#magic spellbook

Any magician worth their salt studies their craft with the help of a library's worth of grimoires. And so our Magicians have their own mystical guide, the "Magic Spellbook"!

(This card received a minor update, but only to put the word 'Magician' in quotations just like the other updated cards. It seems unnecessary to insert a whole image here when the only change is that small, so this note should suffice.)

You'll notice that the manga version of this card is not an equip-able card, like Konami's version. Takahashi's original is a plain old Magic Card, and its use in chapter 205, "Begrudging Soul!!", indicates that this card, at least, gives an ATK boost that only lasts up until the end of the turn it's played.

Believe it or not, this was the card whose original name gave me maybe the most trouble translation-wise out of any of Yugi's Battle City cards.

Its original name is 「魔術の呪文書」. 魔術 is basically 'magic', same as it is in many other card names. 呪文書 was a little tougher for me.

From what I gathered based on my resources, the most context-appropriate interpretation for this seemed to be something like 'book of spells' or 'incantation book'; 書 mostly means 'document' or 'book', and 呪文 is literalistically 'spell sentence' or 'spell text/writing'.

With a little interpretation, the latter could be taken to mean 'magic words', 'magic spells', or 'incantation'.

It got to the point where I ended up briefly consulting with a professional translator for this. Their suggestions included "Book of Magic Formulae" (I was unaware of the specific phrase/concept 'magic formula' before they pointed it out) and 'Incantation Book of Magic'. The former goes a little way towards explaining Konami's name (though why they omitted the 'book' part of the name I'll never know).

Their input was very helpful! It gave me a direction to base my mental framework on.

So that just left me to ponder how to render the name. It was clear to me that this was going to be "Magic [something]", probably "Magic [something] Book".

I considered; what's the difference between a "Magic Formulae Book", an "Incantation Book", a "Grimoire", a "Book of Enchantments", and a "Spell Book/Spellbook"? Depending on your specific intentions/needs/traditions, there is granularity among these concepts. But for this particular purpose, what would fit best?

I probably put more thought into it than was really warranted for a minor card like this. But in the end, I decided that "Spellbook" worked for me. Of the options, it was fairly close in intended meaning, small enough to fit comfortably on the top of a card, and the word itself seemed in-line with the other "Magician"-themed cards.