Anime titles deciphered (My Anime Top-10 list)

I recently redid my Top-10 animes list on YouTube and in case you haven’t seen it you should click this link to it. However, this blog is about the wonderful world of anime (and manga) titles. A lot of times it seems a lot of them make absolutely no sense, but a lot of times you have to look closer at the series they’re about to understand what the name refers to. Some anime names are actually complete nonsense and picked because they sound fun, but here are examples from my own top-10, deciphered for your convenience and I hope entertainment…

Sandybell

This one would appear to be fairly self-explanatory. Sandybell is the heroine of the story and the series is named after her. However, I should note that this is only the name used in my and in some other non-Japanese territories. The original title of the series, Haro! Sandiberu, is actually “Hello! Sandybell”. The title conundrum gets even more interesting when I note that Sandybell is in fact an incorrect romanization of the name, which apparently is supposed to be Sandybelle (the anime series actually shows this spelling of the name at one point).

Azumanga Daioh!

Here’s probably the closest example of a gibberish title in my Top-10. The “Daioh” as I’m told means “Great King” but I’ve also heard explanations that it’s simply an exclamation and means nothing. However “Azumanga” is a compound of “Azu” and “manga”. A and zu are the first two syllables of the creator’s last name, Kiyohiko Azuma, and manga obviously refers to the comic-book. “Manga” when literally translated actually means “whimsical pictures”, which I guess isn’t far off.

Love Hina

The first half of this title is pretty obvious in what it refers to. “Hina” on the other hand refers to “Hinata Flats” or “Hinata Apartments” which is the all girls’ dorm where the series is set. I’m not sure why the title omits the final syllable of the name “ta”, but my suspicion maybe that it has something to do with the whole concept of a dormitory which could make the whole compound “Hinata Flats” redundant (kinda like ATM Machine or the Kamehameha wave [ha = wave Jap.]).

Ouran High School Host Club

Another title that’s fairly self-explanatory since the whole series is technically about the Host Club. However, I find it interesting that the title refers to Ouran High School, but in fact within the series they keep using the term “Ouran Academy”. A host club is an actual type of cafe in Japan where typically women serve men and provide conversation partners. These types of Host/Hostess Clubs are typically modelled after some sort of theme (the Ouran Club seems to switch themes depending on the season and what the writer finds particularly amusing dressing the characters as).

Fruits Basket

This one can seem a bit bizarre at first, but for anyone whose watched the series, its meaning is pretty obvious. “Fruits Basket” was a game that the main protagonist Tohru’s friends used to play (a sort of cross between Simon Says and Musical Chairs) where you only become part of the game when a fruit you’re assigned with gets called out. Tohru was always assigned as an origini (rice ball) which of course isn’t a fruit and so she was never able to play with the other children. This feeling of exclusion is probably why Tohru sympathises with Kyo, who despite carrying the Sohma curse is not considered part of the group since his animal isn’t part of the Chinese Zodiac.

Dragon Ball Z

Another fairly self-obvious title, though it bares mentioning that Dragon Ball Z only refers to the second anime series. The comic is all-throughout referred to as just “Dragon Ball”, though the later chapters of it, which correspond with the anime, have been occasionally released under the DBZ title. Within the series “dragon balls” are the seven magical orbs, which when brought together summon the Eternal Dragon, Shen Long / Shenron, who grants any wish. The dragon balls play an important part in most of the story-arcs in the series. The Z title was dreamed up by Akira Toriyama, ironically, to signify it as the end of the series (Z being the final letter of the alphabet), ironically since DBZ was eventually followed by the continuation series Dragon Ball GT.

Magic Knight Rayearth

This one is rather self-explanatory as well. Obviously the three heroines of the series (Hiraku, Umi and Fuu) are the Magic Knights. Rayearth refers to Hikaru’s rune-god who are the giant mecha like beings which the three girls ride into battle. It’s not inherently clear why Rayearth specifically is in the title, though Hikaru’s role does become more important in the second season, Rayearth really isn’t that important of a character. I guess putting all the girls’ rune-gods’ names in the title would have made it too long: Magic Knight Celeste Windom Rayearth. For the non-canonical OVA special the title, which is just Rayearth, is even more confusing and non-sensical since Hikaru’s rune-god in that one isn’t even called Rayearth, but instead Lexus. As a side-note: the Rayearth OVA sucks balls.

Tenchi Muyo! / Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki

Here is a genuine case of a series having more than one title in English and Japanese. The OVA series, which surprisingly is the main narrative of the Tenchi Muyo franchise (and not the TV series as in most similar cases), is commonly referred to as simply Tenchi Muyo! but which in its third run was added an extra title. Tenchi and Ryo-Ohki are both characters from the series, so those parts of the title is fairly self-explanatory. The Muyo part actually have several meanings, one being “Useless” (which would sound about right owing to the manga based on the series “No Need for Tenchi”). It also apparently means “This Way Up” which doesn’t really make a lot of sense and is probably why the series title has never been translated fully into English.

Baccano!

Well this is actually a fun case because the title isn’t even Japanese. Instead it’s Italian. It literally means “noise” or “racket” depending on the context. However, what noise within the series it actually refers to I have no idea, so this might be another gibberish title.

Ginga Nagareboshi Gin

Although the series is called “Silver Fang” in some countries, that is neither the official nor really an accurate translation of the title. Growing up in Finland, I knew the series by the name “Hopeanuoli” (Silver Arrow) which too isn’t accurate at all. What we have here is a really confusing title with a lot of bizarre elements. Firstly “Ginga” actually means Galaxy or specifically the Milky Way. “Nagareboshi” means a meteor or more commonly a shooting star. And finally “Gin” is the name of the hero of the series, his name meaning “silver”.

So compiled the The Milky Way’s Shooting Star Silver or The Shooting Star of the Galaxy: Gin (the title is sometimes written with a colon, though its usage seems very inconsistent). At any rate, the title attempts to convey the idea of Gin being fast as lightning and the Ginga (Galaxy) is just a grandiose intro to the title (plus it incidentally contains the hero’s name).

The spin-off titles of this series are collectively known as Ginga Dendetsu (GD Weed and GD Riki) which means “Galaxy Legend”. Dendetsu in general refers to side- and origin stories but is used in primary titles as well (Dendetsu no Zeruda for instance: The Legend of Zelda).

Translater’s Rants: More fun with the Sherlock Hound

In case you haven’t a clue what this is about, you may want to check out my previous blog on the matter. But here’s the gist of it. I’ve been watching an anime called Sherlock Holmes (a.k.a. Sherlock Hound) in its original Japanese language form on a Malaysian DVD release with absolutely abysmal English subtitles. I voiced by suspicions last time that the translator’s were using the Chinese subtitles on the same DVD as a prompt and basically translating word for word. With Holmes at times being called Furmosi, Watson becoming Huansen, Moriarty written as Moliaite or Moliait and Lestrade as Listorite, its hard to draw any other conclusion.

Further more it’s become abundantly clear that the translators have an absolutely appalling (almost non-existent) grasp of the English language. Time tenses, personal pronouns, syntax, spelling… hell, you’ll be lucky to actually find a correctly written sentence in the DVD’s subtitles that would actually make any sort of sense. 90% of the time the subtitles are just plain wrong, badly composed or in some other way off (sometimes simply using the wrong words).

But anyway, enough ranting because what I really wanted to bring you was the Cream of the Cråp, the ten most absolutely funniest and bizarre translation errors from the subtitles. Here we go…

1. “You speak in superlatives!” – I think this would actually make for a great one-liner in an action movie.
2. “I want the stupid clock, not the fake clock.” – Words fail me.
3. Lisiduoli - As if Listorite wasn’t funny enough, for one episode the translators decided to mangle Lestrade’s name even further.
4. “Shit… who are you on earth!” – Here we have a collision of two consistent errors from the translation. Firstly, the overtly used S-word and second the “on earth” ending which the characters seemed to utter a lot when they were confused about something or amazed.
5. “It save much Kung Fu” – I did not just make this up. I couldn’t even if I tried. What I believe the translators were trying to convey was that Moriarty capturing a street urchin with a valuable diamond saved him much “effort”. Google Translator at least seems to agree with me since 功夫 [gong fu] apparently one of the alternate spellings for effort.
6. “My car actually chase myself” - This line is so utterly over-written and on top of which accurate about the situation it’s describing that I had to write it down. Listorite… I mean Lestrade was behind this gem of a line.
7. Ownsome – Yes, it is.
8. Mengalisha – Take a wild guess what this mess stands for. I’ll even give you a clue. It’s a painting. A very famous painting. A very famous painting by a very, very famous Italian artist and inventor. Give up? No, you guessed it, this is how the translators apparently write Mona Lisa. In addition the translators seemed to really struggle with the concept of what a painting is and kept referring to it as a “book”. *facepalm*
9. “Oh my god, a snare” – Holmes and Watson fall down a hole and this is what they say. The over-reacting exclamation would have been enough to make me laugh but the fact that the translator missed the proper word for trap was what made this one extra funny.
10. Blue Red Diamond – A blue ruby is what’s being referred to here. At least they were trying, although Red Diamond is a bit of a miss just because there happens to be another colour right before it.

And the rest which were also pretty funny…

• Siliman - One of Moriarty’s henchmen is called Smiley on the show, but after seeing this on the screen I just kept calling him Silly Man afterwards. That’s probably what I would also call the guy who made the translation.
• We are succeed – Out of the million different ways the translators misused the word “success” this was the one that made me laugh the hardest, mainly because it just came from out of nowhere.
• “Shit, there are two else” – I don’t even need to say anything about this one.
• “Shit, it rain” - Did I remember to tell you that there’s just an over-abundent over-usage of the S-word in the translation. And here I thought the Japanese/Chinese never swore.
• “We all unhappy” - So is Arthur Conan Doyle in his grave.
• “Let us energise” - I mentioned this in the last blog but it just gave me a warm feeling to see this translation error return in later episode.
• Very perfect – Oh the irony…
• “Shit, very boring” - I’ll confess that I would never express my boredom so profanely.
• Boob pronate – ???
• I lost myself – That’s quite an achievement.
• Escape, it’ll bomb – I guess someone should have told Kevin Costner.
• Very pain – You ain’t kiddin’.
• Boob go ahead – Moriarty is about to break Skeletor’s record for how many times he can call his minions “boobs”.
• Shift! – In two episodes the translators kept misspelling the S-word. I can’t imagine why. They were doing it so well before.
• “Hua, so hugh” – Combining a great uttering noise with a misspelling and you get something that’s a sure show stopper.
• Sweetmeat – A word that should never be used outside of Black Adder.
• Shit Clock – The Bell of Big Ben. I am not kidding. This is how it’s translated.
• “In a word, run off quickly” – THAT’S NOT WHAT IN A WORD MEANS!!

Translater’s Review: School Rumble – 2nd Semester

Time to give a review to one of my favorite dubs and how fittingly it’s for one of my favorite animes. I started watching School Rumble when they released the first series on DVD in my home country but unfortunately I never had a chance to listen to the Funimation dub of the series until I ended up getting the second season (2nd Semester) box-set a little later on (and the Extra Class DVD much more later).

Funimation came into prominence with their Dragon Ball Z dub and this is also why some people also don’t necessarily like them. However, not only do I prefer their DBZ dub over the original version (though I’ll admit some of the edits and censorship was unnecessary) I think generally that they are the best English language dubbing company out there.

Voice sync: 4,5/5

There’s no real problems with this but rather Funimation is in the habit of adding dialogue and chatter into scenes where there originally wasn’t any. Most of the time it’s good stuff but there are a few occasions when I didn’t really enjoy it.

Voice performance: 5/5

I do have to say that School Rumble has one of the best dub casts I’ve ever heard. All of the characters sound distinct and memorable. I perhaps had a slight problem with the tiny, tiny, tiny lisp that Eri has but I even got used to that.

Translation: 5/5

Rather than making a direct translation from the original Japanese (like ADV used to), Funimation are more about rewriting dialogue so that it better fits an English language context and undoubtedly they are the best at it that I know. Funimation is great in that they know how to anticipate jokes that wouldn’t necessarily translate into English and will often come up with a new gag in its place (and especially for a heavily comedy-driven series like School Rumble, that’s very important).

There weren’t too many dramatic rewrites and Funimation managed to keep their changes consistent. However, I do recommend watching the series both in its original Japanese form and the English dub in order to see just how much they differ.

Consistency: 5/5

I can’t find anything to complain about in this area.

Music: 4/5

This is one area where I’ve also been consistently impressed with in Funimation’s dubs. The in-episode song-performances are good but my absolute favorite is obviously the second credits theme which was performed brilliantly by Luci Christian and Caitlin Glass. My only regret is that Funimation decided to leave all the other opening and closing themes undubbed.

Score: 94%

This is what you call a solid dub. Great voices, great sync, good rewriting and translation and as an added bonus a great song performance at the end…

Translater’s Review – Tenchi Muyo! seasons 1 and 2 (Geneon dub)

Today, I’d like to talk about an English dub for a change and we’ll focus on one of the first ones I ever heard. Tenchi Muyo! is another one of my favorite anime series (an OVA series to be precise) and it’s been dubbed by at least two companies in the past. Today we focus on the first two seasons which were dubbed by Pioneer’s subsidiary, Geneon in the mid-to-late 1990s.

Tenchi Muyo! is by genre definition a harem comedy, which features a boy named Tenchi living with a number of extra-terrestrial women – trying to lead a normal life but which is complicated both by some of the women’s’ romantic feelings towards him (especially Ayeka and Ryoko) but also other problems they bring with them (old adversaries, royal alien in-laws  etc.)

The Geneon dub has never been my favorite and I generally felt Funimation’s dub of the third season was actually better in a number of ways, but the dub was hardly terrible either. So let’s get to the review.

Voice sync: 3,5/5

There wasn’t a huge issue with character voice-sync, but a particular area I was always displeased with were reaction shots. It seems to me quite frankly that the voice-director didn’t really know how to best handle reaction shots and a lot of time there either isn’t a reaction noise in the English dub or the reaction seems just plain wrong. Especially in the shows’ many gag-dialogue scenes this is rather noticeable but I’ll give Geneon credit for pulling off the battle scene well.

Voice performance: 4/5

I didn’t think any of the voice-performances were particularly bad but there were a few instances where I felt there was some bad casting. Especially I never liked Mihoshi’s voice in the Geneon dub (I thought she sounded much better in the Funimation series) and even Tenchi sounds pretty bad in certain episodes. However, mostly the voices were tolerable and I particularly enjoyed Ryoko’s voice (much more than in the Funimation dub).

Some people might be annoyed by Ayeka’s British or Washu’s Canadian accents but I’ve at least grown used to them and so they don’t bother me.

Translation: 4/5

On the over-all the dub’s translation remained true to the original dialogue and there were no heavy rewrites that I could spot. I was even pleased that in the scene where Ryoko demands her power-gems back they were able to translate the “Now, hand over your balls” joke so well.

Really, it seemed the dub only toned down any instances of sexual jokes and references. In the scene where Ayeka attempted to torture Ryoko, in the original Japanese she’s apparently saying “Stop it! I’m coming!” while in the dub she says “Stop it! It tickles!” Okay, I can understand why they’d want to tone that down a little bit.

However, in the infamous hot springs episode, I never understood why they decided it was better for Sasami to say that Tenchi was being “a little naughty” instead of saying he was “a little perverted”.

Consistency: 3,5/5

There aren’t huge quality issues in the dub although some of the secondary characters had their voices inexplicably changed in the second season, such as Mihoshi’s boss. This change wouldn’t be too noticeable if it weren’t for the fact that his second voice-actor sounded absolutely abysmal.

Another annoying issue is how sometimes you can hear the actors smack their lips and do other involuntary oral noises. I know this dub was made in the 1990s but I still can’t see why they couldn’t retake some of those lines because quite frankly that sort of noises don’t belong in a dub.

Music: 4,5/5

Tenchi Muyo!’s song dubs are among my favorites in the field and I’m rather surprised by this. “Talent for Love”, “I’m a pioneer” and “Lonely Moon” are all excellently translated from the original Japanese and even sound a little bit better in English. In fact I was even a little disappointed when Funimation didn’t follow this tradition by translating the ending credits song from the third season. This is by far my favorite aspect of the English dub.

I’m detracting half a point though because I don’t understand why they decided to redo Ryo-ohki’s song as “Twinkle, twinkle little star”. =P

Over-all score: 78%

While the Geneon dubs has a few quality issues it isn’t a terrible dub and actually fairly enjoyable. I do prefer to watch the series in its original Japanese language form but at times I do like giving the English dub a watch, even if it’s just for the excellent song translations.

Translater’s Review – The Hamtaro Movie

Usually Finnish dubs that aren’t really all that bad get torn a new one for no real reason. Today I wanted to bring you something different. A terrible dub by an otherwise good dubbing company. Werne became the de facto dubber for all cartoons on Finnish television after the folding of Agapio and undoubtedly quality is what got them there. I was impressed by their dub for the Pokémon series back in the day and they still continue to push out fairly good quality dubs, but as of late I think their quality has lopsided somewhat.

Hamtaro is a series I watched very briefly but I couldn’t resist the show because it was just so darn cute. The movie, however, even without the dub was jumbled psychedelic mess that nearly made my brain explode. I’m not sure if the movie was nearly as bad in the English dub but Werne’s Ham-handed *groan* effort certainly didn’t accentuate its good points.

Character sync: 4,5/5

This is something that Werne has never experienced problems with but there was one scene where the apron wearing Hamster’s voice didn’t seem to quite go with the lip-movements.

Voice performance: 3/5

Now I can’t say the voices would be terrible as such but the major roles feel painfully miscast. For instance I can’t stand the Finnish voice for Boss (he actually sounds like a hamster as opposed to the more manly voice he had in the English dub) and a lot of the female voices sound rather generic themselves. Beyond that the other major criticism I have is how overtly cheery some of the voice-actors sound as well as the fact that some of the actors seem to just yell their lines (a problem I’ve seen in increasing amounts in Werne’s other dubs).

Translation: 2,5/5

Oh my goodness… now the “Ham-Ham” schtick, which the characters in this show have, was sort of cute and funny in the English dub but in the Finnish equivalent it just sounds incredibly bad. There was clearly zero effort in trying to adjust the dialogue to better fit a Finnish language performance, but thankfully it falls short of sounding like Finglish.

Still, I wish they would have been a bit more creative with the translation since between the over-the-top performance and the awkward sounding dialogue the dub becomes quite uncomfortable to listen to.

Consistency: 3/5

I didn’t find a lot of problems in this department either. Really I had a major issue with how Laura sounded. Her acting was just appalling through much of the thing.

Music: 2/5

This would have been a three were it not for two things. I don’t usually find myself criticizing Werne’s song dubs but here I just felt they missed the mark and then some. Firstly at the beginning where the children are singing it just sounds like a jumbled mess. Later when we get the peppy poppy-techno song about sunflower seeds, the singing isn’t bad – but the lazy translation of the lyrics just makes the song sound pretty bad.

The DJ Hamster was the final nail on the coffin. His phat rhymes didn’t even flippin’ rhyme. I’ve seen Werne do so much better. This was just a major let down.

Over-all score: 60%

To sum up quickly, over-acting, yelling lines, mediocre translation and awkward songs. These are the things bad dubs are made of. I honestly find it hard to believe Werne has sunk so low. Thankfully the movie was free of anything that sounded too much like Finglish.  On the over-all, however, I have to say that the enjoyment factor of this movie dropped significantly because of the dub.

Translater’s Review – Digimon (the Agapio dub)

Reviewing an Agapio dub is like making fun of a kid with MS for not being able to run. But I just couldn’t pass an opportunity to discuss what is perhaps by far the most notorious Finnish dub of any cartoon ever made. Now, I say notorious which isn’t the same as “the worst” – but it’s pretty damn close.

Our culprit of the day is Agapio Nordic also sometimes known as Agapio Racing Team (what the hell kind of a name is that for a dubbing company anyway) but out of convenience, we’ll just refer to them as Agapio. It’s safe to say that no other Finnish dubbing company has ever received as much criticism as this one. Their dub of Digimon was actually pulled off the air on the insistence of viewer feedback (something which I can’t recall has ever happened in the history of Finnish Television).

Agapio’s resumé is impressive, if only for its size. Since the mid-1990s they did numerous dubs of cartoons for straight-to-video releases and also dubbed cartoons both for MTV3 and Nelonen (channel 4). Their resumé included the infamous dubs of Casper the Friendly Ghost, eXtreme Ghostbusters and Flipper & Lopaka.

Now I’ve never been a fan of Digimon. The first time I even saw the cartoon I thought as many others did, that it was just a Pokémon knock-off. However, even I wasn’t spared the awfulness of this dub because my sister actually liked the show. On with the review…

Character sync: 3/5

I can’t say that the character sync was horribly off, but the apathetic style of acting and the Agapio actors’ sloppy line reading is the main issue with the lack of voice-sync (at least Golden Voice were trying even if they didn’t always get it right). For reactions, like yells the sync wasn’t always off but you never got the feeling there was much effort involved.

Voice performance: 1/5

Agapio only gets a point here for actually having enough actors to make characters distinct from one another. But that’s about it. The Agapio actors sound like a bunch of druggies on triple dozes of diazepam. Apart from sometimes not having any emotion in their performances their attempt at faking emotion often comes off as dry and uninspired. I have absolutely no idea who gave these people the illusion that any of them could act – but it’s the people who were subjected to this garbage that paid the prize.

Translation: 5/5

Well, the one area where I can’t complain much about is the level of translation. I don’t honestly think it makes that big of a difference but at least we didn’t get a shitty translation on top of shitty acting.

Consistency: 2,5/5

I’m not sure if being consistently bad is something to be proud of.

Music: 2/5

The show went down-hill, already, with the opening theme. However, most people forget that Agapio didn’t actually dub the intro for the first few episodes, this happened a little later on. However, it’s safe to say no-one was pleased with this particular rendition of the intro song and Agapio themselves realised this and brought the original Japanese theme back a little while later.

This is why I’m giving them two points instead of one, and as awful as the Digimon theme was at least you only had to listen to it at the beginning (I still have traumas from the song sections in Casper).

Over-all score: 54%

The word ‘over-ambitious’ always comes to mind when I think of Agapio. How they managed to do so many horrible dubs is a puzzle I’ve never been able to solve. Perhaps the commercial TV-networks just didn’t give a fuck about who dubbed their cartoons (MTV3 is the only Finnish channel I know that had as many as three companies dubbing cartoon simultaneously).

Digimon was what broke the proverbial camel’s back. Parents were fed up of having to subject their children to such horrific voice-acting (where were you guys three years earlier when I had to listen to that god-awful Casper dub?). Agapio were never seen or heard from again and the dubbing duties of the cartoon were duly taken over by the alpha-dog dubbers of Werne.

Here at the end I’d like to provide you with a sample of Agapio’s horrible Digimon dub and to cleanse your ears of its horrific quality  afterwards, the Werne dubbed version of the intro song…

Translater’s Review: Ginga Nagareboshi Gin – The Finnish Dub

The cover for the uncensored DVD release

Ginga Nagareboshi Gin, known in my home-country as Hopeanuoli (=silver arrow), and known also by its (Swedish originated) English title Silver Fang is hands down my favorite anime series. Anyone who grew up during the late 1980s and early 1990s in Finland has at least heard of this 1986 anime. Additionally, it continues to be re-released on DVD (it originally went through four release cycles on VHS) and they even recently released the orignal 1984 manga over here as well. There’s been a sequel series (Ginga Dendetsu Weed which wasn’t all that great), an uncensored DVD release but most people are familiar with the original Europe cut of the series.

So GNG was released in several European countries in the late 1980s (among them, the series was most popular in the Nordic countries and Hungary) but in an effort to make the series (which frequently had people, dogs and bears dying in various gruesome ways) more “kid friendly” they cut out several minutes of scenes from each episode and even left out three episodes altogether. And even with these edits the “kiddy version” of the series still had copious amounts of blood and violence (as well as containing depictions of Japanese dog fighting).

I only became a fan of the series when I watched the uncut Japanese version but today I’m giving a review to the (in)famous Finnish dub of the series which was made by the Golden Voice OY. Golden Voice were the long distance champs of children’s cartoon dubs – they did everything from American cartoons to Japanese animes and all with a cast of three or four people. Despite the fact that their dubs were occasionally hampered by lacking dubbing techniques (such as having to overlay the dubbed voices over the original English ones in some cases) and rushed production (often having bad sync with the picture or doing things in a single take) the Golden Voice company holds a special place in my heart since they also dubbed some of my favorite cartoons growing up: Super Mario Bros. Super Show, The Legend of Zelda (this one with surprisingly good sound mixing) and Captain N – The Game Master.

But on to the review. As a brief plot synopsis the show is about an Akita Inu pup, named Gin (=Silver), who loses his father in a fight with a giant bear, Akakabuto. He joins a pack of wild dogs and goes on a journey to recruit fighting dogs across Japan to fight off the bears who want to take over the valley in which the dogs live. It’s as cheezy and melodramatic as it sounds – but that’s why I love it.

Character sync: 3,5/5

I give this series a good grade because I felt the voice-sync wasn’t as off in the beginning of the series as it undoubtedly was a little later on. Mainly the problem came in the final, fourth VHS (which runs almost three hours) where the dialogue started to lag behind considerably in a few scenes.

Voice performance: 4/5

I think Golden Voice did a good job here. There was a huge cast of characters to dub for a group of only three actors but they still managed to make most of the characters sound distinct.

Obviously, there’s some overlapping of voice-performances between the dogs and the humans but GV gets away with it because of the fact that the dogs only start to have dialogue scenes later, once the story moves away from the human characters. In a way, it’s also kinda cool that Daisuke and Gin sound the same because the first third of the series is really about Daisuke and as the series focuses more on Gin, they manage to sort of transfer the likeable voice of the actor to him.

Of course, I could be critical and say Daisuke sounds like a 20-year-old man but that would be very nitpicky of me. Instead the more obvious weak points come in reaction noises, especially towards the end of the series but GV still does good with their limited resources.

As an added note, the standard female actress of the group had the least amount of work on the show, only doing the voice of Cross and a few supporting characters, so I liked the fact she also got to do the narration (which in the Japanese version is done by a man). I immediately associate her voice with GNG in other dubs as well even though she only plays a few supporting characters in the series.

Translation: 4,5/5

I can’t honestly complain, Golden Voice rarely suffered from bad translation efforts and this dub was also made during a time when the characters in the Finnish dubbed cartoons actually spoke Finnish (as opposed to Finglish). I even liked how they translated, quite accurately, some of the character names like Akatora (Punasilmä), Hyena (Hyeena).

The few nit-picks about the translation that I have are that they constantly had Daisuke call Gohei “grand father” (isoisä) whilst the uncut version translates his title more accurately as “gramps/old man” (pappa/vaari) as he is not actually related to Daisuke in any way (I actually found the same problem with the Finnish dub of “Howl’s Moving Castle” where they kept calling Sophie a “grand mother” (isoäiti) even though she doesn’t have grand-children).

The other problem was some of the actors pronouncing Sniper’s name as [sni:-per] rather than the correct [snai-pər].

Consistency: 4/5

Towards the end of the series I started to notice that GV was swapping voices for some of the background characters. This is a common issue and it even happens with better established dubbing companies (just compare Mihoshi’s boss’s voice in the two first seasons of Tenchi Muyo! – where the dub was made by Geneon).

However, Smith went from being voiced by a man to being voiced by a woman within the same (second) VHS (or within two-to-three episodes if we think of them like that) which was rather surprising.

Music: N/A

Thank goodness Golden Voice actors never got it in their heads that they could sing or do it better than the people in the original version. Because of this I can’t give the series a music score but I’m relieved since I’ve seen so many dubbing companies and actors embarrass themselves with shitty song performance.

I’m a little disappointed that not even in one of the VHS-tapes did they ever show the ending credits song (Tomorrow) which is actually one of my favorite songs from the series. But at least they left the opening theme untouched (except for the third VHS where they had the recap narration over it and the fourth where it starts cold from where the last tape left off).

Over-all score: 80%

In all the Silver Fan dub, despite its notoriety is quite solid. It tends to suffer from the same weaknesses as a lot of other Golden Voice dubs (some lacking sync) but it’s also the only series I’m aware of that GV dubbed from start to finish and therefore the errors appear more noticeable. They’ve done much more cack-handed jobs with their dubs (a few episodes of He-Man and Captain N come to mind) but on the over-all scale GNG is one of their better efforts.

Obviously a few of the problems in the European cut (such as background music disappearing from certain scenes) can’t be blamed on them since this was a fuck up on the part of whoever did the European edit in the first place – but admittedly I never cared for the final VHS of the series (which comprises of the final third of the series – minus three episodes) where all the voice problems were at their most evident. The first VHS had the best dub, mix and work-up overall (even if it did lack the music from Gin and Daisuke’s training montage) and that’s the one I always loved.

The “kiddy version” of GNG is also available on DVD but I personally would recommend getting the uncut version as well, if for no other reason than for comparison’s sake.

Translator’s Rant (well, sort of): Japanese translating to English – or How Grammar, Spelling and Register get mixed up due to the power of the all-powerful “Umph!?”

Okay, free advice of the day: Never buy imported DVDs from Japan!

Even if the DVD cover claims that it has English subtitles that is never a guarantee that they are good subtitles. Last night me and my sister were watching Sherlock Hound, the animal-anime version of Sherlock Holmes, a series that Hayao Miyazaki himself worked on. My sister had ordered the Japanese DVD and we immediately encountered a problem with the subtitles. They were so hilariously bad they actually stole the attention from the actual cartoon.

We’ve run into this problem before. My sister also recently purchased the DVD for the short anime series R.E.C. which was a cute little anime consisting of five ten minute episodes. However, the DVD was an import and it was clear the English subtitles were made by someone who didn’t really know the English language too well. The REC translation very frequently suffered from the wrong time tenses being used, sometimes having slightly non-sensical sentences and a general problem with the correct register (people talking about “propaganda” instead of a “marketing campaign” or “advertisement”). However, REC was still bearable and you could still struggle through to make sense of the subtitles.

Sherlock Hound’s translations had the same errors as REC and then some. Firstly I’d like to point out to anyone looking to get into subtitling, never use “…” or “?” to translate a line of dialogue or an utterance. I think one of my favorite examples of translating grunts and groans was the constant use of “Umpf” in the first episode. It got practically used for every grunt in that episode and even at one point as a question: “Umpf?”

Here’s a quick list of the general problems with the Sherlock Hound translation:

• Spelling errors: Sucessful, aviod etc. – these just came in abundance. I can forgive maybe one or two spelling errors from an official DVD release (hey, in Finland it tends to happen at some point during a movie) but these errors were consistent and they got repeated time and again.
• Grammar problems: The translator seemed to have a real problem with using past tenses and conjugating verbs according to who was being addressed. This I would attribute to the subtitles being a “dictionary-on-hand” translation where the translator was either translating the Japanese word-for-word, or possibly the Chinese subtitles (lazy translators frequently use other readily available subtitles for the translation if they don’t know the language that’s being spoken on-screen, and considering Watson is given a Chinese name in the subtitles I believe this is the came).
• Line misplacement: Very frequently when a subtitle texts are put on two lines, the beginning of the sentence is actually the line on the bottom. My sister, who’s been to Japan, noted that the Japanese are very clumsy when it comes to subtitling in English so this might explain why this sort of thing kept happening.
• Incorrect names: The translator has clearly never even read Sherlock Holmes as he couldn’t even manage to translate Scotland Yard correctly once. Baker Street is written as Bakiyu Street, Lestrade’s name is mangled beyond all hope and he couldn’t even spell Moriarty correctly.
• “Hey, [full name here]“: Another mark of a lazy translation is that a character keeps getting continuously referred to by his/her full name. Holmes’ name is never written as just Sherlock or Holmes, but always at full length. Even Western translators are not immune to these fits of stupidity (in my Hong Kong Legends’ City Hunter DVD, Jackie Chan’s character is always called Ryo Saeba in the subtitles, regardless of context).
• Not translating as full sentences: The worst part about the translation are all the little words that Japanese anime uses. Yes, the sailor boy who runs to Watson probably did just say “bad” in the original Japanese, but for a normal English-speaking person the translation ought to have been something a little less concise, like “There’s a problem” or “There’s trouble…”
• Text zooms by: The translator also kept showing long sentences only for a fraction of a second on-screen making it practically impossible to read the lines (and given all the language problems I’ve already discussed before, you can see why trying to read the subtitles is a bit of chore to begin with).

However, me and my sister were really entertained by the ridiculous translation effort and here are my personal highlights from the first two episodes we watched…

1. Shit, look at me! – Said by Lestrade as he flies off the police-boat when it hits shore. The second episode had quite a few instances of characters swearing for no reason and this one was by far the most hilarious.
2. Energise! – Two times in the first episode Holmes and Watson keep “energising” their car rather “starting the car”. The whole thing gave me flashbacks to Star Trek. =)
3. Umpf - By far the most over-used exclamation in the first episode. Practically every character said it at one point or another. My personal favorite being when Jorge (my guess is his real name is actually George) used it as a question.
4. Old bean – Quite surprisingly there was a moment of correct English nickname usage when Moriarty’s henchmen escape the ship in the first episode and one of them calls the other old bean. Am I to assume that they actually call people “old beans” in Japan and China as well?
5. He is a [so-and-so] person – This structure gets used a lot when the translator is translating Watson’s lines. “He is a private detective person” I think is a comment he made in the first episode. =D

Translator’s Rant: Finnish Comic Book Names

The first ever issue of X-Men

In the late 90s I became interested in the X-Men comic books and over the course of the next couple of years made a genuine effort to try to follow the series. This proved to be problematic though since apparently I’m a.) too busy to remember to buy a monthly issue of a comic book and b.) too cheap to order it.

This is why a few years back I started to get in the habit of buying collected albums of comics from DC and Marvel alike. Devoting yourself to a series of comics is hard because you’ll have to read the comics for a long time in order to get into the storyline and even further to see the story arcs amount to anything significant. Here is where a collection album comes in handy as you get entire story-arcs in one (though not always and sadly not all collection books are necessarily worthwhile).

Even more so, I live in Finland and that means that unless I specifically seek out the English language edition of a particular comic-book I’m going to be subjected to a translated version of a comic. For the regular monthly editions they have well established traditions of how things are translated and its usually the special one-ofs (like Batman: Year One where the translator apparently didn’t know the difference between the rank-systems in the police-force and the military) where you run into positively cringe-worthy translation fuck ups.

However, the regular monthly issues don’t deviate from the norm which means that if some translated effort has been fucked up somewhere down the line, rather than do something about it the Finnish publisher is going to run with it from here-to-eternity, all in the name of confounded consistency. Here I’ve picked a few of my least favorite translation fuck-ups and I’m sticking with X-Men since theirs was the last special release that almost made me puke not just because of the translation but also because of the shitty stories collected in this particular album (I would have never guessed there could be an X-Men story that ‘sucked’).

X-Men >> Ryhmä-X

Let’s start with the title under which X-Men is released in my country. Although you’ll be able to pick out an issue of the comic easily enough in a Finnish comic-stand since they never remove the original X-Men logo, they have added a Finnish title to the top of the logo. Translated the Finnish title means “Group X” or “Team X” (note here that this title was introduced long before the Finglish word “tiimi” entered the common lexicon).

The title of X-Men is at the core of a lot of debate with some fans since the team also consists of women. Therefore the usage of the less gender-specific “group” or “team” can be seen by some as an improvement on the original title. This, of course, is only the case if you’re a feminist PC language nazi.

It all boils down to the age-old debate: “policeman vs. police officer” – “fireman vs. fire fighter”. I’ve never considered the suffix -man to be chauvinistic because in my view it doesn’t actually refer to male persons but to mankind meaning humans in general. Therefore I see why the creators of X-Men didn’t have a problem with having that as the title of the comic (since there was a woman in the team back when the comic first started). What gets me is when Kitty Pryde in one story referred to herself as an “X-Woman”. The resulting translation made me cringe.

It’s obvious that the original translation of the name was made back in the day when the Finnish public’s knowledge of the English language wasn’t quite on the same level as it is today (and to top it off comics are usually marketed to kids and young teens). However, it’s the 2010s now and I really think it’s time to dump that unnecessary tag-along. Every time I read the Finnish name of the team I just find myself shaking my head.

And yes, X-Man when translated with the literal word for a male person “X-Mies” makes it sound like somebody has had a sex-change, the same way somebody saying X-Woman (X-Nainen) does. Just have the team name in its original form, that’s all I ask.

Nightcrawler >> Painajainen

By far my least favorite name translation in the X-Men comics happened to Kurt Wagner. Not all X-Men characters have their name’s changed, most notably Wolverine and Storm, but those who have usually get at least decent enough efforts (we’ll talk about consistency a little later). Shadow Cat is Varjokissa which is a literal translation and sounds okay, Colossus is Kolossi and that’s good enough for a mutant with such a weird power, Cyclops is Kyklooppi and even Beast translates quite comfortably into Peto.

So what about Kurt? Well clearly the translators struggled with the name because what they came up with is something I just find unacceptable. Painajainen by the way means “nightmare” which I think is just a really bad name to give to a super-hero. Even worse it’s not that fluent to read off the page and sounds way too silly. In my view, even the quite literal translation “Yöryömijä” would have been better (‘nightcrawler’ by the way is a type of worm but that’s probably not the reason why Kurt has that name).

It’s really one of those occasions when a name should have been left untranslated. I personally can’t bring myself to refer to the character by his Finnish title and neither does anyone else I know for that matter.

Now there was a time when I didn’t have such a huge problem with the name. That was back when I didn’t know the character’s original name. It was only once I discovered how the original and the Finnish name sounded nothing alike that I got really pissed. This isn’t Disney either who can and will change names to whatever they like because they cater to a younger audience but X-Men should be above this sort of crap.

The Brood >> Niljahirviö

Finally we come to the Holy Grail of shitty translating (well actually that’s Finnish Movie Channels and DVDs but that’s besides the points). I originally ran into the Brood on the pages of a Mega-Marvel release, primarily an Iron Man and Fantastic 4 story but which eventually included every major character from the Marvel universe in one of these “heroes beat the crap out of each other” events. Back then I thought nothing of it, an ugly monster with a silly name.

When I later ran into them again on the pages of the aforementioned shitty X-Men storyline (which actually predates the Mega-Marvel comic I described) I was startled not only by how bad the story was but also by the horrific name of the creatures. Without explaining the finer nuances of the Finnish name’s first part what the Finnish title for the Brood translates as is “Slimy Monster”.

It sounds like something thought up by a five-year-old and even worse this is what the creatures are referred to as in every Marvel publication. Even the Skrulls got away with just an additional “i” thrown to the end of their name to accommodate for the Finnish language inflections. The Brood should have gotten the same treatment: the name should have been left as is – even at the risk of sounding a little choppy. Some smarter person could have probably concocted an alternate name that would have sounded at least moderately better and taken into account the parasitic nature of the Brood but really sometimes the easy way to do something is the only sensible way to do something.

Translation Consistency

I end this rant with a word about my displeasure with all these name translations done for X-Men. The readership includes not just young boys (who arguably don’t speak English) but also older readers such as myself. Here’s the thing, young boys don’t give a crap if the character names are practically unpronounceable in their language as long as they don’t have to feel silly calling characters Painajainen or slimy space monsters Niljahirviö. And besides which some X-Men characters have gone untranslated for years.

Wolverine is the prime example because nobody in Finland actually wants to think of the animal in question when they read the X-Men (when I was younger I thought it was some weird version of ‘wolf’). Wolverine in Finnish by the way is ahma which definitely doesn’t sound very heroic (especially since the name is used as the base for ahmatti - meaning someone who eats too much).

On the other there’s never been a really good reason not to translate Storm’s name and yet it has never been done. It’s strange since the Finnish word for a storm (myrsky) would sound perfectly respectable as the name of a super-heroine. Conversely I can’t stand how Storm’s catch-phrase (By the Goddess) is always translated without the preposition taken into account and sounds really jerky whenever I have to read it.

Here’s the thing Marvel, all these translation fuck ups could be avoided if you did just one thing: a.) Translate all the character names or b.) none at all.

Translator’s Rant: “Who Am I?” DVD subtitle flubs

Like anyone who learned to program a VCR at a relatively young age, I was into recording movies off the TV onto VHS tapes as a kid. When our parents were together we also had some movie channels that we could watch (Filmnet +, TV 1000, Canal) which were really great since they would also show the movies you’d want to see several times a day for a week, giving you many opportunities to tape the movies you wanted.

It is also these movie channels that introduced me to Jackie Chan and the first movies I saw from him were Thunderbolt and Who Am I?. Some time later (once I started collecting DVDs) I decided it was time to get WAI on DVD as it was and still is my favorite Jackie Chan movie. But the international DVD release turned out to be a bit of a bummer.

Now like with most international DVDs, any additional text (aside the film’s title and credits) are removed so that the importers can add subtitles freely without them getting mixed up with one another. However, this presents problems when translators don’t realize that there is supposed to be text on-screen when there isn’t. The first scene after the film’s title-shot is one such example. What’s even more annoying is that originally the text explaining where the scene was taking place, appeared accompanied by a computer-typing sound-effect. The sound-effect is still there, but apparently the person who did the English subtitles didn’t catch this (nor was the removed on-screen text probably with the transcript) and as a result, we hear the text appear on screen but don’t see it.

The same problem by the way is present with all the other subtitles (including my native Finnish) which means none of the various translators caught this and bothered checking the original film out (they all just based their translation on the English version). More to the point, there are scenes in the film where African natives are talking in a language other than English.

I know for a fact that this is a real African language and not just something cooked up by a Hong Kong scriptwriter since in the TV broadcast version (which incidentally is the English theatrical version) had the English translated subtitles over the scenes (with the digital Finnish subtitles trying to cover them up with a black background). However, once again, there is nothing shown on-screen when the natives are talking on the DVD. The same gets handed down the line to all the other translations.

At first I had been shocked by this since the natives occupy a large portion of the film’s first act and have a lot of dialogue. Now, quite literally, there is nothing on the screen half the time. However, on repeated viewings I started to notice that this didn’t hinder the movie viewing experience since the natives’ body language thankfully helps make clear what they are trying to tell Jackie’s character in the film. And since there is a language barrier between the characters anyway, some may argue that this actually helps the mood of the movie.

However, there is one small scene with Jackie and native African boy which was really sad (though not accentuated too much) where Jackie borrows the boy’s compass and promises to bring it back. It also hurts me to see the natives’ speech not represented since they are actually delivering meaning through language and not just uttering nonsense for the look of it.

At first I had thought this was the Finnish translator being lazy which is really common (especially with DVD translators, but with AV translators in general). At any rate the film shouldn’t have its translation this heavily altered from theatre-to-DVD, especially when the film is clearly intended to be fluently bilingual.