Japanese tech Towara is misspelt?

The first unique Japanese Villager upgrade is named “Towara”.

https://aoe4world.com/explorer/civs/japanese/technologies/towara

I’ve been unable to identify any plausible history reference across sources in Japanese and other languages - in fact, there is nothing in dictionaries that’s spelt towara.

It’s most certainly a misspelling of tawara, which refers historically to straw-woven barrel-shaped containers for foodstuff & materials.

In particular, rice tawara, or 米俵 kome-dawara were universally used to transport rice. This seems to be what the tech refers to.

See also: the folklore story “Tawara Tōda”, which has been translated as “My Lord Bag of Rice”.

Dictionary entry:

Illustration:
ta174

Suggested Fix:
At minimum, correct the misspelling to “Tawara”.

Or if the word’s meaning is difficult for uninformed players to look up (currently, English Google results for “tawara” are not informative, and Wiktionary only explains it in the sumo context), “Rice Tawara” or “Kome-dawara”.

2 Likes

Forget to add that Chinese/Japanese localizers should be informed that the correct word in hanzi/kanji is 米俵.

Ideally, for anything (techs, units, etc.) inspired by history, devs should offer instructions to localizers on what they are, which knowledge field they come from, to help translators achieve correct translations. But that’s obviously too much to expect from the AOE revival project.

1 Like