Unfortunately this edition of Kinmoku is not actually sponsored by ASCII Media Works nor Lantis. It is however brought to you by our good friends over at Evetaku. As per usual I decided to spin up another old cartoon I had laying around, and happened onto Kamimemo.
Given that it wasn’t another uninteresting official sub (which can’t be said for the other few shows I watched recently), and we’ve yet to look at any Evetaku releases, I figured it would be a good candidate for review—so let’s get into it.
I’ll call this out every time until I stop seeing it. I’ve never actually heard anyone refer to their father as “father”. Unless you’re going for a pretentious and over-the-top bourgeois (we’re talking about a Malaysian immigrant here, by the way), just say “dad”…
… which you did not even ten seconds later, when she used the same pronoun too. I really don’t see why it couldn’t have just been consistent throughout.
Going strong so far in terms of correctness, at least. Not wrong, but way too literal—I can’t imagine anyone saying this outside of an extremely contrived situation. Like a quiz show where someone’s going through a list and picking out all the falsehoods; that’s a lie, this is a lie… As far as expressions of disbelief and exasperation go, “I don’t believe it!” or “no way!” are much stronger contenders.
Slightly off the mark here. Hiro was actually bragging about the great friends he has. Being proud is definitely a component of the message, but it’s just that; a component.
We’re getting a lot colder now. Not sure why the father came up. We’re still talking about Hiro here. He’s said he has a lovely motherly figure looking after him, and Shinozaki is making a reference to something he (presumably) said about there only being one woman in the world he wasn’t able to make fall for him. The logical connection being Shinozaki realising that Hiro considers Ming a foster mother and not a subject of romance, unlike every other female character in the show.
Given that you had to connect a few dots yourself (I don’t think Hiro ever actually mentioned this on-screen, and there’s a lot you need to infer from context), I can sympathise with the translator for stumbling a little here. That said, the topic of the sentence was pretty far off so I can only imagine something got lost down the TLC and editing pipeline.
The next line ended up in a strange place too. I assume it was just the editor’s best guess at fluffing something that made some modicum of sense following the previous line, but aligning to mistakes only exacerbates the problem. This is actually meant to be a disdainful remark about Hiro’s alleged MILF fetish because he (presumably) tried to bed the person he (now) considers his mother.
The sentiment is lost a little on this line as well. It’s one of those glass half empty things, and would probably be easier to understand if I rewrote the line differently: “We’re on good enough terms that she still cooks for me, at least.”
I think this might be a bit too much of a stretch to brush off as a liberal translation. Hiro wants a massage and is told to get his girlfriend to do it. His response is essentially that his girlfriend works in the sex industry, and her job is to be on the receiving end of “massages”, not the giving end.
As above, this is probably a lazy guesslation. Alice needs him to run an errand. I’m not sure I would go so far as to call that a “skill”. Maybe you could argue it, but if you need to argue it then you’ve already failed at letting your work speak for itself.
I might be serving a bit of a reverse-shit sandwich here, but I do want to call out that I really like this line. The original line is delivered with a lot of power, but doesn’t bring much to the table in terms of literary creativity. Something along the lines of “if you break the rules then I will hurt you.” This is a great way to add some much needed spice while keeping the phrasing in-character.
There was an idea going on for a couple of lines, but the last bit got lost somewhere and this was found in its place. He was saying that a single person doesn’t have the capacity to help everyone in need (which they got) and that the only people you can properly look after are your friends and family (which turned into being powerless alone).
The line that comes after is also incorrect. It follows from the previous in saying that you need to know where to draw the line, i.e. decide who you’re able to help and who you’ll have to give up on. Maybe the translator wasn’t familiar with the phrase, but it’s literally the same thing in Japanese so I’m not sure where they might’ve slipped up.
This must’ve been a difficult conversation. We’ve already found another mistake. This phrasing doesn’t refer to time or tense. It’s meant to denote his uncertainty. “I get it… At least, I think I do…”
We’ve gone full circle. Before we were bringing up the father for no reason, and now we’re removing him from context for no reason. Her father is the subject of the sentence here. “A paper-thin promise like that doesn’t mean anything.”
Perhaps this is a generic “you”, not a specific one. As in, how can you (anyone, not Meo in particular) keep a promise like the one her dad made? But even so, he’s drawing her motives for believing him into question, so this is quite liberal if that was the intention. If anything, I’d still reword it to remove ambiguity.
I’ve gotta say, that was an interesting ride. I thought it was a strong translation at first, so I’m surprised it was riddled with so many translation errors that I didn’t really notice until I took the time to call them out. Funnily enough, the majority of them were in the second half of the episode. I wonder if the original translator tagged out or just got tired/lazy/distracted/drunk/otherwise incapacitated or something.
I didn’t include them in the main post for length concerns, but there were also a lot of really strange punctuation choices. A number of triple hyphens, double exclamation points, full caps, inconsistent caps, you name it. My memory doesn’t go far back enough to say if this was the group’s style or just this editor’s preference, but I do know that I don’t like it.
Either way, this was a TV release from 2011 so chances are it was rushed out the door without much proofreading. If you’re watching this ten years later for whatever godforsaken reason then you may as well just grab some BDs. Do as I say, not as I do.