Looking into the Translation Guide in 3 Genshin Impact nations

Genshin Impact is famous enough by now that it barely needs an introduction: a game stretched across dozens of real-world cultures, each region built on its own foundation. Pay close attention, though, and you'll notice each region runs on its own playbook. Some borrow straight from a real language. Others invent something new just to sidestep the risk of getting it wrong, or blend both approaches without any consistent rule tying it together.

Doesn't that already sound like a fun rabbit hole for a game this massive? Let's walk through three standout regions and see how the translators actually pulled it off.

Mondstadt draws its inspiration from real-world Germany, so it's no surprise that most character titles here lean on German too.

Take Jean, Acting Grand Master of the Knights of Favonius. English splits her into two separate titles, Dandelion Knight and Lion's Fang Knight. German needs only one: "Löwenzahnritter." That works because "Löwenzahn," the German word for dandelion, literally means "lion's tooth," a pun no other language can hold onto, so everywhere else Jean's title just gets cut in half.

A few other characters skip translation altogether and keep their German titles as-is: Fischl's "Prinzessin der Verurteilung" (Princess of Condemnation), Albedo's "Kreideprinz" (Prince of Chalk), Diona's bloodline tagged with "Kätzlein" (Kitten).

Small aside: "Mondstadt" literally translates to "Moon City," Mond meaning moon, Stadt meaning city.

Liyue is built on China, MiHoYo's home country, so the cultural weight here runs a lot heavier than in Mondstadt.

Chinese and English don't share a language family, so translators built their own formula for place names: keep the proper noun in pinyin, translate the common noun that follows it. Guyun Stone Forest and Jueyun Karst both come out of that formula.

The fun part starts once you actually play. At some point you'll run into the line "Don't rush to eat hot tofu, or you'll burn your tongue." It sounds a little unhinged out of context, but it's a Chinese idiom kept close enough to its original meaning that Western players can still catch the gist: don't rush, or you'll mess things up. It just lands a little odd next to how English normally talks.

And you can’t talk about Liyue without Zhongli, Rex Lapis. Every one of his combat lines pulls from chengyu (four-character idioms drawn from classical Chinese literature), each one cramming a whole backstory into four syllables. Word-for-word, a chengyu turns into nonsense in English. Spell out the full meaning instead and you undercut the entire reason a chengyu exists in the first place, which is to compress an entire story down to almost nothing.

There are roughly 20,000 chengyu, four-character idiomatic phrases, still in active use in Chinese today, which means picking the right one for a specific character skill is no small decision. One of Zhongli's skill lines is 壁立千仞 (bìlì qiān rèn), the second half of a couplet written by Lin Zexu, a Qing-dynasty official: 海納百川，有容乃大 ("the sea takes in a hundred rivers, and so becomes vast"), 壁立千仞，無欲則剛 ("a cliff stands a thousand rèn tall, because it wants for nothing"). Put together, the couplet argues that a person free of selfish desire becomes unshakeable and upright, exactly how Zhongli sees his own sense of justice.⁵ English boils all of that down to one word: "Rise." A combat line only gets half a second to fire off mid-combo, and there's no way to cram that entire couplet, even trimmed down, into that half second.

Zhongli's elemental burst line carries a similar trick. "I will have order" comes from 天動萬象 (tiān dòng wànxiàng), an invented four-character phrase built to sound like a real chengyu, closer in meaning to "the heavens move, and every manifestation of nature follows." "Tian," heaven, doubles as a quiet nod to Zhongli himself, the closest thing Liyue has to a true governing power sitting above its own Qixing.

One more small fact, this time for the title Rex Lapis. "Lapis" means stone, "Rex" means king. Together they line up with his Chinese title, 岩王帝君 (Yán Wáng Dìjūn), the Geo Sovereign, ancient-sounding enough to carry the weight of an archon.

Inazuma, the third region in the game, landed hard with players at launch because it draws from Japan: a country built on faith, ritual, and old customs.

Japan runs on keigo, the formal register that signals respect, so Inazuma was never going to skip it. Raiden Shogun, Kamisato Ayaka, Kamisato Ayato, and Sangonomiya Kokomi all speak English that sounds noticeably more formal and old-fashioned than everyone else in Inazuma. In the story itself, that choice has its own logic: Raiden Shogun isn't just Inazuma's patron deity, she's also lived for centuries, so an antiquated vocabulary tracks. Ayaka and Ayato are nobility. Kokomi effectively leads Watatsumi Island and comes from a long line of priests. Fans have long read this speech pattern as a way to carry keigo into a language with no equivalent grammatical structure, though it's not something HoYoverse has confirmed outright.

Most of Inazuma's place names skip translation entirely and stay in romaji instead. The country's own name is the clearest example: 稲妻 (inazuma) means "lightning" in Japanese, but the game keeps the transliteration rather than translating it. Smaller locations keep their full romaji too: Ritou, Tatarasuna, Narukami Island.

There's a very special detail sitting right in Raiden Shogun's own name. Her real name, Ei, is written with the character 影, which literally means "shadow." This is a clever bit of design by the developers, because she once served as a body double for her deceased twin sister, Makoto, whose name in Chinese characters, 真, means "real."

Ei is "shadow," Makoto is "real," an opposing pair of names built right into the kanji that has no way to survive the switch to the Latin alphabet. In the English version, both names become nothing more than two empty strings of syllables, and the entire layer of metaphor about a false identity, about living in someone else's shadow, disappears completely unless a player goes and looks it up themselves.

Mondstadt, Liyue, and Inazuma each solve the translation problem in a completely different way. So there has to be some kind of internal playbook behind all of this, right? Looking specifically at how titles get handled, after digging through enough of these, I think it's possible to guess at a few of their rules. And to be clear, this is my own assumption, not something the localization team has ever confirmed. Here goes:

1. An individual's personal name keeps its original cultural material, borrowed straight from the source culture, while the name of a group or organization gets softened into readable English. Natlan is the clearest test case. Citlali, Xilonen, Kinich, Mualani, and Iansan are all real deity names, pulled wholesale from Nahuatl, Maya, Hawaiian, and Yoruba tradition, while the tribes those characters belong to carry fully translated English names instead: Scions of the Canopy, People of the Springs, Children of Echoes.
2. When there's no clear source culture to borrow from, invent a word that sounds plausible instead of leaving a gap. Nod-Krai is the textbook case. Its culture blends Scandinavian fjord aesthetics, Baltic influence, and Slavic elements without matching any single real template, so the region's signature gameplay mechanic got a made-up name: "Kuuvahki." It echoes the Finnish word for moon, but it isn't an actual Finnish word.
3. A ruler keeps a title close to a real linguistic root, while their subordinates get pulled from a completely unrelated reference point. Snezhnaya's ruler keeps her Russian title intact, Tsaritsa, full name Anastasya Feodorovna Snezhnaya. Her eleven Harbingers, meanwhile, take their names from Italian commedia dell'arte: Pierro, Arlecchino, Columbina, none of it remotely Russian.

Genshin Impact is genuinely massive, and translating something built from this many cultures turns into a risky balancing act: keep the source material intact, respect the cultures it's borrowing from, and above all, don't lose the average player along the way.

Genshin isn't alone in wrestling with this, either. Persona 5 drew real backlash when its English version dropped keigo entirely, with a chunk of fans arguing that it flattened the nuance between Japanese characters' relationships, the same problem Inazuma runs into. The Witcher 3 hit something similar translating its mountain of Slavic monster and folklore names into English. Some stayed close to the Polish original, others got invented from scratch so Western players wouldn't feel lost, not far off from how Nod-Krai and Snezhnaya handle names with no clean cultural root to lean on. Zoom out far enough and it turns out every major game studio pays some kind of price for carrying local culture out into the world. The price just looks different each time.

Personally, what hooks me about this topic is that there's no clean right answer anywhere in it. Sitting with a single line of dialogue or a single name, asking why the translation team picked this option over that one, is sometimes more fun than the story in the game itself. It's a small detective game hiding inside a much bigger one, and the payoff isn't loot, it's a different way of seeing how much of a language's soul can survive crossing a cultural border.

Some layers of meaning get lost in translation no matter what. Think of that lossless as a failure and more as an invitation to go dig into the original.