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  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

Fair comment. On to a different point, has anybody sen the new series in japanese? i bought it off ebay and the subtitles are alll screwy, has any one else had this problem???

Posted

Depends on which version you got, which could either be one of the variant fan subs or the official sub.

Japanese grammer is organized differently from westerner cultures so a literal translation would sound weird if you're not use to the differences.

And depending on which version you have it could more or less be a literal translation word for word of what is said.

Posted

What Zeo1234 said is true, the japanese words are in different places in their sentences than English. Someone probably just translated word for word on some of them. My copies are the same way. I find myself rewinding to reread some just to understand. Whoever did the translating, probably didn't speak English that well and did the best they could. Oniguyver, are all your episodes like that?

Posted

More or less, yeah they are. Example: everytime a zoalord is mentioned, it's subtiteld as Zoalord Gyuot instead of their name. And for some reason they keep getting agito's name wrong as well.

Posted

Japanese is a phonetic language, which basically means what they have as words go together to form concepts which for us would be words.

If taken apart like we would normally break up the words of a sentence then each part will have a different meaning than what they do together.

For example take any word and break it up into its phonetic components and then try to translate each segment of that phonetic spelling.

Phonetic for example is pho£net£ic! Which you pronounce f*-*ne-tik!

Which shows the primary problem with doing a word for word translation of japanese since even a simple sentence like going to school, would translate to gibberish if you don't take the phonetic linking of the words into account.

The other problem is japanese is structured for ranking of respect. Everyone speaks to each other in terms of levels of respect and social ranking.

Closest thing we got is calling someone sir, mister, teacher, master, etc.

The improper use of which is considered insulting.

You'd notice this problem in the translating resulting in things like Sho, Tetsuro, and Mizuki refering to each other like family.

Or like Oniguyver pointed out the reference to Guyot, etc.

There is also the problem not all letters are pronounced the same way, some letters are either silent or pronounced very differently which makes translating a bit difficult to do by ear unless you are already familiar with the word and its proper pronouncing in japanese.

Which is why even today many fans argue over the proper spelling of many of the characters names.

Like Alkanphel, some have argued it should be Archanfel.

Or Risker should be Lisker, etc.

Even experts in both languages can get confused as some concepts simply don't translate since there are no equivalent words.

Posted

Yep Zeo1234 strikes again with that mind blowing amount of stuff he knows.

But Zeo1234 is right about the name thing letters like "L" for instance don't exisist well it's not that they don't exisist it's just that they don't use it. That's why there are a lot of anime fans who might argue that the correct pronuciation(sp?) of Fully Cooly is actually Furi Kuri. Another example might be Krillin from dbz in japanese romanji it would most likely be written Krurrin or something like that it's been a while since I've thought about the spacifices of DBZ. But yep good translations from japanese to english aren't really a matter for word for word it's more like an art form.

Posted

Funny you should mention Kuririn, since his name is an example of this.

kuri, which means "chestnut" in reference to his shaved head and Shōrin ("Shaolin" in Chinese) which reference the monk design they used for him during most of the series.

Which they combined into Kuririn. Though they mutilated the name into Krillian for the english dub.

Though they kept the pun as they continued it with his daughter's name which was also a name of a nut (not to mention the name of his ex-girlfriend).

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

On a Guyver fan site, I think someone would have mentioned it if anyone knew one way or the other. :roll:

Unfortunately we'll just have to wait and see what they'll do, since they are probably waiting to see how successful the DVD releases of the first season is before they put out the cash for a second season.

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