Old mate puddi recently posted a really good critique of the subtitles on the stupid deer show and it got me in the mood to look at words on chinese cartoons too. But it wouldn’t be Kinmoku if we did seasonal stuff, so we’re going back 20 years and taking a look at an old fansub of Air Master.
First line is fine but the second one misses the mark a bit. It’s more along the lines of “my age is catching up with me”, which is far enough off that I’d assume they just took a guess and got it wrong.
This error doesn’t really change anything though. It’s a faceless background character so it’s pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things. I suppose it can be forgiven.
This comes off very awkwardly in English due to how literally it was translated. Michiru is telling Mina not to spoil the other girl just because she’s crying, otherwise she’ll start to think she can get whatever she wants if she has a cry about it. Unfortunately there isn’t a really good way of saying this succinctly in English, but “habit” is a pretty lazy attempt.
A bit of a misinterpretation here. She’s not talking about losing in this one instance, but about losing in general. It’s also more of a “why” than a “how”. She’s not after an objective analysis of what went wrong in this one instance, but rather being exasperated because she doesn’t win at all. “Why do I always lose?”
Bad choice of tone. Maki is saying she’s fine with that nickname. Pretty neutral, leaning positive. “Dealing with” sets a pretty negative connotation, which isn’t the intention here.
Actually very good phrasing on this line. It’s easy to default to “hit-on” or “pick-up”, but these generally imply a somewhat romantic (or at least sensual) approach is being made. “Skirt chasing” works a lot better because it strongly suggests that the approach is unwanted, and appropriately comes off as mocking since there wasn’t any hitting-on happening in the first place.
Well, at least you did a good job first time.
I appreciate not wanting to reuse a phrase, but you could’ve done so much better. Shame.
This is also an E for Effort. Our guy is giving her a chance here by saying if she can still stand then he’ll be honourable and let her get up before continuing the fight. Phrasing it the way it’s done here somehow makes it sound like he’s on the back foot after losing an exchange, when he’s just kicked her in the head.
It’s debatable whether it should be “Airmaster” or “Air Master”. In context it could go either way, so you’d generally need to just make a judgement call and commit to one or the other until you get some kind of official confirmation. If only there were some indication as to which way this should go…
Yeah, bit of a blunder there, huh?
They got it right in the filename though, so I dunno why they went with “Airmaster” in the episode.
Either block it or take it. No mention of dodging here. Admittedly it doesn’t make much sense because she did take the hit, so it’s not obvious what he means exactly.
Except it is obvious, because he explains it in the next line. He says he likes to take hits from the opponent and win fights despite this, so he was challenging Maki to do the same. The distinction is between taking the hit and going down, and taking the hit and staying standing.
I guess that didn’t get across to the translator here though, because they just made something up about using opponents’ moves against them.
This isn’t even a mistranslation, it’s just straight up wrong. Maki’s saying it felt like her brain was shaken around (from being kicked in the face). Nothing about blood vessels or ruptures. I can’t help but think they didn’t understand what she was saying, so they just filled in the blank with a fanfic based on what they saw on the screen.
“Misunderstood” is a pretty mild term to use here. It’s definitely a lot more negative, like “they probably hate me now” or “I bet they’re freaked out”. “Misunderstood” isn’t even a literal translation here so I’m not quite sure how they came up with that one.
Also, earthquake alert.
Staying quiet isn’t quite right either. She was never a loud character, unlike the awful midget bitch. This is about her behaving, i.e. not getting into fights with random Mexicans on the street.
Damn, if only there was a commonly-used phrase to describe the principal character in a literary work. I guess we’ll just have to make do with “the lead of this anime” until such a phrase is invented.
This is from the opening, but when I saw the fansub credits I knew I had to get the screenshot button ready. I wasn’t disappointed. I actually had to cut a lot of material for this one to fit it into a reasonable-length article.
To be fair to High Quality Anime and Nandeyane! though, there were no henious translation errors. None of the issues would significantly impair you from understanding the episode, it was just some awkward tone and trivial guesslation mistakes. Most of my complaints were actually about several poorly edited lines, but I excluded a lot of these because that’d be someone else’s ballpark. It’s kind of ironic considering they had two editors on the staff team, but I suppose this is the bar for quality you’d expect in 2003.