Interesting peek behind the veil, localization goes far beyond simple translation but that's not immediately obvious to most, unless they're playing a poorly localized game!
I don't have much else to to add except to say that Odyssey is a fantastic game and you should buy it. I'm a PC gamer and have no nostalgia goggles for any Nintendo property except Pokémon - I don't even like platformers! - but that game is a joy to play. The section where the song in TFA played was particularly stand out.
I'm a big Nintendo fan. Other than that, I came to say almost exactly what you did. Including the recommendation!
Localization in entertainment is often more about preserving the conveyed feelings than translating the words themselves. During the recent development of Need for Speed: Payback, I happened to sit next to two people working on dialogue and localisation. I'm a software engineer working on the UI team, but for a few months, these wonderful guys were seated in the UI room.
I learned a bunch from them, especially when they discussed how to translate things like common sayings and cultural references.
Song translation is a really interesting "intelligence-complete" [constrained] optimization problem. You have an objective function that needs to take into account:
- closeness of meaning to the source language for each line or group of lines
- rhyme scheme in the target language (often completely absent in the source language)
- meteor/scansion in the target language (i.e. strong syllables on downbeats, see: http://www.patpattison.com/perfectmatch/ - and, as is often the case when the source language is a language like Japanese where syllable stresses are ignored, the melody is not written to make this easy)
- if the target language is tonal or semi-tonal, the degree to which words match the melody increasing/decreasing in pitch
- overall natural feel of the lyrics as dialogue
So the song re-writing is an iterative process as indicated here: over time, you explore the space of possible translations, evaluating against these metrics, and recognizing that changing one line could have higher-order effects, i.e. you need to change the rhyme scheme and therefore require a reordering of two other previous lines, leaping out of a local optimum and throwing out a lot of progress to make the overall song even better!
Skilled songwriters, of course, can instantly discard huge portions of the space, and know intuitively where to begin. But even the best still need to iterate. And I find translation a great exercise for songwriting, since it lets me practice navigating this subspace of the much more complex general problem: how do you write a song starting with a blank page?
If you're interested in video-game localisation, you'll get a kick out of Legends of Localization. It's a site run by professional translator and amateur game-translator Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin, and it has a bunch of articles examining the translation of particular well-known scenes¹ as well as in-depth comparisons between different versions of a single game, like The Legend of Zelda².
I don't have much else to to add except to say that Odyssey is a fantastic game and you should buy it. I'm a PC gamer and have no nostalgia goggles for any Nintendo property except Pokémon - I don't even like platformers! - but that game is a joy to play. The section where the song in TFA played was particularly stand out.