Teams names and Sonamy in Sonic Advance 3
Nothing major, just something random I’ve noticed in translation
Sonic/Tails and Sonic/Knuckles were translated faitfully: S/T is called “Yuujou Pea”, literally “Friendship Pair” (aww) and S/K is called “Kenka Tomodachi Pea”, literally “Fighting Friends Pair”. So far so uninteresting.
The real interesting teams are Cream/Amy and Sonic/Amy.
In English, C/A is called “Team Jubilee”, a name that baffled some. Of the many meanings of “jubilee”, the one that makes more sense is “A time of celebration or rejoicing”, closely related to the word “jubiliation”. After all, Cream and Amy are best pals and Advance 3 marks the second time they’ve hanged out together, roughly six months after Heroes - I bet they were jubiliating!
Well, turns out it is a much more interesting name for them, because in Japanese they are known as……!
Wow. The imagination is overflowing. For once I’m glad the English translators intervened.
EDIT: just for curiosity I checked the name of this team in the other languages. Turns out, Spanish, French and Italian all decided to follow the Japanese name (they probably didn’t understand the meaning of Jubilee either lmao)…
(the Italian version doesn’t even bother with putting the word “team”, no it’s just “Little Girls”)
And the German version is particularly lazy, as they just slapped “Team Jubilee” again as if it was a name:
I can’t prove to you that this is not the English version, trust me lol
And now for the real reason I thought of writing this post!
As we know, the English translation toned down most of the Sonamy hints throughout the years (more details here and here), and it’s only recently that Western media have started to hint at the ship more blatantly (Boom, IDW). We can chalk it up to cultural differences and different portrayals of Sonic, but it was what it was.
The only instance I can think of where the opposite happened is in Advance 3:
In Japanese, S/A is called “’Raburabu?’ Pea”, literally “‘Lovey-dovey?’ Pair”. Notice the question mark. It’s very tongue-in-cheek, clearly poking fun at Sonic not sharing Amy’s enthusiasm at all.
The English version, for whatever reason, missed the sarcasm entirely:
Sure, Sonic still has an expression that screams “Why are we still here? Just to suffer?”, but the name seems much more earnest, like it’s saying yeah, they are lovely!
And of course all the other languages followed suit:
The Japanese name seems very out of place now, doesn’t it? Somebody in the translation team clearly had an agenda.
… maybe one day I’ll stop obsessing over small translation details, but that day is not today.
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