#muito

[lenkike]

Tem algo muito atraente em ver a esposa lendo o manual de uma cafeteira enquanto usa uma camiseta enorme… deveria ser crime.

[nanah17blog]

Não dizer nada também é dizer muito.

Valentina S2

[feelingcomplet]

[nodutra19]

A Brief Ramble on Princess Tutu and Translation

I don't speak Japanese, but, in recent times, I've become significantly more attentive to and critical of how translations sound. This is especially thanks to keeping up with Haru-Dipthong's translation of Revolutionary Girl Utena.

I decided to start watching Princess Tutu and I was dumbfounded by how horrendous the translation sounded to me.

I have no idea what the original Japanese says but judging by how awful this sounds, it's doubtless a literal translation. Probably too literal for its own good. My only credentials for criticizing this is reading a shit ton of books. Just looking at this, I would recast this sentence as

Aren't you a miserable little creature.

Fakir seems overall regal, aristocratic, and authoritative (see what I did there?). He lives in a castle! The subs here, which is what the dub also goes with, just fail at capturing that.

His use of ばか towards Mytho/Muito is too straightforward and bland. It's just "You idiot." At first I thought "Maybe 'fool' would be a way of translating it," but I looked at jisho.org and saw "imbecile." That's cleary the best way of translating it here. At least when it comes to Fakir's dialogue.

This here is the biggest offender to me.

"Wooden" would be an insult to the trees. Again, looking only at the English, I would rephrase this to:

The water begins to flow. And now time marches on.

Japanese doesn't even have definite and indefinite articles! There's no need to put one before "time" here. Take for example this line from The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King:

Time was a face on the water, and like the great river before them, it did nothing but flow.

Or even this line from Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov:

Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.

I do like this show but I am agonizingly grated by how these translations are cleary not up to snuff. My ear for English is too good for me to ignore all this.

But I don't speak Japanese, so everything I've written here is a complete shot in the dark.

They also translated ファイト as just "Fight!" which completely misses the point. I feel like an animal in a cage. I know these subtitles and even the dub could have a much better script, but I have no way of knowing how exactly, nor of actually putting out a naturalistic translation.

[home-bythesea]

shu

[ratfc]

Pookies 🇵🇹

[sabrinarismos]

o meu silêncio diz muito sobre mim. escute-o.

— cartasquechoram