So it turns out that writing blog posts and writing fanfiction both come from the same pool of time and energy and that therefore starting a blog while you’re pushing to try and get a chapter of a story finished by an arbitrary deadline isn’t too hot an idea. Who’d have known?
In any case, relatively recently I picked up this:
I’d already seen the episodes in question, but I do try to buy the things that I watch on fansubs when they come out, and it is always interesting to see what’s different with the official version. One sentence review: it’s a good release, with nothing noticeably wrong about it.
That’s not what this post is for, though, but it is instead just to discuss a translation issue I found interesting.
Somewhere in the first the first episode Rukia (a shinigami) says (essentially; I’m too lazy to go through the DVD right now to get the exact quote) this to Ichigo (the main character) when he refuses to believe that she is what she says she is:
“You believe in ghosts but not in shinigami?”
For perfectly valid reasons, instead of leaving shinigami untranslated, the official version translates the word as “Soul Reaper.” That sounds a little artificial to my ears, but is workable. However, it turns the above line into:
“You believe in ghosts but not in Soul Reapers?”
That doesn’t make much sense at all, because (unlike shinigami in Japan) “Soul Reapers” have no place in American popular culture as a related concept to ghosts. The whole line winds up coming off very oddly.
As I recall, Lunar fansubs used “death god” as the translation for shinigami, making the line in question:
“You believe in ghosts but not in death gods?”
This choice of translation has its own issues (in that the usage of “death god” seems unwieldy to me in other places), but even for this line it doesn’t quite work for me. The connection between “ghosts” and “death gods” is more immediately apparent, but still from an American perspective to comment makes little sense. Most Americans would probably know what was meant by “death god”, but “death gods” also don’t really have any place in American popular culture.
There really isn’t anything that’s a perfect American shinigami. “Grim reapers” or “angels of death” probably come closest, but both have connotations that wouldn’t work properly for Bleach. Either would work as well as anything for this one line, but would have problems with the rest of the series. It also doesn’t help that both of those are usually seen a singular entities – the Grim Reaper or the Angel of Death.
What would I do? The otaku in me says to just leave it as shinigami, at least for the subtitled version, and have a liner note or something briefly explaining what the word means. The rest of me says that Viz’s choice of translation is perfectly acceptable, and that one mildly nonsensical line is really not worth bothering about.
Hmm. I wonder what the dub did with that line. When I have more time I’ll need to check.
Anyway, if this post had a big grand point, this is where it would go. There really isn’t one, though, except perhaps that translation is a lot harder and more involved than it seems at first glance. So I’ll just leave it at that, because this is already far too many words on such a minor thing.
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I suggest not to sweat smaller things. It’s not as if the choice here affects a lot. This reminds me how I took a screencap recently, where Megumi of Muteki Kanban Musume says, in subtitle, “A woman’s weapon is her charisma”. I do not remember what she really said, but I suspect she meant that the charisma was a weapon, not vice versa. It left its mark because of the screencap only. In the episode’s flow, it was completely fine.
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Since the majority of the characters in the series are shinigami, and it’s a perfectly good word, I too would have left it unchanged.
On a broader subject, I really liked the first dozen or so episodes of Bleach.
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The first batch of Bleach episodes are, indeed, really good.
Be warned that a bit after the first dozen or so episodes, the series has a dramatic shift in tone and plot. It’s still good in my opinion, but in a different way. A season or so after that, it starts to get a bit weaker, and then it hits filler territory and gets a lot weaker, though it seems that came to an end this week.
The show remains watchable throughout, to me at least, but I do kind of wish to see what might have been had Bleach stuck to its original style.
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I know. :) I watched it up through the start of the bount cycle, then gave up.
The first dozen episodes, before they start all the fighting stuff and ultimately head off to Soul Society, are really enjoyable and, as you say, very different to the later show.
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