
A brand new Zelda trailer always brings a lot of excitement, and there was an extra layer of jubilation with the newest The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom trailer — one, because we have a name, and two, we have a release date — 12th May 2023! But what everyone is really after are the theories. The answers. And one fan claims to have worked out what some of the Zonai script says during the trailer, which may give us a few clues.
Over on GameOver Jesse's Hylian Gamescast (shared via GameXplain and GoNintendo), a fan messaged in with a potential answer as to what this short snippet of text could mean. The Zonai tribe has been one of the biggest talking points of Tears of the Kingdom — heck, even we focused on them a lot when we tore apart the relatively short trailer. But this text in particular has had fans transfixed for weeks, with many over on various Zelda subreddits trying to decipher it.

The section of the trailer in question is at around 37 seconds in, but we've taken a snapshot of the important part for you, with the Zonai script on the right.

Translating any fictional in-game language is usually a pretty in-depth process, but Zonai's text in particular has had people spinning. But, according to this listener, they believe the stone tablet text translates into some kind of a poem:
"When the sun shines, the moon shines.
When the moon shines, the stars shine.
When the sun sets, the moon turns red.
Daylight comes and goes, but the sun never shines."
As vague as that might be, there's a lot that Zelda fans might be able to pull apart here — blood moons? Wars? History? Typical BOTW stuff! You can check out the discussion from the time-stamped video below:
But that's not the only piece of text in the trailer. If you've looked closely at the game's ouroboros-like logo, there's a little bit of text on each of the dragons. But the listener thinks that the text inscribed on these two may hint towards a "meeting of lovers", which is a little bit different from ouroboros!
Of course, this isn't confirmed, and some are less sure about whether the translation is correct. Over on the r/TotKLang subreddit (created by the same people who made the r/ChozoLanguage subreddit for Metroid Dread), user CryZe92 believes the code that the listener has used brings up "four possible combinations". Another user, DMCthread310, picks up that matching the runes to a single Japanese character may not be correct either:
So, essentially, this Zonai script is causing a lot of debate and it's led to dedicated fans trying to grab any kind of clues as to what we can expect from Tears of the Kingdom. There's plenty of good work going on over on the r/Zelda subreddit, including this overall discussion on the Zonai script, and a more focused discussion on this trailer's script alone.
It looks like we're going to be talking about this trailer for a long time. Even we've got in on the action with our own list of theories and details:
Have you attempted to decipher the text in the Tears of the Kingdom trailer? Let us know!
[source youtube.com, via youtube.com, gonintendo.com]
Comments 18
I guess this alludes to the possibility that, despite being defeated at the end of BotW, Ganon wasn't truly vanquished as monsters continued to roam, and blood moons continued to rise.
The words are that of Mordor, which I will not utter here.
But the Sun ALWAYS SHINES on TV
The sun never shines, that to me seems like we maybe going underground? I’m excited for this game quite a bit but I hope we might be discovering new places to explore on land, maybe the Twilight? Because Nintendo have hardly shown much from the trailers we have seen, tiny little snippets, they are keeping something big very secretive
This means tingle is in the game
Hoped it was tear related.
Like teared tears or tearing tear.
That's quite interesting. Personally I didn't believe the sequel would delve in the Zonai like many fans thought it would. If the trailer depicted a tablet in their language, even if it's meaningless (or not), it might point people were right about the Zonai.
I love these deep lore, the kind we had in BotW where the environment tells you a wordless story. I'm pretty happy to be proven wrong
Damn this game might be dark af
Tears of the Kingdom 2 confirmed
I'll be honest, I had to look up Zonai. I guess I should have paid more attention to Ruin names and stuff because I totally missed something.
Granted I only really paid attention to main story characters and tribe names. Guess Breath of Wild took cues from Dark Souls in terms of fleshing out lore.
I hope that they tie the Zonai in with the Dark Interlopers from Twilight Princess. I've always wanted to know more about both groups.
Seriously, Zelda Youtubers needs to calm down, they are making 30min long videos based in barely 6 minutes of footage, and some of them act like they have played the whole thing talking about story and gameplay. It's kinda sad how desperate they are.
It's clearly saying, "The princess has been kidnapped by Yiga. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the princess?"
@Bunkerneath I wish people would listen to more a-ha than just take on me, they're a great band.
Half Life 27 confirmed!
I can’t actually find the process of translation actually documented anywhere in detail.
The people in the video above talk about it a lot, but the concrete steps aren’t shown. We’re told that the characters map to the Latin alphabet, which is turn spells out a Hepburn romanisation of the Japanese language. (I believe this has also been the case for some scripts in previous Zelda games.)
It sounds perfectly plausible, but why is this intermediate step nowhere to be found? We seem to have magically ‘arrived’ at the final English translation with all the steps taken to get there reduced to hand waving.
GameXplain and others have jumped on this (“WE’VE CRACKED THE CODE”) without any investigation as to whether the intermediate steps between original text and translation make sense, or whether they even exist in the first place. There’s nothing in the way of ‘explanation’ there at all.
EDIT: The person who contributed the translation said they plan on sharing their key and mapping ‘tomorrow or the day after’. Really, I think this should have been a prerequisite before sites start reporting on this stuff, but hopefully something comes of it. I can’t see why the conclusion and the justifications couldn’t have been posted at the same time, though.
Do people really have this much free time on their hands? Hey, God bless.
Removed - off-topic
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