stuff

Not complaining about anything here. It's just that it's hard to get Japanese to be as flowery as English can be at times, and I'd always loved the Japanese translations of Hartman's lines. Figured I might as well do a post on it. Most of the dialogue here is nowhere close to what Japanese ever use, period, but references frequently show up in pop culture (one of the characters in the recent anime Kuromukuro constantly spouts quotes, for example). English Japanese subtitles Translation of Japanese subtitles The first and last words out of your filthy sewers will be "sir"! 口でクソたれる前と後に“サー”と言え！ Say "sir" before and after each time you let shit dribble out of your mouths! I can't hear you, sound off like you got a pair! 大声だせ！タマ落としたか！ Sound off louder! Did you drop your balls!? If you ladies leave my island, if you survive recruit training ... you will be a weapon, you will be...

Dug up my copy of the official US release of CCA, figured I might as well give the subtitles a look. Not watching the movie in its entirety at this point, just jumping to memorable parts. 「なんでこんなものを地球に落とす？」 Literal translation:  "Why would you drop such a thing on Earth?" "Crashing this to Earth"... I don't know, since when did you crash things to others? And where's the question mark? 「だから抹殺すると宣言した」 "That's why I declared that I would kill them all."  Yes this openly contradicts the stuff from later on where he says his goal is to get people to move into space but that's what it says. And minor and inconsequential change, but "declared" becomes "decided". 「人が人に罰を与えるなどと！」 Another minor change- Amuro says that people (in general) don't have the right to punish others. 「私、シャア・アズナブルが粛清しようというのだ、アムロ！」 And then this . "I, Char Aznable, will purge them, Amuro!" becomes this load of...

This is an thing I did on a certain image board sometime last year IIRC, just copypasting stuff over. The US Manga Corps DVD release, translation done by one "Studio Nemo". I'd say that the subtitles on this are atrocious, but "atrocious" is hardly sufficient to convey how bad they are; In fact I doubt that there even is a word, or combination of words in the English language capable of properly expressing how bad they are. But anyway, I was rewatching Patlabor TV and for a short time during that period I posted the particularly bad translations along with explanations of why they were terrible. This list is of course by no means comprehensive because this show is 47 episodes long and pretty much every single line is messed up in some way. I should like to add, though, that before watching the TV series I rewatched the first OVA (Early Days) as well, and the translation in there was astonishingly good aside from a couple of questionable superficial decisi...