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Why do we treat the Hyrule Encyclopedia as non-canon for The Legend of Zelda again?
Eiji Aonuma, the series' author, seems to believe it to be canon and implies that he supervised its content, despite not having a direct hand in writing it.
From what I've seen, it not being canon is based on a quote in the book's preface claiming that it contains creative liberties to the original lore. However, there are issues with that:
I. Said interpretation of the quote over the internet comes from a random Japanese translator on ZeldaUniverse.net, who simply noted that the preface stated such a thing. The translator in question did not provide a word-for-word translation with the original kanji for reference, they merely paraphrased the quote. This is therefore unreliable to use.
II. The official English translation of the "creative liberties" statement is:
As I hope anyone can discern, this is not the "take what we say here with a grain of salt" statement that people often make it out to be - far from it.
And about the validity of the official translation: the lead editor of the Goddesses Trilogy (ie, Hyrule Historia, the Encyclopedia and the Art & Artifacts artbook), that is, the guy mainly responsible for supervising the English translation of these guides, is Patrick Thorpe. Check how he described the process of translating and editing the Encyclopedia specifically:
Given all of the above, I trust an official translation of the Encyclopedia that had several weeks and a professional team and countless revisions worth of effort put into it far more than what a translator on the internet who wasn't validated by other reliable translators paraphrased (and I do stress that this was a mere paraphrase of the actual quote, not a word-for-word kanji translation). This isn't an appeal to authority - the official translation was revised and supervised by a reliable and fluent translation team, and is thus extremely accurate to the original Japanese.
The second issue some have is the existence of contradictions with the game's lore. Indeed, there exist some contradictions. But every single guidebook, canon or otherwise, is bound to have some unreliable bits once in a blue moon. They don't affect the canonicity of the whole guide, just the validity of the specific section being quoted. In fact, Zelda as a whole is rather infamous for having lacked a timeline and continuity until after the release of Majora's Mask, making the series itself inconsistent on that regard.
In fact, pretty much every contradiction people point out concerns some minor detail that isn't super important to the games' lore continuity (like the Koroks being Hylian).
So, overall: if the Hyrule Encyclopedia is heavily implied by the series' supreme authority to be canon, it contains few contradictions with the lore, is the continuation of an unquestionably canon guide (Hyrule Historia), being even stated by the lead American editor, who is affiliated to Nintendo of Japan (as he himself states in this interview) to be more reliable, expansive and in-depth than Historia, why don't we consider it canon?
Eiji Aonuma, the series' author, seems to believe it to be canon and implies that he supervised its content, despite not having a direct hand in writing it.
From what I've seen, it not being canon is based on a quote in the book's preface claiming that it contains creative liberties to the original lore. However, there are issues with that:
I. Said interpretation of the quote over the internet comes from a random Japanese translator on ZeldaUniverse.net, who simply noted that the preface stated such a thing. The translator in question did not provide a word-for-word translation with the original kanji for reference, they merely paraphrased the quote. This is therefore unreliable to use.
II. The official English translation of the "creative liberties" statement is:
As I hope anyone can discern, this is not the "take what we say here with a grain of salt" statement that people often make it out to be - far from it.
And about the validity of the official translation: the lead editor of the Goddesses Trilogy (ie, Hyrule Historia, the Encyclopedia and the Art & Artifacts artbook), that is, the guy mainly responsible for supervising the English translation of these guides, is Patrick Thorpe. Check how he described the process of translating and editing the Encyclopedia specifically:
Given all of the above, I trust an official translation of the Encyclopedia that had several weeks and a professional team and countless revisions worth of effort put into it far more than what a translator on the internet who wasn't validated by other reliable translators paraphrased (and I do stress that this was a mere paraphrase of the actual quote, not a word-for-word kanji translation). This isn't an appeal to authority - the official translation was revised and supervised by a reliable and fluent translation team, and is thus extremely accurate to the original Japanese.
The second issue some have is the existence of contradictions with the game's lore. Indeed, there exist some contradictions. But every single guidebook, canon or otherwise, is bound to have some unreliable bits once in a blue moon. They don't affect the canonicity of the whole guide, just the validity of the specific section being quoted. In fact, Zelda as a whole is rather infamous for having lacked a timeline and continuity until after the release of Majora's Mask, making the series itself inconsistent on that regard.
In fact, pretty much every contradiction people point out concerns some minor detail that isn't super important to the games' lore continuity (like the Koroks being Hylian).
So, overall: if the Hyrule Encyclopedia is heavily implied by the series' supreme authority to be canon, it contains few contradictions with the lore, is the continuation of an unquestionably canon guide (Hyrule Historia), being even stated by the lead American editor, who is affiliated to Nintendo of Japan (as he himself states in this interview) to be more reliable, expansive and in-depth than Historia, why don't we consider it canon?
