Gubaba

Y'know what I'm not a big fan of? Those twelve or thirteen clip shows that came in between HnK and KnK2. But yeah, I never actually finished watching HnK2, even though I loved the "Tough Boy" theme song...it became a little TOO clear with that one that the writer was just making it up as he went along...Plus, let's face it: when Raoh dies, the series dies.

You...watched the movie BEFORE you watched the TV ending...? That's unusual...

I dunno, I have no problem with that. At the very least, it's a much more constructive hobby. He's a member here, though (although I don't think he's posted in a very long time), so we probably shouldn't say anything TOO bad about him...

Sweet Jesus, you're a Neo-Platonist, aren't you! Well...yes, anime is all of those things, the images, the voice acting, AND the script. But this thread is about translation, no? Myung's voice actress hesitating has nothing to do with how the subs are translated, unless the translator wants to put a comma or ellipses in the line to show where that pause takes place...the difference between "I gave it up a long time ago" and "I gave it up...a long time ago."

Yep. And yes, he is indeed the writer and creator of Valkyrion. Other than that, I have no idea what to say about this. It doesn't look very appealing.

BOOOOOO!!!

Isn't that the one written by the Pie Guy?

I've been living on Mars Base Salla for the last couple of years...so I should be COMPLETELY safe from whatever's about to hit earth.

Totally. Idioms are KY.

Here ya go...

I'll try to see if I can get a screenshot in a bit...but yes, if you go through the DVD frame-by-frame, you can see her lower half flying off the screen with her upper half being, um, not attached.

Sweet of you to think of me, but... Nanase's a large girl, but in that pic...man, she's just deformed. A hunchfront, if you will.

That's funny...since that's generally considered one of the first GOOD dubs of an anime... My advice: Never, ever watch the dub of Eva. You WILL gnaw your own leg off. For the record (since I think Keith was talking to me when he started talking about watching cartoons in English), of COURSE I like subs better, but I have made a couple of exceptions. Princess Mononoke has very inconsistent voice acting (Billy Crudup and Gilllian Anderson are awesome, Billy Bob Thornton is terrible), but the script is by Neil Gaiman, of whom I'm a big fan. Most of the Disney dubs for Ghibli movies are perfectly serviceable, and I don't mind watching them (although I prefer the original Japanese). I also watched some of the dub for SDFM because of Mari, but...well... I agree with you if we're talking about language in general...but we're not; we're talking about scripts. A script, being a work of fiction, is MADE of language. Thus, I don't think it's a falsification any more than a painting of a person is a falsification because it's made of paint and not flesh. And before you voice the obvious objection: I don't think fiction or painting are falsifications of reality. They are not trying to BE real, they are trying to be good fiction and good paintings. The paint on a canvas isn't false paint, and the language of a script isn't false language. That's my point. Even then, Deacon Blues translation leaves out the fact that the way he says "I am called Deacon Blues" is the humble form. The various hierarchical levels of politeness in Japanese are the bane of any Japanese-learner, and even more so for the translator. Anyway, it's a good example of something in Japanese for which there is no equivalent in English, and thus CANNOT be translated in any literal way. Completely different words are used to convey honor and/or personal humility; there are ways to do it in English ("I am called Deacon Blues, Sir" or "I'm pretty unimportant, but you could call me Deacon Blues if you'd like"), but nothing that would be anything close to literal.

Yeah, I read your interpretation of the final TV episodes. But I don't think you can make many one-to-one correspondences between the TV and Movie endings. The few scenes that are the same are shown in a different order, so trying to figure out what's happening when between the two is an exercise doomed to failure. Your theory is also based on ideas of what Instrumentality looks like that may or may not be true...where did you get the information that everyone was (for want of a better term) incorporated into Shinji? I've never heard that before, and thus view it with natural skepticism. And anyway, as someone mentioned elsewhere, the Newtype 100% book claims that Shinji at the very end of the TV series is the Instrumentalized Shinji. I have the book and I've checked it. Now you could argue that they got it wrong, I suppose, or you could argue that a few seconds AFTER the TV series ended, he changed his mind, but you can't state as an unqualified fact that the two endings are the same. If that's how you want to view it, great. But if you want to be intellectually honest, you've got to call it a theory, not a fact. And you've got to ignore the Newtype book to do so. This one, on the other hand, I thin we can ALL agree on: This ridiculous and nonsensical idea is based on the fact that Asuka's eyes look brown in the final scene of EoE. But they're not brown, they're blue...it's just dark outside, so naturally her eyes look darker. This one gets debunked over and over again, but somehow it refuses to die...

Well, THAT'S a vicious circle, isn't it?

I think that's still open to debate...my impression is that they're pretty much the same until the very end.

Neither. May'n has a really interesting voice (when she's Sheryl, that is...her solo stuff, not so much), deeper than your usual Japanese songstress, and with a certain...I dunno...knife-like quality to it. As for the songs themselves...do you really need to ask? It's Yoko Kanno! They're kinda rock, kinda disco (with a couple of killer ballads), and kinda weird...in the best way possible, of course. Even if you haven't seen the show, listen to the music. It's really something special.

Y'know, there's that old bit that pretty much all of us thought of when first watching SDFM (or, for many of us, Robotech), i.e. Why didn't U.N. Spacy just broadcast porn the Zentradi if they REALLY wanted to mess with them? This is kinda like that. I wish we'd had it a few months ago when the Sheryl Shippers were getting so obnoxious. Send it to them and watch their brains explode!

I'm tellin' ya, Alan Moore said he laid a curse on the movie...don't mess with an experienced Kabbalist.

THAT'S right...I remember her using the leg missiles (or almost using them). And maybe there will be more detail on the "B" page... Oh, and Morpheus...now that I actually HAVE the issue, I checked the Mylene pages, and no, we're not done with her. The "Character Episodes" haven't reached the end of the series yet. So yes, more Mylene fashion is on the way! Whether you want it or not!

They actually GAVE MYLENE WEAPONS??? After she went apeshit with the VF-19's missiles? Someone wasn't paying attention when they made the fighter...(I blame Ray and Max). Did you have any doubt on that score? And this is only the DYRL version! I'm sure they'll be getting to the TV version eventually...

The answer to your first question is: HELL NO, That's not some weird amalgam of Misato, Rei, and Asuka! It's just Asuka. Her eyes only LOOK brown because it's dark out.

Gad, there's tons to reply to here...this thread is eating up my time off... Point taken. Man, you're taking me back to my college Plato and Aristotle courses with that "penny" stuff... I think we agree more than we disagree. I remember reading Artisophanes's "The Clouds" in school, and getting annoyed because Socrates was talking about songs with mountain themes, and the translator substituted whatever was in the original Greek with things like "On Top of Old Smokey" and "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain." I would've preferred that he put the original song titles and informed us through footnotes that they were songs of the period. The translator must be sensitive to the world of the story and not intorduce jarring elements, even if they're more familiar. I would expect a higher "level of weirdness" or exotica from an anime set in 11th Century Kyoto than I would set in present day New York. It's a delicate balancing act, no matter how literal you're trying to be. I don't hold my translations up as paragons of beauty, truth, and perfection, but I do try to be as faithful as possible. In my (still unfinished...man, I've got a lot do!) translation of the "Nyan Tra" liner notes, I felt that I needed to add a little bit of information to make a certain point (that the seven-colored carrots are no longer being produced) clearer...they never came out and SAID it, but it was heavily implied. But then, Japanese can handle some forms of ambiguity better than English can. A number of things implicit in the original must be made explicit in English if the meaning is to come across. I don't think I was really falsifying the information...I was merely presenting the same information in a different language. Poetry, on the other hand, WILL ALWAYS be falsified by translation, since there are so few words in a poem that every single one carries enormous weight. Most anime scripts don't achieve that level of sophistication, though. ...he said smugly. (And I agree, also smugly. ) I agree. Anime is a medium, not a body of work. And while I have a lot of respect (and love) for erudite, scholarly, "difficult" approaches to things, I'm not sure the general anime or SF fan wants that, or would tolerate it. Imagine if your average romance novel set in 18th Century Ireland or something had TONS of notes and background information on the culture and history, and a painstaking analysis of Gaelic. Some women would eat it, but I think most would get impatient waiting for the hunky guy to rip the woman's bodice and stick his purple warrior into her delicate flower, and that book would end up in the trash can. I think the same is true for anime, and that's okay. Again, I think the best example of a scholarly (but fun) approach is Animeigo's "Urusei Yatsura" collections. TONS of information about culture and translation, presented in such a way that the viewer can take or leave it, depending on his or her level of interest. But I don't think all anime would benefit from this approach. I don't think we need ten different translations of or copious liner notes for, say, "Fight! Iczer-One" in order to soak up all the subtleties in the dialogue.

I'm still not convinced; by translating idioms literally (unless you have some kind of footnote), it seems to me that you're STILL falsifying the work by adding that level of weirdness that isn't present to the original audience. Having suffered through far too many Hong Kong DVDs, I can say with some certainty that having the Queen and King fan with the scratchy voice from an early episode of Macross 7 shout "What the fool you make me?" instead of, say, "What the hell are you talking about?" did nothing to help me appreciate the "foreignness" of the Japanese language, and nothing to help me revel in the intricacies of Japanese to Chinese to English translation difficulties. Instead, it just made me curse the ineptness of translation by computer. Ditto having to deal with Focker being called Fuxutokka and Shin saying "What is a city?" instead of "Cities, huh?" in Macross Zero. If I hadn't understood what he was saying in Japanese, I would have been seriously confused. Ditto the HK version of the 20th Anniversary DVD I got...do YOU know what they mean by "Chando Blue"? (For the answer, see below.) Idioms can be fun, informative, and enlightening...but what about dull grammatical problems? (Admittedly, "What the fool you make me?" is a stunningly great bit of Engrish, and I'm kind of glad I came across it.) ˙ıpɐɹʇuǝz :sı ɹǝʍsuɐ ʇɔǝɹɹoɔ ǝɥʇ

I'm sure he doesn't. Why bother when you've got a ready-made obsessive fan-base willing to do all that work for you?