Behind The Nihon Review

Back again with my semi-regular column. How’s everyone?

This week, I was asked again to fill in for our translator, who was absent due to personal reasons. In this installment, I’m going to give all of you a deeper insight into my job as a translator using Episode 9 as a case study; the second half of the article will be devoted to my general impressions of the series, which I haven’t really talked about yet.

Let’s first talk about what I had to do for episode 9. Needless to say, it was a lot more simple than the two minutes of episode 6 I translated; there was less emotion, less tension; there was, therefore, no need for me to beautify the text or wrack my brain for alternative translations. Of course, my translation checker is free to disagree with me on everything I’ve done, and the final product which you all will see on either Wednesday or Thursday afternoon is a group effort. But as for me, I often prefer to sacrifice literal meaning (especially in the case of idiomatic expressions) in the pursuit of natural-sounding English. I feel that, as viewers, you all should be able to feel that the characters in the show are speaking in English, and not Japanese

A word on the German, as I’m also responsible for those as well: Ironically, the German presents a unique challenge to me as I do not know how the seemingly random words that appear in each episode interact with each other. Therefore, I can only guess as to how the German fits together, and I usually choose to translate them separately from each other, independently. If the German does, in the end, fit together into coherent sentences… well, then I’m in trouble.

On a separate note, a little bit of trivia: the German sentences that appears during the eyecatches at the half of each episode and during the OP are all German translations of the lyrics of the OP for both ef games, the first tale and the latter tale. These two songs, Yuukyuu no Tsubasa (Which translates to eternal feather) and emotional flutter, are both liked very dearly by me; to translate the German that uses lines from these two songs, I simply looked to the original and used the Japanese lyrics. Astonishingly enough, however, I have yet to find a grammatical error in the German used throughout the series. (Or, perhaps, I’m just not looking hard enough?)

Back to the episode, though. There were a few points where I had to be a bit more careful with the translation; both of these points were monologues. First was Yuu and Yuuko’s internal monologues, in which they both expressed regret for not admitting to each other’s love sooner and causing each other so much pain. Perhaps my TLC will disagree with me on this one, but since the Japanese word “suki”, as you all know, can describe quite a large range of emotions, I chose to go with the strongest possible meaning, “love.” I felt there was more impact, more guilt, more regret associated with “If I had loved her sooner” as opposed to “If I had liked her sooner.” You know what I mean? I tried, also, to keep the balance of dialog and anaphora as closely as possible. I’m not sure that I did such a good job, but that’s up for you, my audience, to decide.

The other point where I had to be careful, of course, was Kuze’s inner monologue. I felt I did a better job there, keeping the parallels between Red-Mask Kuze and Blue-Mask Kuze pretty consistent. I do feel a bit of reservation with the line “Do you think you can win or lose at life?” and “Just thinking that is loss.” Both of these phrases had to sound a bit awkward, since I didn’t want to say “win or lose” again during the second phrase. I toyed away with simply saying “Do you think you can win at life?” but some meaning is lost there as well. Anyways, enough ranting about semantics from me. (Then again, it IS my job.)

Now, before I talk about my impressions of the series in general, a word about the preview at the end of each episode. These are my favorite things to translate, because each one is only one or two sentences, yet each preview manages to capture the spirit of the next episode very well. They’re also really beautiful to listen to, as well as aesthetically pleasing. For example, from this week:

思い出す過去。

思い巡る邂逅。

In Romaji:

Omoidasu Kako.

Omoimeguru Kaikou.

Very poetic, the anaphora is very strong. If you look at the kanji, even if you can’t understand it, you can see the parallel; it’s visual. Here’s my translation:

A past remembered.

A reunion surrounded by memories.

Not as strong as it could be, but I couldn’t think of a succinct way to do it, like the Japanese. I blame the English language.

Now, enough about that. Moving on, notes about the series in general:

To sum it up, I’m not a huge fan. There are a few reasons for this; I believe that SHAFT made some serious blunders in terms of characterization and plot development that, honestly, killed, in my mind, at least two characters: Kuze and Yuuko. Potentially Mizuki. I’ll just talk about Kuze today, since I want to keep this short… a bit late for that, isn’t it?

NOTE: Pretty much everything after this point is a spoiler for either the anime version or the game.

First, I’ll talk about what I believe to be SHAFT’s greatest mistake: flow. Unlike Chihiro and Miyako’s stories in season 1, the story between Mizuki and Yuuko are not concurrent. They are the opposite. As we discover at the end of episode 9, Mizuki knows Yuuko. It would have made a lot more sense, in my mind, to finish up Mizuki’s story cleanly (at least, until that point at the church) and then jump into Yuu’s recollections of Yuuko. It makes sense because Mizuki brings up the name Yuuko; it makes sense because it gives Yuu a reason to think back to the times that he and Yuuko had together. The way SHAFT did it, it feels slightly jarring and one can’t see the relationship between the two stories very well. It becomes confusing.

Now a word on Kuze. I honestly believe SHAFT ruined him. In the original, Kuze was a man who was deeply hurt by his illness, yet found the will to live through his own determination and Mizuki’s encouragement. He never cried, never broke down; he was a different person. One thing remains the same, however; he wished to push others away so they wouldn’t be hurt by his death. It wasn’t that he ran away from battles he couldn’t win, but rather, he was a more kind and considerate person, in my opinion. The defining scene in that arc, I remember, is when Kuze wants to push Mizuki away. This happened in the anime too; Nagi invents a clever lie to get Mizuki away from Kuze. In the game, Kuze takes matters into his own hands and almost succeeds in raping Mizuki, in order to get her to hate him. I think this was a better plot device. It shows both Kuze’s determination to get everyone away from him and Mizuki’s deep, deep love for him as well as her compassion. In episode 9, they gave Kuze’s most memorable line from the game (in my opinion) to Chihiro. Chihiro’s little lesson to Mizuki at the train station about having a dream and achieving one’s dreams was originally spoken by Kuze to Mizuki; I feel the switch in character turns Kuze into a spineless coward, someone who’s unwilling to go out and get what he wants, and turns him into a suffering emo crybaby.

That’s it for this time. Yuuko gets her own article because she’s so fucking awesome.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? All are welcome. I’m hoping I’ll see you all soon.