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[kazarinn]

Dream Eater Guide — Dream 5: Cinderella's Ribbons

Download: MEGA | Google Drive Project page and more information

Miyako Ichinose is short, klutzy, and not very skilled with so-called "girly" things, and everything around her loves to hammer in that she’ll never be girly enough. Worried about one of her classmates constantly mocking her for it and the fact they both like the same boy, Miyako receives a pair of hair ribbons made from the same glass used for Cinderella's slippers, which are meant to be a lucky charm so that she can be "as happy of a girl as Cinderella was". Miyako wears them to school, hoping that they’ll help her become "girly enough" the way she wants, but…actually, what do the ribbons do, anyway?

Up until now, we’d been releasing these at a pace of about one chapter a week, but multiple of the team members are going to be busy in the upcoming weeks, so I apologize if anyone had been expecting us to be making this into a schedule. We’ll still try not to fall too far behind, though!

[kazarinn]

Up until now, we've been releasing a Dream Eater Guide chapter around once every week, but we're going to be a bit busy over the next few weeks, so I can't guarantee we're going to keep up that exact pace. (But we'll also try not to fall too far behind!)

[kazarinn]

Dream Eater Guide — Dream 4: Ice Lenses

Download: MEGA | Google Drive Project page and more information

Resentful about the way she's treated just because she's a girl, Ibuki Toda is determined to get back at all of the boys around her. When Marin and Bakuo drop by, Ibuki asks them to make her into "a girl who will never cry" and is offered "Snow Queen"-branded contact lenses that will prevent her from showing any weaknesses… with the catch that they can't be taken off easily. Ibuki is convinced that there’s no way she'd ever want to take them off anyway, but it's not long before she learns the hard way that being unable to express any kind of emotional vulnerability comes with a heavy price…

When I was looking over Saint Tail's 2001 Tokyopop translation during the consultation stage for the retranslation project, one of my biggest gripes with it was that it had an insensitive way of handling things to the point it would even add offensive nuances that weren't in the original Japanese dialogue. Dream Eater Guide was never officially translated into English, but among Tachikawa's works, it's on the more overt side when it comes to its social commentary aspects, so one of my personal priorities with this translation is to be careful and precise so that it doesn't pick up unintended implications.

As you can probably see by the synopsis, this chapter is a particularly loaded one, and I'd also say it's heavier in tone than most of the other chapters in this series. I'd like to give a shout-out to the other members of the group who were watching my progress and giving advice, especially our QCer, who managed to get through this quicky and efficiently.

[kazarinn]

Dream Eater Guide — Dream 3: Wish Upon a Star Candy

Download: MEGA | Google Drive Project page and more information

Chinami Kosaka is self-conscious about the fact she's much taller than the other girls around her, especially since her crush, Hidero Yoshihara, is also the shortest boy in her class! Concerned that he might be turned off by her height, Chinami makes a wish to Bakuo asking him to make her smaller. But when a mishap with the star candy Bakuo gives her causes things to not go as planned, Chinami and Hidero end up having to work together to get out of the mess they're in...

This is where I personally believe the series starts hitting its stride, since now that the formula's been established, the series gets to play around with it a little more. Enjoy!

[kazarinn]

Download: MEGA | Google Drive Project page and more information

Sumine Nakajima has an upcoming exam for her music class, and unfortunately for her, her assigned partner is none other than Nishizumi, an ill-tempered boy whose mere presence intimidates her! Marin and Bakuo are on the case, turning Sumine’s recorder into a magical flute that can make flowers sprout. With "Hamelin’s Recorder" in hand, can Sumine grab enough of Nishizumi’s attention to convince him to practice with her?

This is a real release, not an April Fool's joke or anything (our schedule just happened to end up like this). Sorry if it tripped any red flags.

[kazarinn]

Dream Eater Guide — Chapter 1: Rapunzel's Shampoo

Download: MEGA | Google Drive Project page and more information

Here we are with a new project! We’ve started a translation of Dream Eater Guide, a 9-chapter shoujo manga series by Megumi Tachikawa, whom you may also know as the creator of Saint Tail (which we released a full retranslation of last year). Dream Eater Guide happens to be the series she was working on right before Saint Tail, and while it’s not strictly a magical girl series, it has a lot of similar sensibilities and distinctive touches that are in the latter, so I definitely recommend this series if you’re a fan.

Each chapter centers around a different protagonist who’s dealing with some kind of concern in her life to the point it gives her nightmares, and the general flow is that each one will get a visit from Bakuo the Dream Tapir and his caretaker Marin, who will offer her a magical item that she can use to help overcome her troubles and have better dreams. Of course, the item itself isn’t an instant solution; it’s up to each girl to put it to proper use and resolve the problem on her own, and there’s often an underlying issue that ends up needing to be addressed as well. Recurring themes include personal insecurities (especially expectations of femininity) and interpersonal relationships (often romantic, but not necessarily so), so there’s a lot to enjoy in only nine chapters!

Since it’s an episodic narrative, we’ll be releasing each chapter as we finish them, so without further ado, here’s our self-written synopsis for Dream 1:

Yuiko Suga has a complex about her hair always being rough and messy compared to that of other girls in her class, so when she sees a sign that her crush, Asami, might have an interest in pretty hair, it only makes things worse! Wishing she could be a "real-life Rapunzel", Yuiko gets a visit from Marin and Bakuo and is given "Rapunzel’s Shampoo", which magically makes her hair silky the way she’d always wanted. Which means she now has everything she needs to be more assertive…or does she?

Enjoy, and we hope you look forward to more!

[kazarinn]

Download: MEGA | Google Drive

And here we are with a release of the last final two oneshots in this batch: the two that were included with Saint Tail volume 7, One and Two and Three and A Perfect Catch in Midsummer! With this, we've now rescued made an alternative translation for everything that was in the original Saint Tail volume release!

Our next project is going to be Dream Eater Guide (夢食案内人), another series by Tachikawa that directly predated Saint Tail and has never been translated to English before. However, I won't say this will be our last Saint Tail-related release, since I'm tentatively considering doing smaller translations like song lyrics on my personal site (The DigiLab), and there's also the issue of Saint Tail girls!, which is low priority for us right now for various reasons but is still being taken under consideration. Of course, I'm going to be juggling these between other translation projects as usual, so I can't guarantee how quickly we'll be able to get all of this out, but I'll do my best.

Translation, typesetting: Kazari Art processing assistance: Hayami Umika QC: Replicant

[kazarinn]

Saint Tail anime voice actor commentary (episodes 1-2 and 43)

(Even if you try to be as generous as possible, it's at least 45 times.)

If you thought we were done with everything regarding the Saint Tail anime, think again: we've now subbed the voice actor commentary included with the Blu-ray release from 2014, featuring voice actors Tomo Sakurai (Meimi), Kosuke Okano (Asuka Jr.), and Kikuko Inoue (Seira)! This covers commentary for the episode 1-2 combined special (including the bonus skit that came with it) and episode 43, and features a bunch of interesting behind-the-scenes stories and thoughts from the three of them.

Notable things include:

Kikuko Inoue is "seventeen years old" (oi, oi)

Discussion about the musical adaptation, as well as Sakurai and Okano's experiences playing their respective characters there

Tomokazu Sugita mentioned when you least expect it

All three voice actors repeatedly getting distracted by wanting to watch the actual episode because it kept absorbing them

The line Okano had the hardest time saying in the entire series

...and more!

For more information and instructions on how to watch, check out the release post!

[kazarinn]

You said that the old Saint Tail translations got the story wrong and made the ending say the opposite of what it actually meant, what do you mean by that? If I rewatch the series with the new TL, what would be different about it?

I apologize for what's probably going to be a much longer and more rambly answer than you were hoping for, but I really do feel this needs to be covered thoroughly and carefully, so please bear with me! I can only say so much about what it would be like for someone who's known the series for a long time, but all of our QCers for the retranslation (all of whom had never been exposed to the series beforehand) had no problem understanding the story themes without needing an explanation and were mortified when they heard what the older translations had turned the series into, so there is definitely a huge difference.

The problem boils down to the premise of the series itself. From what I understand, most descriptions of the series in English (including official English summaries) frame the series as involving Asuka Jr. being in love with St. Tail while ignoring Meimi, or even if they do acknowledge that it's mutual, they'll frame it as an "ironic love triangle" where he's torn between the two as if he has to pick one. I imagine this was what the translators themselves thought it was about, since they translated it this way as well. Neither of these are true at any point in the series, and Asuka Jr. has his own independent character arc and story that constitutes a whole half of the series plot and themes, but previous translations had nullified all of that by not handling his dialogue carefully. (I'd say it's exemplified by the fact that the word associated with him to the point it's almost an in-universe meme, donkan, was translated as things like "clueless" or "dingbat" as if he's a shallow idiot who lets everything go over his head, when in actuality the problem is that he's "dense" in that he's insensitive and struggles to understand others' feelings.)

The main gist of it is that Saint Tail is a series about exploring what it means to love someone in the sense of "someone being precious to you", and the role of the phantom thief chase in the plot doubles as both an allegory for their relationship and their outlet for bypassing their respective insecurities they have at school. For Asuka Jr. in particular, there's no room for doubt that he likes Meimi, but the problem is that he has a short temper and tends to say the wrong thing on impulse, making him come off as hostile to her and leaving him hesitant to approach her again because he keeps ruining everything. (This is stated directly in the Japanese Blu-ray booklet, and in fact, no Japanese summary has ever contradicted this nor have they supported the "ironic love triangle" reading.) But previous translations phrased his dialogue as actively insulting and removed most of the nuance regarding his feelings towards Meimi and St. Tail, then mistranslated the one line where he gets closest to clearly stating his actual motive for being involved in the case, thus making it so that the only possible interpretation is that he's shallowly acting out of romantic infatuation.

As for the final arc and ending, I'll put it under a spoiler cut:

One key factor about Asuka Jr.'s dialogue is that even in the beginning of the series, almost everything he says has a legitimate point behind it, and it's just not coming out in the right way. This is especially so in the anime, where his early dialogue lines lashing out at people for "not knowing anything about St. Tail" become important later when he really does turn out to be the only one who's putting any effort into understanding St. Tail's motives and feelings. While Meimi interprets his initial statements as "only caring about St. Tail and not her," he's being completely serious when he complains that people don't respect St. Tail enough, and him demanding that Meimi show St. Tail more respect in episode 12 is, in a sense, him saying that Meimi needs to respect herself more. So when you get to the final arc, it turns out that he was right the whole time: Meimi is engaging in some serious self-neglect, and being loved in the way she wants means being loved as St. Tail is a required component that she can't ignore.

Since everything relevant to Asuka Jr.'s side of the story wasn't handled properly in prior translations, the problem becomes a chain reaction that makes the entire final arc into a series of nonsensical contradictions. If Asuka Jr. says that St. Tail is his dream girl like he's infatuated with her, then decides she "looks like" Meimi despite saying only one line later that he doesn't mean it in a physical sense, then his conclusion about how his feelings regarding St. Tail/Meimi changed after seeing her in Princess Rosa's mirror doesn't make sense either. If all of the references to him feeling frustrated about not knowing how to help Meimi are taken out, the meaning of "...that my hand can reach you" also becomes null (and the fact the Tokyopop manga translation interpreted it as "that I can touch you" really gets me to feel that the translation team didn't understand the story at all). If the parts about him already suspecting St. Tail's identity and wanting to "find" her in an intellectual sense are taken out, his reason for taking Meimi to Pandora (when he distrusts fortune-telling) and his resulting reaction to Maju's prophecy don't make sense either...and so on and so forth.

Naturally, this eventually leads to him "catching" her in the finale losing most of its meaning besides being an ironic play on him having formerly been charged with arresting her, especially because both translations still kept translating "tsukamaeru" as "capture" or "arrest" even when arresting her stopped being his motive. To make things worse, the old anime translation ends on the note of the adult Asuka "taking work from" the police as if he's carrying all the burdens on himself the same way St. Tail did in the past, the opposite of the actual implication that he's "taking credit from the police" by resolving all of the cases but still getting everyone to participate instead of letting someone suffer the same fate of becoming a figurehead. And for things like the reason the calling cards are called "love letters" or the meaning of the "everlasting promise" mentioned at the end, all of the English-language descriptions I'd seen floating around were making terribly strained reaches at what they were supposed to mean, but all of the QCers got it instantly with the new translation...meaning it should be straightforward and easy-to-understand, but wasn't because the old translations had removed everything that got it to make sense.

[kazarinn]

Download: MEGA | Google Drive

We’ve released a retranslation of the two oneshot chapters that were included with Saint Tail volume 6, A 16-Year-Old’s Tiara and The Day the Whale Went Around! As with before, these were technically included with the original Tokyopop English release as well, but on top of the already existing issues with their Saint Tail release, volume 6 has some particularly…let’s say, unique problems:

An entire page is missing from A 16-Year-Old’s Tiara (a critically plot-important one, at that)

All of the pages after it are shifted to the wrong side, meaning important details are sucked into the spine while page edges have excess leeway

Multiple lines are erased and not replaced with anything at all, often leaving conspicuous blank spaces and omitting plot-important information (something that impacts Saint Tail‘s final chapters as well)

(Yep, that’s actually how it’s printed in the book. Yes, that’s where the most important line in the last page is. Needless to say, it didn’t take much convincing for us to pick these up.)

Tachikawa’s author comments for these two oneshots can be found in Saint Tail chapter 23, on pages 45 (A 16-Year-Old’s Tiara) and 57 (The Day the Whale Went Around). If you’ve read our release and were curious about what those were referring to, here’s your chance to check them out!

[kazarinn]

Download: MEGA | Google Drive

Today, we're bringing you a retranslated version of oneshot manga chapters Portrait of a Morning Glory and The Music Box That Brings Forth Spring by Megumi Tachikawa, both of which were originally published in Nakayoshi extra issues in 1992...but which you may also recognize as the extras included with Saint Tail volume 1! While they were included with the Tokyopop English release as well, they were subject to the same major issues that necessitated our Saint Tail retranslation project, so we went ahead and revisited these too. I've also decided that I'll be working on the chapters included with volumes 6 and 7, so please look forward to them!

Portrait of a Morning Glory is about a morning glory flower that makes a deal a la The Little Mermaid to become human and spend some time getting to know a boy she'd fallen in love with, while The Music Box That Brings Forth Spring is about a world where the changing of the seasons depends on the maintenance of an astral music box. If you're a Saint Tail fan, you may recognize some early prototypes for some of the themes and concepts that would eventually get used there, so I definitely recommend you check these out ☺

[kazarinn]

Regarding Saint Tail's translation, how much of it do you think might have had to do with early 00's localization trends? Since it was Tokyopop and all

Honestly, very little. Actually, as far as changes that were clearly intentional go, I didn't see very many (perhaps surprisingly so for a Tokyopop manga at the time?), and they weren't really that damaging to the story by themselves; if they were, they were only a small part of a wider problem where the relevant subplot wasn't reflected properly in the overall translation.

The main issue is simply that the translation is extremely sloppy, failing to account for a lot of nuance in how the Japanese dialogue is phrased and failing to maintain the importance of certain recurring words/phrases. At times, a lot of it comes from the translation being too stuck on the dictionary definitions of the words in the sentence instead of being more flexible with phrasing, and when there are liberties taken in the wrong direction, the problem isn't about taking liberties at all, but that someone involved seemed to have misinterpreted the story context and phrased it in a way that made things stop making sense. And of course, some lines are just full-on technical errors, or in other words, clear byproducts of the translator misreading a word or sentence to begin with.

(Incidentally, I'm specifically referring to the manga translation and the anime subtitles; the English dub is a whole other can of worms, but it doesn't cover the full series, so I think talking about whether the story makes coherent sense with it is kind of a moot point.)

All things considered, I do think there are some really good choices in the official translations, to the point where some lines even make me think "man, I wish I'd come up with that!" I also fully concede that I was able to make maximum use of language resources and research materials available to me on the Internet in 2023, something that definitely would not have been as possible in 2001. So despite everything I've said, I do have respect for the work that must have been put into the older translations and don't hold a grudge against anyone or anything. It's just that I also believe it's important to be critical of a bad translation when it's bad, especially when it's a professionally produced one that still misrepresents the original source material this badly.

[kazarinn]

Are there any other examples of "insidiously bad" translation like what you mentioned on your blog?

The most well-known examples I like to refer to are Final Fantasy VII (the original game) and Final Fantasy XIII. Whatever you think of the overall quality of their respective stories is subjective, but I'm specifically talking about the part where I would see VII be called things like "surreal" for its stilted phrasing while English-speaking players of XIII would complain that it doesn't sufficiently explain certain plot-important terms like what a l'Cie is, etc. Both games make coherent sense in Japanese, it's specifically the translation that phrased things weirdly and made it unnecessarily confusing. But they're also both professional localizations that have passable English grammar (and in particular, VII came out at a time when people had a tendency to equate "good translation" with "it has swear words in it"), so anyone who's not familiar with Japanese probably wouldn't notice.

Another one that's less well-known but is still a good case study is that of Part 5 of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (Vento Aureo). I've never actually read a fan translation of JoJo myself, so this is a story I've heard about via hearsay and short samples, but from what I understand, Part 4's most prominent fan translation had been done by someone who didn't have a good grasp of English grammar, so everyone saw the clumsy grammar and phrasing and knew to take it with a grain of salt. (From the samples I've seen, the translator seemed to actually have a good grasp of Japanese and translation theory, it was specifically the English grammar that was a problem.)

But since the most prominent fan translation of Part 5 seemed to be in coherent English, people accepted that it must be a better translation and that it couldn't be that bad...when in fact there were actually a lot of nuance and character voice problems, as well as lines that were just made up wholesale. But since people reading it didn't notice the problem, they'd often blame anything that didn't make sense on the writing itself, so Part 5 got a bad reputation with things like "the main character (Giorno) has no personality" or making "what does King Crimson even do?" into a meme. Then the anime adaptation with a professional translation came out, and people getting into it thought Giorno was a perfectly well-written character and had no problem understanding how King Crimson works...but until then, people often wouldn't believe you if you claimed the translation had made that much of a difference.

(And this is why being a translator can be kind of scary sometimes. Depending on what you're translating, the stakes can get pretty high...)

[kazarinn]

Regarding Saint Tail girls! and our future plans

I've gotten this question a few times now, so I felt I should dedicate a proper post to explaining the situation so I can refer back to it. Saint Tail has a spiritual sequel manga (of sorts? It's a bit complicated, I'll explain below) called Saint Tail girls!, which was the product of a contest held by Kodansha in 2017 to create a Saint Tail sequel by a new creator. Now that we've finished retranslating the original series, some people have been (quite understandably!) curious about if we have any plans for the sequel as well.

The thing is, I'm not sure how many people are aware of this, but Saint Tail girls! is only four chapters (two split into two parts each) and is an incomplete story with a lot of unanswered questions/loose ends hanging. What's more, its connection to the original series is a bit fuzzy, since while it ostensibly takes place in Seika and has a school named St. Paulia, there aren't any concrete references to events or characters from the original series besides the fact that a vigilante phantom thief named St. Tail existed before. If you've read the original series, the premise of "two girls competing for the St. Tail title and taking up her name" should immediately raise eyebrows, since the original series is clear about its stance that worshipping St. Tail like a name instead of an individual person is disrespectful (needless to say, it makes one wonder what Asuka and Seira are doing during all this, because there's no way they'd approve).

I'm not saying this to knock against the writing, since it does seem like it was a proof of concept of sorts, and if the series had been extended, it may have addressed those questions (after all, the original series was also initially meant to be only four chapters as well). But nevertheless, that's where it stopped, and a thank-you message from author/artist Shiki Yamori. that was included at the end of the digital volume release has a note of finality that suggests we probably shouldn't be expecting more anytime soon. Because of this, the team and I would like to prioritize Tachikawa's other works that were either translated badly or left untranslated, since we feel that those are in more urgent need of attention.

That said, since it's only four chapters, I do still have it under consideration, so it's "very deep down in the backlog and low priority" rather than a hard no from me. But if people are still curious about it, I can at least consider moving it up the queue a bit, so do feel free to let me know if you're interested!

[kazarinn]

I decided to do a bit of a writeup/deeper look into what made Saint Tail's official translations so dangerously misleading, as well as what kinds of notes I had to take for the retranslation project. I don't usually post my notes up in this kind of detail, but I felt this was a good opportunity to show off how complex the series' writing actually is (and show off more of the translation process, because I just love talking about translation too much in general). If you're interested in the series, or you're just interested in how translation works, please check it out!

[kazarinn]

By previous translations of the Kaitou Saint Tail anime being bad, do you mean both the Tokyopop and the Discotek versions?

They're mostly the same translation, and (correct me if I'm wrong) my understanding is that any full English translation of the series released up to last month had been based on the original Tokyopop translation from 2001. If the translation you know of uses the phrasing "...for I use no gimmick or trick" for the transformation phrase, it's probably based on that one. It does seem like there's been modifications by different people here and there, and I mainly made reference to the Discotek release because it's the most recent official release, so I wanted to make it clear that the problem was still persisting up to even as recently as last year. But fundamentally speaking, they're all working off that one specific translation.

Unfortunately, that translation seems to be in that exact dangerous territory where it's just good enough for anyone looking at it at a glance to think it's mostly usable -- it's a seemingly simple series, the English grammar looks okay, and the story mostly seems to make sense, so there isn't too much problem, right? -- when in fact it's got problems all the way down to the core. These kinds of translations are bad in a very deceptive way, so I can hardly blame anyone who figured that they might as well work off an existing translation since it was technically done already, but I wouldn't have retranslated the entire series from scratch if I hadn't felt it was so much of a disaster that it was easier to just retranslate it than try and salvage it.

When I was going over the Discotek release line-by-line, I did a tally and found around 200 technical errors (as in, context and logic errors or semantic misinterpretation of the original Japanese line), around 30 of which were ones that I felt had a major impact on the plot or story themes, especially the final arc, ending, and epilogue. These are just the technical errors, so that's not even getting into the inconsistently sloppy terminology/naming that seemed to flip back and forth between episodes, the way it often mishandled nuance in characterization (poor Asuka Jr. really got the short end of the stick here), or the gripes I had with the phrasing in general (the fact it had so many choices like rendering a word meaning "inelegant" as "unfeminine" or "no sex appeal", for instance). And unfortunately, the manga, which normally should be a good reference to work from, had an even worse translation (also by Tokyopop) that threw any concept of nuance out the window and had lines that were genuinely incomprehensible.

It pains me to think about the fact that this was all people had to work with for more than 20 years, so that's why I hope even people who have seen the series already can give it a chance with the new translation, because I really do think it's possible it'll come off as a completely different series to them.

[kazarinn]

You mentioned a few times that Saint Tail has a lot of metaphors, what do you mean by that? Can you give examples?

The most important one is probably the story of the flower and snow that Asuka Jr. tells Meimi in chapter 15 (episode 23). This is especially important for the manga, which makes careful use of the placement of flowers and snow in certain panels, especially in the final chapter.

Personally, I and the rest of the team felt that understanding the meaning behind "the only flower that was willing to offer the snow its color" and "the snow protecting the flower during the winter" made it much easier to figure out the deeper narrative about Meimi and Asuka Jr.'s thoughts and feelings, since everything came naturally from there. In particular, since Asuka Jr. is not very good at putting his feelings into clear words, the way the manga used the flower/snow imagery was helpful in establishing what his deeper feelings were behind his words, which thus made it easier to ensure that our translation of his lines would be consistent with them. If you didn't notice it the first time, I definitely recommend going through it again and paying attention to how the flower/snow imagery is used, especially in chapters 13-24 and extra chapters 1-2; there is, in a sense, a whole extra underlying narrative that comes out of it.

Besides that, each one of St. Tail's heists featured in a given chapter has some kind of thematic parallel or connection to Meimi and Asuka Jr.'s feelings for each other (for example, chapter 20 even uses visual framing to signal whom Mana and Hiromi are supposed to represent). The anime generally falls under the same principle, so you have things like the parallel between Asuka Jr.'s attitude about how the Tree of Happiness is treated in episode 35 and his description of St. Tail as an "ideal" in episode 39.