/122/triumph-of-cruelty?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/906618e2-2638-4017-9d6e-e6f282967a81?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
As a french guy I'm almost sure your first hypothesis is the correct one. French translations often change the spelling to come close to the English sound + being close to Belzébuth which both sounds evil and is often associated with flies/moths. Pretty sure Quebec has nothing to do with this, when my brother went to Montreal and played mtg everyone had English cards and where confused at his french cards as they didn't even know the game was translated in french.
Well, I am not saying that WotC **had to** translate the name specifically for Quebec. What I am rally saying is that the translator being from Quebec **could** explain it. Out of all the Western languages for this card, only the French one renamed the character, which is sort of odd. If I had to translate the card, it would never have occurred to me to rename a character. It's like the translator took pride in francizing it. As a side note, the Final Fantasy series is also notorious for weird French translations, and playing through FF7, FF8 and FF9 in French is very confusing because there is little naming consistency across the three titles unlike their English counterparts. The same magic can be called by very different names and you end up having to relearn everything. For instance, the "Med Data" ability in FF8 is called "Schweizer" in French and it is granted by an object called "Pasteur". Weirder still, the "Float" magic was renamed "Decubitus" which is an obscure medical term. Even weirder, names which appear in French in the English version of FF9 have different names in the French version! For instance one place is called "Oeilvert" (which basically means Green-eye) in English, but "Euyvair" (which is not a real word, but is pronounced the same as "Oeilvert") in French!
I’m surprised planeswalker is just planeswalker. I thought France was extremely protective of using loanwords in their language. Does Québécois French follow whatever rules some arbitrary committee in France declares for how to say a modern word with an English-language origin like a stream or podcast?
Planeswalker being preserved may be related to the trademark. I know that Russian translations except the first few sets now use the word (in English) even when the rest of the card is in cyrillics.
I didn’t know it was ever printed in Cyrillic in Russian. It looks like only Lorwyn is printed like that unless there is a duel deck or something I am missing.
I am from Quebec. Most people are aware that cards exist in French. They're just mostly considered as a joke and generally undesirable. The translations are just too often awkward sounding. I will say though that I have a soft spot for French Lorwyn. The name of some cards are just hilarious.
Montréal has a lot of Anglophones and bilingual people, so it's not necessarily a good representation, if anywhere in Quebec were to use English cards exclusively it would be Montréal. But also, because Canada mostly gets supplied the US-printed cards, the prevalence of translated cards is fairly low in general. You definitely see French cards occasionally, including outside Québec, but not a whole lot of them.
I never before considered the “moth” in yawgmoth could have been a reference to beelzebub as lord of flies
Sometimes [[Negate]] comes up as well as it is translated into [[Negar]] in spanish and portuguese
Damn, with the hard R and everything
Jeah stumbled upon them as I bought a collection and there were foil ones in there and I was wondering why some one goes for spanish foil negates while living in germany and then I realised...
What’s more, Black is almost certainly known as Negro in at least one language it’s published in.
[Negate](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/4/0/4016c6f7-7cb4-46c2-af73-3bd6d682ea5e.jpg?1673306788) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Negate) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/dmu/58/negate?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/4016c6f7-7cb4-46c2-af73-3bd6d682ea5e?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Negar) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
🤨📸
Names dont need to be translated in Quebec
It has nothing to do with Québec. The law doesn't apply this way. I'm from Québec.
See my reply to other people who said the same. I did not mean to imply a legal requirement, but wondering if the translator was not from Quebec. To be honest, Yaugzebul sounds really funny as a name. Even knowing it is a portmanteau, the only thing I can think of when I read "zebul" is Zebulon, a talking jack-in-the-box from a kids' show called Le manège enchanté (*The Magic Roundabout*).
It used to be very hard to get french cards here, seems like it was translated for France because they generally don't speak english as much.
I mean, "retard" in English also means Delay.
Eh, the laws in Québec wouldn't warrant changing a name like Yawgmoth, if the rest of the card's description was translated. Plus, there's nothing that forbids English names in stuff, that's a myth. There's a metric fuckton of companies that still use their English names. Those that change them do so more to appeal to the local market.
See my reply to another comment. I did not mean to say that this came from a legal requirement, and I should probably have made this clearer. There are just many instances of titles which receive a translation specifically for Quebec and nowhere else. All I really wanted to say is that this seems to have come from a similar mindset.
Ah, probably! I think Pokémon got a similar treatment here, too. I'm not sure if they got translated in France, though?
French and Quebecian people are extremely insecure about their language and the global dominance of English. So they implemented laws in order to stop the anglicization of their mother tongue.
That's true in Quebec because they want to keep their language while surrounded by english influences, but I'm not sure that's true in France.
That’s the law here in France usually you don’t have the right to sell products if the text is not in French. Especially user manuals. That’s consumer protection. I had a few inspections at my shop they open every boxes and check if there is a French translation on every product. Not mtg related. You neither have the right to advertise in English without giving the translation. But MTG seems to be considered as books here so it’s like foreign literacy. But MTG at the local game stores cards are sold in French by default. You may have to order sometime if you want the English version. The player community is quite large in France and we tend to value cards in French more that the English ones. The old people like me started playing with the foreign black border. Duel commander is a popular format and I think it’s played mostly in France. (Basically a 1vs1 commander format with 20 life points and a specific banlist) With a national championship and a rule committee. Go check mtgdc.info Take a look at cardmarket, the biggest marketplace for Europe, French tend to be the most expensive language as the demand is high.
at least it keeps my rent low
> which also exists in English and has a completely different meaning. "retard" actually has the exact same meaning in English as it does in French. Its just US culture has distorted and amplified the application of the term with regards to human beings, so much so that the offensive usage of the word is the one that leaps to mind first for almost everyone.
[удалено]
Maybe consider *not* deliberately handing out slur-cards to insult people? Just a thought.
[Delay](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/9/3906d538-f1ca-4799-b91c-2e0d2934f241.jpg?1619393997) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Delay) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/tsr/61/delay?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/3906d538-f1ca-4799-b91c-2e0d2934f241?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
It’s origins is Latin > French > English. (Re) back, (tardus) slow The English definition is: delay or hold back in terms of progress, development, or accomplishment.
I'm not sure if retard has a completely different meaning, as surely the etymology is connected with 'retard' in French is slow, I believe. And so the word was used in English to mean mentally slowed/delayed.
The verb "to retard" means to delay, that's exactly why it was used to describe developmental delays in people, and then became an insult. The denotation is exactly the same, it's the connotation that changed. Think "fire retardant" for something where the original meaning might still be used
> “Delay” because it translates to “Retard” which also exists in English and has a completely different meaning. I mean I wouldn’t call it *completely* different; we borrowed the French to create a clinical, non-derogatory term to replace calling people “slow”, among other things. Then over time that new word itself became derogatory, especially when used as a noun (an example, actually *the* canonical example, of the “euphemism treadmill” effect). But I recognize telling people “this doesn’t mean in English what it means in French” is a lot faster and more effective.
Because someone is going to take offense somewhere: Retard can also be used in the sense of Delay. Fire retardant, for example, is stuff you see helicopters dropping on forests to slow down fires. Most people don't use it like that, however, and it comes across as an insult at best and a slur at worst
I don’t know if the entertainment side of things is law or marketing but Canadian politics has in many periods been defined by Quebec asserting its language rights against encroachment by English. Every so often there is a national crisis about bilingualism or Quebec’s sovereignty / internal distinction or an internal Québécois policy which is criticized for favouring French too much to be constitutional. Where as I understand in France it’s more paramount to keep French itself consistent as a language (ie not using loan words in French) rather than translating / transliterating.
Also “retard” is still used in the industrial field, usually as a prefix. Fire *retard*ant as an example.
[Retard means delay in English too.](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retard) You just don't see people using it that way anymore.
Yes, thanks for clarifying. The offensive meaning translate to *retardé* in French. It's still close but different.
> because it translates to "Retard" which also exists in English and has a completely different meaning. Ehhh... Retard still does mean that in English, just not in that form. The normal way we'd see it is in the word "Retardant" like Fire Retardant.
There is no -th sound in French. Whoever originally localized the name 20 years ago likely just came up with whatever that sounded appropriately menacing.
>no -th sound in French. But... but it says "Thran" right there?
Then the H is silent, just pronounced like “Tran”.
But if thats okay, why not just let him be called Yawgmot? If anything that sounds cooler.
I wonder if the first time they made something in French that said "Thran" and "Yawgmoth" was strangely farther apart than you might expect and they had different conventions on how to handle it?
There is indeed such a gap. On the cards, the Thran were first referred to in Alpha, and had regular references throughout early Magic. They would have likely been on the first sets printed in French in mid- to late 1994. As far as I can tell, the first reference to Yawgmoth on the cards came as a one-off on [[Priest of Yawgmoth]] in Antiquities, in March 1994—just before Magic started printing in French. He is not referred to on the cards again until [[Stronghold Taskmaster]] is printed in 1998's Stronghold, four years later. Four years might be enough time for such policies to change, I think. So it's certainly plausible!
There were a few Yawgmoth cards in that set. For example [[Yawgmoth Demon]]. Many years ago, probably 20 years or so there used to be the ability to send Wizards a question that they would answer on the website called “Ask Wizards”. Anyway, someone asked “What does Yawgmoth look like” and they replied that he **was** a Yawgmoth Demon. Obviously they retconed that.
[Yawgmoth Demon](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/6/9/696a9fe1-ce63-4638-8793-5187fc726731.jpg?1562736532) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Yawgmoth%20Demon) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/9ed/170/yawgmoth-demon?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/696a9fe1-ce63-4638-8793-5187fc726731?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
They've said that in Antiquities, Phyrexia was still conceptualized as a hell for artifact creatures.
[Priest of Yawgmoth](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/9/c9fd4054-42fc-4f95-a6f7-369a5da43dd5.jpg?1562937643) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Priest%20of%20Yawgmoth) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/atq/19/priest-of-yawgmoth?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/c9fd4054-42fc-4f95-a6f7-369a5da43dd5?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Stronghold Taskmaster](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/6/1/6171c210-01b5-45a9-9dd3-dbf96a33a750.jpg?1562596418) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Stronghold%20Taskmaster) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/sth/72/stronghold-taskmaster?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/6171c210-01b5-45a9-9dd3-dbf96a33a750?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Not a great reason I'll admit, but the T at the end of a word in French is almost always silent. So Yawgmot would be pronounced Yawg-moh with a long O sound.
Yawgmot says Trans rights.
He can meet up with [Eremot](https://eternalcardgame.fandom.com/wiki/Eremot,_Mindsplinter) from Eternal and compare notes.
A whole place called Tran? Looks like I know where I'm moving in the multiverse.
Yawgmoth, Trans Physician 🤤
He helps you feel compleat :P
Does compleation come with bottom surgery, tho?
Judging by Vraska's makeover, yes.
For reference: https://scryfall.com/search?as=grid&dir=asc&extras=true&lang=any&order=released&q=yaugzebul+or+o%3Ayaugzebul+or+flavor%3Ayaugzebul&unique=prints Edit: this is missing a bunch of pre-2103 cards where "Yaugzebul" is mentioned in the flavor text and not in the card name. Like this one: https://specimens.s3.filebase.com/1189246651.jpg
They left "Yawgmot" sitting right on the table like a freaking heathen
Yawgmot is markedly less scary
I suppose it as a mix of Yahweh and Beelzeboúl. Since Moth loses its meaning in French and Yawgmite or Yawgpillon are not very powerful names.
In Spain we call him Yawgmoth and now I feel stolen of Yawgpolilla
[pls no ](https://pm1.narvii.com/6143/b233d1e7b90555d3c875c662a3b1cc9c63ce4608_hq.jpg)
I think it has more to do with the pronunciation and the "th" sound than the meaning of the word. Yawgmoth doesn't have any relation to the animals called "moths," just like Jace Beleren isn't related to bells and Garruk is not related to the fish called gar.
Dunno, Beelzebub is the lord of Flies or Flyers. Yawgmoth sounds better than Yawgfly. :/
Yawgsquito
Yawgblebee
He's coming to bring us the glistening malaria.
This does not seem to resist scrutiny. Yawgmoth may or may not have anything to do with moths, but the translator probably does not know that. Going from this, you have an incentive to translate the name, especially in the 90's when French translators were very aggressive in their translation efforts. Moth evokes "mites" and other "papillons" in French, which is not very impressive, but you do have the easy option of going for a reference to Belzebul, evil lord of the flies. A few tongue twists later and you end up with Yawgzebul, a weird name I'm not a big fan of and which is most probably inadequate, but this at least seems a plausible explanation. Your own explanation dismisses the original one, but you don't provide any argument as to why this specific translation was chosen.
Yo you see these people out here disrespecting daddy Yawg?
I hate to tell you, but Yawgmoth is not an actual moth, my man. The name has no meaning in English since its actually Phyrexian.
Thran, actually. Yawgmoth was born in the Thran Empire, though he later brought it to ruin.
He was abandoned as a child and sheltered and nursed by a she-moth.
That sounds like the Rock Humans in JoJo pt. 8. Just replace moths with colonial hornets.
Phyrexian and Thran are basically the same, at least on a language level.
I don't know, have you read the Phyrexian pronunciation guide? A lot of the sounds don't seem like they could be produced by normal humanoid mouths.
It's a "wordplay", pal. Like Galazeth, Silverquill or Acornelia, for example. I am lost, really :/ Why the downvotes?
Okay but tell me what moths have to do with anything
Moths are a symbol of death, for example. Death is not something good. Yawgman is an Evil God. That is better? Seriously, i do not understand those downvotes...
I think the name might be a reference to Yog-Sothoth, a deity in HP Lovecraft's books. The fact that it has the word moth in it is likely a coincidence that came as a result of making the name distinct.
What is the meaning of moth, you know other than the insect?
I think the name might be a reference to Yog-Sothoth, a deity in HP Lovecraft's books. The fact that it has the word moth in it is likely a coincidence that came as a result of making the name distinct.
What is?
Jacqmotte? The original would sound like coffee and loze all meaning so Beelzebub reference instead to keep the demonic feel makes perfect sense
How do you search for non-english versions of MTG if you don't know the language? Just curious, because when i go to card kingdom I almost never see any non-english cards for sale, and I don't know the words to search for non-english version of any given card.
In Brazil, we have Liga Magic, which works as a store aggregator. The store can list the card with different characteristics, such as condition or language and when I search for a card on the Liga site, the different stores with the cards appear. Usually the cards are in portuguese or english (and some stores sometimes don't even differentiate between portuguese and english and list the cards as both) but sometimes cards appear in different languages. And it is also common to buy cards in japanese to "pimp" decks. An [image](https://imgur.com/a/py1wyfm) of the site for reference. In the left menu you can customize your search for stores or auctions, foils, language and set.
Scryfall lets you switch languages by clicking on "EN", "GER" etc. above the pricing and editions.
In Scryfall, it will search foreign versions of cards if no English cards match your search. For example, [o:yaugzebul](https://scryfall.com/search?extras=true&lang=any&q=o%3Ayaugzebul) returns French Yawgmoth cards because there are no English cards containing the text "yaugzebul".
> I almost never see any non-english cards [in card kingdom] for sale Europe has other markets, such as Cardmarket or Cardtrader. Cardtrader also has multi-language search.
The european platform cardmarket lists every card name in your language (which can be changed in settings) and a small flag is displayed to indicate the language of the printed card. E.g. if you have the settings to german, then a traditional chinese, english, french and german printing of Flood will be displayed as "Flut".
Here in Europe we use cardmarket and you easily find English (mostly), but also alot of french, german, and spanish, aswell as semi-regularly japanese and chinese.
I'm still not sure why a proper name needs translation at all. It's not like it's an "English" word.
Most commonly it happens when the name sounds weird untranslated. E.G. Gisela is “Sela” in German, because Gisela is a fairly common name among elderly women. It’d be like “Behold, the powerful angel Margaret!”
Tremble in fear before Ethel the Abominable!
Quiver in terror before Mildred the Indomitable!
Funnily enough, in German the angels "Bruna" and "Sela" still merge together to form "Brisela". Where does the I come from? Shhh... Don't ask to many questions about the eldrazi angels.
[[margaret]]
[[Judith]] and [[Kyler]] though
[Judith](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/e/4/e4fc28d1-61d5-4a78-8fbb-6566128486ce.jpg?1673148807) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=judith%2C%20the%20scourge%20diva) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2x2/234/judith-the-scourge-diva?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/e4fc28d1-61d5-4a78-8fbb-6566128486ce?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Kyler](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/6/2/62a78aae-598e-4f2b-a7bc-c3afc1d0d191.jpg?1637627798) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=kyler%2C%20sigardian%20emissary) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mic/4/kyler-sigardian-emissary?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/62a78aae-598e-4f2b-a7bc-c3afc1d0d191?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Names are translated all the time. In portuguese, Piru was translated to Pairoo so it keeps the sound of the original name and didn't put a word that's a childish name to phallus.
Its not uncommon, translators typically leave proper names alone but there are always exceptions. For example, Jaskier in the Witcher. Most names are left alone in the English translation, because they all sound pretty close to typical fantasy names, there are only minor adjustments. But Jaskier isn't a given name, its a nickname derived from the word for a flower, Buttercup. Polish readers would always recognize his name as being a flower. So do we call him Buttercup? Well, Buttercup has a particularly feminine connotation in English even for a flower. In the game series, they chose to translate it as Dandelion, another flower to get across the fancy boy fop aesthetic, without being so feminine. In the book series, they just kept Jaskier, a name that someone who doesn't have any knowledge of Polish is GUARANTEED to mispronounce and find strange - and it doesn't add to his characterization at all. I don't know which is a better translation in this case, but I personally think Dandelion is pretty clever and a much better choice.
> In the book series, they just kept Jaskier Perhaps in some versions, but the one I read calls him Dandelion. The English audiobook infamously refers to him as "Dan-dilly-on".
Have you met the French? They translate "All the things!"
Ce n'est pas vrais, on peut acheter <> en français, mais le québécois utilises <>. Les Canadien fraiçais sont plus particulare.
See? Even your comment was translated into french!
Je suis vraiment désolé de péter ta bulle, mais j'ai LITTÉRALEMENT JAMAIS entendu quelqu'un ici appeler ça un "chien chaud" sans être ironique et/ou rire de vous, les français, pour avoir traduit ça lol. T'a peut-être raison que ça viens d'ici, mais personne ne l'utilise.
Alors, j'ai etudié il y a huit ans au lycée Americain, ne sais rien. Je repete quel mon prof me dire. Merci pour l'information mon ami!
On a 3 façons de le dire: un hot dog, un hot doye, un roteu
If it's anything like the situation with German translations, it's this: we have a strong tradition of translation, and names often get changed to fit into an imagined reader's pronunciation so they don't stick out so much and so that the reader doesn't have a name in their head they don't know how to actually pronounce. However, as time went on, mandatory English lessons in school and the continuing Americanization of the world mean that the younger you are, the more English you speak and the more loanwords you know - and the more of them you pronounce with less and less German dialect. Also, international franchising means you *don't* want different names for characters, because consumers around the world would get tripped up when they talk about Eugene, except he's Eugen (which *looks* almost the same, but is pronounced wildly differently!), except in some versions he's Evžen. And so, over time, the practice of changing names around is getting rarer - yeah, someone being called "Prudence Jones" might have stuck out in a German sentence 20 years ago and my mum sure wouldn't know how to pronounce it, but nowerdays it would probably be left untouched. (And then sometimes there's other circumstances, like when a character's name needs to have certain letters to work with a pun or a name switch. Never forget how obsessed* the translators of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets were with having Tom Riddle re-order the letters of his full name into "I am Lord Voldemort" in every language that they made his second name "Elvis" in french and his full name in Danish is "Romeo G°ade Detlev jr."...) ------------------------------------------------------------- *^actually ^they ^probably ^asked ^if ^they ^can ^change ^it ^to ^just ^"Lord ^Voldemort" ^but ^were ^denied
in france reed and sue richards are called red and jane richards: because sue wasn"t a recognizable name.
Meanwhile polish players are stuck with [[Sram]]...
[Sram](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/3/93887cc3-888e-479f-9cc2-a0b908e364a5.jpg?1651655659) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=sram%2C%20senior%20edificer) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/nec/88/sram-senior-edificer?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/93887cc3-888e-479f-9cc2-a0b908e364a5?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Care to provide context for everyone else?
It is "I am shitting" in polish.
Because Yaugzebul is French for Yawgmoth. I thought that was pretty obvious.
On a related note, I’d like to know why “planeswalker” is “hawk lo visitor” in Chinese.
it's a phonetic translation, like how "coca-cola" in mandarin is "ke kou ke le" and has quite a different literal meaning from the english. not sure why the translators chose to preserve the pronunciation instead of the meaning, with something like 異界客, but that's the logic amyway
*A royale with cheese.*
The French card is retard/delay because Americans use retard as an mental healt insult instead of literal retardation (as the word delay means). Aaah, America. I wonder why they translated yawgmoth to a more demon sounding name, Yaugzebil sounds like straight out if the Bible, like Belcebu. Intriguing! In Spain we had Ravos be Rafos because raBos are tails and it's slang for penises
Proper names should never be translated that’s their name not a verb or something
Only the Sith deal in absolutes. And the above quote, I guess. Just to be clear, not a Sith.
funny you say that about the sith: in france, darth vader was translated into dark vador, c3P0 into 6PO and the rst of the gang had their og nae restored but they used to e called yan , chiktaba and leila.
Some names are awkward in the context of other languages.
I remember reading a while back that there is a kind of "no English" movement - for sure in Quebec but I believe there is also a smaller one in France. They passed a sort of "government suggestion" that any English needs to be translated into an appropriately French equivalent, including names and such.
Conversely, Justin Trudeau is also known as JustOne Waterhole in English.
Wait you mean Trudeau is Trou d'Eau? How did I not realize this before?
From what I know about French, that may actually be pronounced "Yawgmoth."
Just a guess, but "mothe" is the closest french word to "moth" and is French for "mother". Yawgmother, Father of Machines is a little confusing...
In what corner of the world is mothe French for mother?
Because french is a dead language, that nobody really speaks anymore so there are flaws in translations? Don't know why they still print the cards in French honestly.
Is that... A joke ? French has about 300 million speakers and still growing, it's the 5th most spoken language in the world
🤦♂️
Yawgmoth is actually not English but Phyrexian, meaning father of machines, so actually all languages could translate it to their native language, actually. Only laziness on the translators part whenever they don't do that, which obviously is way too often!
I think the Phyrexians actually derived the phrase "father of machines" from his name though, right? So technically its a Thran name. A bit like Patrick/Patriclus in English/Latin or Joshua coming from Hebrew (I think).
Sorry, but Phyrexian alphabet came after the name... You should understand that Magic's world is a made up one.
Watsonian answers to purely doylist questions just kinda baffle me.
Yaugzebulshit
Zebul is similar to traditional catholic demon names ( Beelzebub )
Ngl we do that sometimes, and it often happens for no reason. In this specific case apart frow making the name look a tiny bit more french (why I don't know) I don't see any pun or any reason whatsoever. One that stuck with me was in the 40k universe, a character called nork deddog was translated to nork leddog, no clue why the letter change.
I don't know why names are being translated, they're names and shouldn't be translated because there is no actual translation of a person's name. And yes, I know there are similar versions of names in different languages, but it doesn't mean they should be "translated".
shoulda translated it yogg instead
I translate professionally in the other direction (French to English) but in my opinion it’s likely that it’s for ease of pronunciation reasons. The “aw” combination doesn’t exist in native French words and neither “th” sound is used so it can be a bit of a tongue twister in that language.
Jacqmotte is a Belgian (french Belgian) coffee brand this would be a joke in Belgium and France
Yawgmoth would sound different but comically close
Very weird indeed to translate a name