 You may have heard that Masahiro Sakurai recently shared his experience of playing Among Us. What you may not have heard is that many prominent news outlets made a crucial mistake in reporting on his remarks. Anything that Sakurai says is often picked apart by fans, ourselves included, looking for a hint as to what might be coming in future Super Smash Brothers DLC. Most websites who've covered this story have concluded that Sakurai doesn't think Among Us will remain popular. There's a problem with this, though. He actually said the exact opposite. Sakurai recently talked about Among Us in his regular column in the Japanese gaming magazine, Famitsu Weekly. Often the wonderful, talented team at Source Gaming will translate or paraphrase these columns so that Westerners can know what Sakurai is discussing. In paraphrasing the last sentence of the column, the translator for this article, Cody Nokolo, said quote, He wonders how long Among Us's popularity will last for. This is accurate. Sakurai does indeed speculate on Among Us's long-term popularity, but some news outlets got the wrong end of the stick. They assumed this meant that Sakurai doubted Among Us's popularity. We wanted to read the column for ourselves, so we bought a digital copy and asked some native Japanese speakers for help in translating parts of it. What Sakurai actually said is, well, this. The native speakers we consulted said this translates as, I think its popularity will continue. This miscommunication is an excellent example of how, when covering game news from Japan, journalists can sometimes get the wrong end of the stick. Important information can get lost in translation. We reached out to Cody from Source Gaming to get a sense of how these issues are handled, who said, quote, This is an interesting topic. When I translate these columns, or anything really, it's difficult to be sure how people will read my version of it. It takes a lot of experience with people reading your work to learn about that, and less experience with the actual translating aspect. Sometimes people will assign a kind of feeling to something just because they might be trying to find something more in it, which tends to happen a lot with translations of Sakurai's words because of the culture around it. Smash fans in particular always seem to be reading into things Sakurai says or does to try and find out more about Smash. The case you bring up isn't specifically about Smash, but I do think something similar is happening here. Those outlets read my translation and it seems like they wanted to find some kind of edge in those words about among us his popularity. That kind of thing would make the line more interesting than what it really is. Sakurai just innocently wondering how long the game will stay popular for since it's a very popular game right now. So maybe that kind of spin on it is to drive more attention to their article. Either way, seeing that kind of thing makes me think more about how I'll phrase future translations. This kind of thing is something I think about when I do my translations. I think about how news outlets and regular people will understand what I translate so I can try to best communicate what the original words were trying to say while avoiding any possible misreadings. In a case like this where they just take a line of my translation out of context, it's difficult to avoid, but it's something you just have to hope people will look more into so they hear the whole translation with its context. It's particularly interesting to hear Cody talk about how hype surrounding Smash Brothers clouds everyone's views of anything Sakurai has to say. The Smash Brothers overseer has previously stated in another column that he has to be careful about talking about games online especially if there's a chance that Westerners will hear his remarks. He said, I usually play quite a lot of games, however as soon as word gets out that I'm playing or enjoying the game there's a lot of hype around Smash Brothers. Misunderstandings can spread especially overseas so I'm pretty careful. I don't talk about the games I'm playing on Twitter. That's definitely the moral of this story. Misunderstandings can spread easily on the internet. It's important to check your sources and not necessarily take everything you read online at face value.