Bet you thought the blog was dead, didn’t you? Well, I can’t speak for convex but I’m still around at least. I’ve actually been watching a fair few shows lately (probably more than I’d like to admit) and I’ve wanted to blog about a few of them, but the realisation always hit me after I’d finished watching, and I wasn’t about to go back and watch some garbage chinese cartoon a second time.
That being said, I caught myself before I got too far this time so we’re in luck. Shiki has been on my backlog for the better part of the last decade, and it seems like quite the appropriate show given the topical circumstances. Not that I knew this when I started watching it, I just wanted to see a pink girl get her head crushed by a tractor.
Anyway, I’ve got a real doozy for you guys today. I’ll be looking at the Coalgirls release of Shiki, staying true to my made-up and undocumented rule of not reviewing the same group more than once. This was actually the first time I felt the need to cut some of the screenshots I prepared due to length concerns, so hopefully we’ve only got the real meat left on the bone.
I find this line to come with a hint of accusation, like he’s pressing the doctor on the fact that he might be hiding his suspicions about it being an epidemic. Their line can certainly be read that way, but I don’t think that’d be your first instinct. Something like “Are you sure it isn’t an epidemic?” would be a good way to remove any ambiguity here.
This line reads very unnaturally. I don’t think it’s even correct; shouldn’t it be “their wrists”? Either way, I think it would read a lot better if it were flipped to be “A person won’t die just from having their wrist slit”. I wouldn’t stop there, though. It’s clearly targeted at him in an almost mocking manner, so I might even go so far as to say “You won’t die from a papercut like that.”
The translator missed the mark a little here. It should say “You know how he was a high school teacher?” There is some disambiguation at play in this conversation so I can see why they might’ve messed up, but it’s only coming from one side. A bit more attention to the grammar could’ve helped avoid this.
Finish your sentences! “There’s only one thing this can be.” “I thought you might’ve been involved.” “That’s not what I meant.” There’s no room for ambiguity here, and I’m going to say this in futility every post: Japanese is an inferred language, where trailing sentences are commonplace. This is not the case in English. Translate the meaning, not the words.
She said “itadakimasu”, which is an important part of Japanese culture. Translating this to “thanks” completely misses the point. Every anime fan should have a baseline of Japanese knowledge and would know what “itadakimasu” means, and what cultural connotations it has. This should be left in its original, untainted form. In all seriousness, this was a pretty good choice here. Nice and casual but still grateful.
The translation is pretty far off, here. The language isn’t particularly advanced here as far as I can tell, so probably just negligence or something. It should be “There have been some strange things happening in this town lately.”
The same as what? Pronouns don’t work without context in English the way they do in Japanese, so you need to be more specific. Directly translating doesn’t work well here, so you’d probably need to spin it along the lines of “It’s the thing we discussed” if you wanted to keep it ambiguous, or just “It’s the disease”.
The “and” really gets me here. It’s a conjunction but it doesn’t connect anything. She’s saying “What is this place? Where have I ended up?” The latter is especially important to specify as it implies she was wandering around with no real destination, and found herself in his vicinity. “Where am I?” makes it sound like she doesn’t know how she got there, which isn’t quite right.
If only there was a word for “where we live”. Oh, wait.
The emphasis is wrong on this line. It’s a little hard to explain, but the focus is on the “you”, not the “depressed”. As in, “It’s not something that you need to be depressed about.” As it stands, it sounds like she’s saying it’s not something worth being depressed over, whereas in actuality she’s saying Muroi in particular doesn’t need to be depressed about it.
This is the line that directly follows, and I’m not sure how that makes any sense in context. The translation is way too literal. He’s saying her sickness isn’t the only thing that has him depressed.
I actually really liked this line. The original is “Those things only have meaning when you’re alive”. While it makes sense, it’s not a very interesting line. The way they decided to invert the words here makes it sound a lot more dramatic (as it should here) and also lines up more with how I’d imagine someone to say such a line in English. Great work.
This should say “Mikiyasu showed signs of not only kidney damage, but also lung and liver damage.” The distinction is important here because the kidney damage was expected while the others were not.
The translator also dropped the ball on this one. Given that all the doctors are proposing theories here, it would make sense to ride the flow and treat everything as a suggestion. This goes double if they were looking up the medical jargon and lost track of the sentence. Either way though, she’s actually just asking if multiple organ failure is more commonly known as secondary MODS these days.
I have a lot of bones to pick with this one. Onii-chan doesn’t have to be literally “brother” every time. No one speaks like this in English, just use his name. My other gripe is that it’s actually a plural. She’s not asking about Tohru specifically, she’s asking about him and Natsuno (while only specifying her brother). I hate the $PERSON-tachi grammar form because there’s often no nice way to get all the nuances in English without wording it up a ton, but in this case “Where’s Tohru and Natsuno?” is perfectly serviceable.
Another great translation choice. This is exactly what a high schooler would say when he’s getting cold feet about asking a girl out. The literal translation is some blather about not having enough courage, which is a terrible choice, and I’m glad that this is where they ended up.
Anyway, we’re at the end of the episode now. I have some pretty mixed feelings about this one, I’m not really sure what to say. There are some really good lines mixed in with a lot of questionable ones, which makes me think there was a mediocre translator and a stellar editor. But at the same time, a good editor would’ve been able to salvage a lot of the other lines, so I dunno.
I was actually very impressed with the subs in episode 1, and remember being surprised at the big drop in quality in episode 2 or 3. It was so drastic I wondered whether or not the fansubbing staff might’ve changed, which is what led me to writing this post.
Either way, I’m not sure I’d give this one a pass given the number of blatant errors. I’d consider correctness to be a baseline, and any fancy prose on top of that would be a bonus. That said, it may seem like there were a lot of mistakes but the proportion of total incorrect lines probably isn’t that high; maybe just slightly above average. I guess I’ll leave this one to the reader’s discretion.