#also they pronounce stuff and names so wrong in the english dub i love my man gaytoe and nanananannanmi

[shujiinkou]

have spent the better part of today rewarching jjk but while playing house flipper so I have English dub on this time and geto's voice is just as sexy

[blueflyingturtleontheway]

Okay I was supposed to take a break from the dubbing analysis so I’m going to stretch it a little and instead analise the original dubbing of a cartoon... Since it literally includes Polish. I'll still drop a few fun facts about the Polish dub tho.

I’m talking about Martha Speaks season 1 episode 10b “Bye Martha” so get ready cause this will be incomprehensible:

*And also I have to say I was so baffled when I heard about this episode just… where did the idea to use Polish come from. How. What. Why.

*I’ll start off by explaining what the episode is about since I don’t expect you people to actually watch it – in a scheme to steal Martha, two bad guys switch her regular alphabet soup (that allows her to speak English) with a Polish one. Now, since you couldn’t do this concept in Polish since, you know, they all speak Polish in the Polish dub, instead it got changed to French.

*Still, here's the links if you're really bored in life, English version and Polish dub

*Also this is the first time I watched Martha Speaks in English

*Sorry this analysis will be much sloppier than the other ones since this is really just for fun

*First change between dubs is that there is a scene where Bad Guy #1 (Otis) watches Bad Guy #2 (Pablum) take the alphabet soup cans from a Polish shop and for a moment the frame shows the Polish shop in the focus. To escape confusion this one scene simply got cut from the Polish version.

*Also I’m fascinated by the idea of Polish alphabet soup. Do they have “ą”s and “ę”s and “ż”s there? Did they make separate noodles for the digraphs? Can I write “żółć” with noodles? Does it taste like the instant tomato soup from amino???

*Okay so Otis dresses up as a “Polish lady” and goes to Martha’s owner family and at first I was like, oh okay the accent is fine, we have some hard “r”s and an “I yam” very nice… and then the “zis” and “zat” came in

*A word of explanation, yes, I know that exchanging “th” with “z” has became the standard western way to portray most European accents but when it comes to Poland, this is NOT a thing. This is an accent I’ve heard Ukrainians and Russians have, but never from a Polish person and I have heard my grandma pronounce “ticket” as “tyket”. For Polish people it’s more common to turn “this” into “dis” or in some rare cases “fis” since we don’t have the “th” sound in Polish and this is how we’re taught to pronounce it

*And then

*It happened

*”SASHA!”

*Come on this such an obvious Russian name! Please we’re already past ‘89 acknowledge we’re different countries!

*Though this spoilers the plot twist that foils Otis’ plan if you know a thing or two about Russian names, since if you do, you know that Sasha is actually a male name, specifically a diminutive of the name Aleksandr. This hints to the fact that Otis thinks Martha is a male dog and that ignorance leads to his plan failing.

*Of course I’m not Russian do Amuel if you’re reading this and I’m wrong please correct me

*Okay tho I have to say I love the word “dogling” and it’s pretty realistic since as a Pole, I can confirm that the lack of diminutives in English really bugs me and I’m tempted to do stuff like this all the time

*”Back when you were just a little puppyshka back in Poland” is a hilarious sentence, because this is a clearly Russified diminutive and yet the speaker still claims to be from Poland. Fascinating.

*And then instead of “yes” the fake Polish Lady answers “ja”

*This is were I decided to not get offended by the creators mistaking Polish for Russian because it became obvious they had no idea what they were doing

*Should I get offended that Otis/Fake Polish Lady says they are too poor to afford a camera? (Or a picture machine as he for some reason calls it)

*Honestly after that one X-men movie, no, I don’t think I will

*”Ni” does not, in fact, mean “no”, in fact this word doesn’t exist unless in some pretty specific and mostly archaic cases

*It should be “nie” just so you know

*Fun fact instead of just “dog license place” in Polish they use the actual name “Kennel Club” and this is actually common in Polish dubbings to use names of actual organizations and stuff

*They use an actual idiom “nie ujdzie im to na sucho”! It means basically “they won’t get away with that (although it doesn’t really connect fluidly with the English first part of the sentence it’s used it, but hey, at least it’s not a direct translation of the English idiom)

*Big props for Martha’s VA for learning those three sentences in Polish. It might sound ironic but that’s actually impressive so good for her

*Still, pronouncing “zupę” as “żupę” is extremely funny XD

*Sigh, I know you don’t have a hard “y” in Polish but it really sounds like they’re saying Christina instead of Krystyna, which I imagine it was supposed to be

*Absolutely bad representation. A self respecting Pole wouldn’t get the police at people

*JP100%

*Though Fake Polish Lady is supposed to be elderly so there’s 50/50 chance she’s communist and then that checks out

*Was- Was “Leczałski” supposed to be “Lechowski”????

*PLEASE remember that Polish “w” is always pronounced as “v” I’m even willing to ignore the “ch/h” problem then

*Okay but “Christina” actually has a pretty nice accent, I like the way she says “Englisz”

*And “diktionari” <3

*Also the use of “to dobrze” for “hooray” is such a funny concept because- it literally means “that’s good” this is the least enthusiastic thing they could’ve used XD

So to conclude, I like how they handled this in the Polish dubbing, I’m no French expert but I’m pretty sure they used better sentences than Americans in their dub and even if the accent is stereotypical, at least it’s stereotypical for the right country.

And in the original, they once again mixed up Polish and Russian, at which I would be more offended if I didn’t know it comes from ignorance and not malice. So I’m disappointed but not surprised. Still, there are some Watsonian ways to explain a lot of inaccuracies (for example Fake Polish Lady having wrong accent and using Russianizations because Otis doesn’t know a thing about Poland) and it’s still better than X-men Apocalypse so I can’t really complain.

That really was an Experience tho.

[rottenbrainstuff]

Before going on to part four of Jojo’s bizarre adventure, I snagged the OVAs and gave those a watch. (Jojo part 3 spoilers below)

This is a 17 year old boy.

The ovas have absolutely no sense of humour at all, serious boys here only, folks. (Well... the older ovas are a bit funny) Without the stupid nonsense the show has a very different tone, and I’m not sure it’s the correct tone. Then again, we also don’t have all the gross poop and pee and exploding boobs and naked children, so... it’s a trade off. Kakyoin’s hair is brown instead of pink. Was pink too gay? If you remove the bits that are too gay I feel like you’re missing the entire point of Jojo....

Kakyoin’s earrings (antennae????) are quite fun, I’ve been watching them and they’re in so many different places in his ears from shot to shot.

This spot is probably my favourite spot. How the hell can you even have a piercing like that there. (Also behold: another 17 year old boy)

Hierophant Green looks so much cooler in the ova, omg the scene where it unravels... wish they had spent the money to do that a couple more times... and the name is also mysteriously pronounced wrong in the English dub? Hierophant is an English word?..??..?

Dio’s got HUGE TITS but I’m afraid I don’t care too much for the voice actor... I joked that Dio sounds like a 60 year old man then I looked him up and.... that’s about how old the voice actor is. Takehito Koyasu who does Dio in the anime is one of my top fav voice actors ever so I can’t help but prefer his version.

It’s quite interesting having two versions of the same story, because you can directly compare different direction and plotting choices. Spoilers!

It was interesting how the anime and ova chose different ways to board the scene where Kakyoin dies. I think the anime is more successful. In the ova it’s a pretty standard fight for the series... Kakyoin tries his misjudged attack, Dio stops time, he gets time to do a little monologue, he punches through Kakyoin, gets a couple more lines out, then time starts up again and Kakyoin is sent flying backward. It’s long and drawn out, like every fight, it’s dramatic, it’s ok.

The anime though, I liked the choice they made. We don’t get to see what happens with the stopped time. All we see is Kakyoin trying his attack, suddenly The World is right in front of his face and he’s flying backwards before we really know what’s going on, my god he is dead and it happened SO FAST. When I watched that, I already knew what was going to happen, but I was still *shocked* by it. It’s so fast, so horrible, we still have no explanation for what exactly the fuck Dio is doing so it’s more menacing, and the focus of the scene is entirely his sudden death, not the revelation of what The World can do. It was a really great choice.

The one really great thing about the ovas though is The Animation. Aaaah so good. Even the older 90s one. Guys I’m not exactly sure what happened to the anime industry in japan in the 2000s, I am guessing it’s a combo of paying animators less, farming stuff out to overseas studios more, and just a general shift in aesthetic, but man they don’t make them like this anymore. And I don’t just mean the scenes where they spent big budgets, for example, animating Justice (but that was indeed amazing!!!). Just, the movement, the observation-based animation, the volume of the characters, it’s so classic, it’s so good. I know I have a soft spot for even BAD 90s Japanese animation, but this is great, ah I love it. I miss shows looking like this. A+. I was reading some comments from someone who lives in Egypt and they said the research for the backgrounds was so good that they could recognize specific cafes and shops in the background.

In a nutshell, the ovas are a quirky little adaptation, sometimes doing a good job cutting out the boring filler, sometimes ending up too truncated, and always with extremely pleasing animation and an inexplicably brown-haired Kakyoin, A+, five stars, a shame they never properly released that Phantom Blood movie, on to part four for me now.

[ribbonstrawberrysurprise]

Ribbon vs. Reborn

This is one of those big TMM translation arguments.

I guess I’ve already taken a side due to my url...

Putting that aside for now, why is there a debate over the first word of the Mew Mew’s attack names? And does one option have more evidence?

The Mew Mew’s attacks all* begin with リボーン (ribōn/riboon/riboun). 

*except sometimes Pudding in the manga

Japanese syllables (except for “n”) cannot end in a consonant, so foreign words written in katakana try to sound sort of like the original pronunciation without violating that rule. Sounds like “or” and “ar” in English usually become an “o” or “a” sound held for twice the normal length (sort of like the British pronunciation).  For example, “star” would be broken down into su-ta-a, and written as スター, with “ー” meaning to hold the vowel longer.

This means that the typical translation for リボーン is reborn.

“Ribbon" would more typically be written as  リボン (ribon).

However, the “ ー ” in katakana just means that the vowel at the end of a syllable is held longer, not why it is held longer. So,  リボーン could be reborn, said normally, or ribbon, with the “bon” part held for a dramatically long time (i.e., Ribboooooooon, Strawberry Check!).

Like it is in the anime.

So, which was intended?

Unfortunately, as far as I know the attack names have never been written in English on any official Japanese merchandise or publication, and there’s no word from Mia Ikumi or Reiko Yoshida.

So what about the official English?

Both official English translations (Tokyopop and Kodansha) used Ribbon for the attack names. However, the Tokyopop translation is known to have seriously mistranslated lots of katakana and been incredibly inconsistent with attack and weapon names.

Kodansha is definitely better, but they still couldn’t get Quiche until a la Mode.

So, both versions of the English manga think it’s ribbon, but neither is infallible when it comes to translating names in katakana.

What about the anime?

Well, Mew Mew Power used entirely different attack names, so it and any dubs based on it won’t be helpful. Of the dubs listed on the TMM wiki, 5 were based on the original Japanese: Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, Thai, and Italian. Of these, the Cantonese cuts out Ribbon/Reborn entirely, and the Korean and Thai transliterate ri-bo-o-n into Hangul and Thai script, respectively.

The Mandarin dub definitely uses ribbon because that part of the attack is written in English.

...but there are obviously some other issues. I can honestly see how サプライズ (sapuraizu) was misunderstood as スプライセス (supuraisesu) and ラッシュ (rasshu) as ズラッシュ (zurasshu), but you’d think someone would check the meaning of the English words...

The Italian dub actually uses Italian for the attacks rather than transliterating the original Japanized English. The wiki lists Ichigo’s Italian attack as “Ribbon of Light,” but this is misleading. Mew Berry’s attack in Mew Mew Amiche Vincenti is “Fiocco di Luce,” which would more accurately translate to Bow of Light. Her weapon is “Fiocco del Cuore,” (Bow of the Heart/The Heart’s Bow). Mew Mina uses “Cuore di Mina” (Mina’s Heart), and her attack is “Fiocco d'Azione” (Bow of Action). The other Mews’ are along the same lines as Mina. This isn’t really a use of ribbon, but it definitely suggests that the translators interpreted the original attacks as using “Ribbon” when coming up with the Italian ones.

So, the dubs and English manga seem to generally like “Ribbon”. Why then, is there a debate?

Aside from the fact that リボーン is translated as “reborn” in every other context, “Ribbon” is a totally random word that doesn’t seem related to any of the attacks or even the Mews in general. Admittedly, “Check” also seems totally random, but the other words at least seem vaguely suggestive of the attack or the Mew’s attitude. “Ribbon” is a random cute word, whereas “Reborn” is thematic.

There’s a lot of rebirth/resurrection in TMM, usually due to Mew Aqua.

Deep Blue is reborn as Masaya, a bird is reborn to show off the power of the Mew Aqua, everyone in Tokyo (the world?) except Ichigo is reborn due to the final Mew Aqua, then Masaya and Ichigo revive each other due to love (and possibly residual Mew Aqua).

The anime underplays this by specifying that the bird in ep. 21 was only injured, but it’s more explicit about the main characters’ deaths in the last few episodes. 

Either way, “Reborn” makes sense thematically because the Mews’ power seems somehow tied to Mew Aqua (e.g., it reacts when they’re close).

So, “Reborn” is thematic, but “Ribbon” is a cuter word (always a concern for girls shows) that’s probably more familiar to the target audience. After all, the loanword ribon is a term used day-to-day to refer to stuff like hair ribbons, whereas riboun is not very common*. Official translations favor “Ribbon,” but none of them are flawless translations, and all of them are influenced by previous translation choices (e.g., the Tokyopop translation influenced fansubbers, who influenced the fandom, who influenced the Kodansha re-translation). 

* It’s become more well-known due to the Reborn! manga/anime, but those came out after 2002, when the TMM anime takes place.

Choosing between them seems like more of a matter of personal preference, but I think choosing just one is unnecessary. 

(EVERYTHING PAST THIS IS HEADCANON)

How did the Mew weapons, etc. get named? (In universe, so Ikumi/Yoshida is the wrong answer.) 

Presumably either Keiichiro or Ryou designed and named everything themselves. We know that they at least created the Mewberry Rod because Ryou gives it to Ichigo in episode 15, and it can’t be that different from the other weapons because Ichigo summons it by default from then on.

Ryou is intelligent but has no people skills.

His idea of a fun nickname is “biological weapon”.

Ryou cannot have named the weapons or attacks because they aren’t something like “Chimera Disintegration Beam”. Keiichiro, who is used to smoothing things over when Ryou offends someone and is at the very least capable of designing cakes, is a much better candidate for the designer/namer of the weapons, outfits, cafe, etc.

It’s also possible they outsourced it since we know they don’t work entirely alone. I don’t want to go through the whole series right now, but I’m pretty sure the anime mentions them getting results from a lab a few times, and Mary McGuire at least seems to know Ichigo’s secret identity. (Also, why else were they hosting a party if not to gather/recruit members of the project?)

Regardless, I think Ryou pushed for something too scientific or unappealing and person B compromised with something that the average Japanese elementary or middle school student wouldn’t hate. Thus “Reborn” to get him to agree, but secretly “Ribbon”.

To explain/justify that, let’s consider the name of the Mew Project. 

ミュウ (myū/myuu) is a slightly irregular spelling of  ミュー , which can refer to the cat sound “mew” but also to the Greek letter “Μ” or “μ” (mu) which is pronounced the same way. The symbol μ is used to represent the mutation rate of a gene in genetics research, and the Mew Project is sometimes written as the μ-Project in the anime.

Greek letters also show up in a manga illustration.

(In case you’re wondering, horizontally is an attempt at “Ichigo Momomiya” and vertically is an attempt at “Tokyo Mew Mew”)

There’s no way that no one noticed that μ is both scientifically appropriate and a cat pun. Similarly, there’s no way no one noticed that “Reborn” sounds like “Ribbon”. Considering all of the weapon names are already puns, it should come as no surprise that the names of other things are puns as well.

I think that whoever named them (probably Keiichiro) always intended them to be both at once. So, both μ-Ichigo and Mew Ichigo, both Reborn and Ribbon. Ryou would approve of the first and either not notice the second until too late or grudgingly agree that it makes an okay cover for a cafe name

Out of the Mews, only Zakuro might know the Greek alphabet and possibly be aware of its use in genetics. Theoretically all of them might have the English knowledge from school to get both “ribbon” and “reborn,” but Ichigo “I am a Ichigo” Momomiya is not great at English. She definitely knows the word for hair ribbons though, because she uses it in episode 1 (about 3 min. in, “Arrhh! The ribbon snapped!”). Ichigo is also one who officially names the team “Tokyo Mew Mew” to the press, and even Ryou ends up using that name eventually, despite reacting negatively when he first hears it. Since that name gets accepted as official both in and out of universe, I feel like Ichigo’s interpretations of all the names should be the “official” ones unless specifically talking about Ryou and Keiichiro’s research. 

So, both options are correct depending on the circumstance (e.g. Ichigo talking vs. Ryou talking, official Project report vs. news broadcast), but Mew and Ribbon should be the default.

tl;dr, 

Ryou tells μ-Ichigo about her attack, Reborn Strawberry Check.

Mew Ichigo tells the media about her attack, Ribbon Strawberry Check.

Keiichiro has once again saved the day using people skills and puns.