Rumour: Fans May Have Translated The Zonai Text In Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom Trailer

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!