If, like me, you find yourself occassionally nostalgic for the era when anime series could get multiple fansub groups working on them, none of them just ripping off Crunchyroll, this 2011 vintage discussion about how several fansubbers translated one particular scene in Bakemonogatari is right up your street:
For some reason, I was watching Coalgirls’s release of Bakemonogatari. It was the second episode, and the scene was when Hitagi, in her own unique tsundere (read naked) fashion, was hitting on Koyomi, even though he’s too stupid to realize it. Incidentally, this part was what got me into the show two years back because the jokes and Hitagi’s all-around verbal abuse here is fantastic. Coalgirls’s translation up to this point can be best described as “understandable” despite the translator’s poor sense of style. Or at least until it got to the punchline of my favorite joke in the scene.
Your amateurish virginity will infect me
“Amateurish virginity?” What the hell does that even mean? Let’s ignore the Japanese here for now and judge this based solely on the English translation, which is what I would assume most people who watch subs (and don’t know Japanese) would do. Interestingly, the translator didn’t even provide a translation note to preach to the viewer about the finer details of Japanese slang.
The writer goes on to compare Coalgirl’s subs to two other fangroups, Thora and GG’s, finding the latter to have the best translation. “Amateurish virginity” turns out to be Japanese slang for men who only have sex with sex workers and never had a proper relationship. In English you’d call them incels these days. It’s a good example of why a translation should not be too literal or too faithful to the original wording, when this does not make sense in the target language.
No Comments