Smile Precure – 04 Released

LET'S MARCHING

HD Torrent | SD Torrent | Script

tobikome kiki no saizensen

Okay actually I should probably clear this up. I did say back when I took on Smile that if Go-Busters was any good – and I ended up doing it – I’d probably drop Smile to make way for it. And, uh, I haven’t… because I like Smile. D: However, I do reserve the right to invoke that option if necessary and I get too burned out, but all three shows have been good so far so hopefully they’ll keep me motivated enough to be happy with literally having no time at the weekend.

One other thing: We’re using 10-bit encodes for our HD now. Ride the wave of the future, awww yeah.

Anyway, translation stuffs after the jump, as ever.

First off, let’s get this out of the way: Didn’t really enjoy TLing this ep. It was a good ep, don’t get me wrong, but it had a lot of things to really get on my nerves – annoying idioms and other things that prove difficult to translate, along with the word ‘kizuna’ being over-used too much. Kizuna literally means ‘bonds’, as in that which ties people together, but if you start throwing that word around in English as much as ‘kizuna’ is thrown around in Japanese, the entire thing starts looking incredibly goddamn stupid. As such, one has to find ways of translating around the word and conveying the concept in a less direct and more natural-sounding manner, which is great, but it kind of starts having effects on the overall narrative when the term is constantly getting brought up in reference to it’s previous uses and one’s constantly dodging around it with one’s wording.

You can see where the issues – and headaches – arise.

Anyway, actual TL notes. When the student council president arrives, he is referred to by name as Irie. That’s cool, but he’s referred to in full as “Irie-seitokaichou” or “Student Council President Irie.” As this sounds utterly retarded in English, and there’s two people saying it at once, I decided to present it as one person saying the name and the other saying the title, which gets the information across without sounding incredibly awkward in English.

When the kids are playing catch with Candy, one of them shouts “pompokopom!” This is a reference to the old myth that tanukis – raccoon dogs – would inflate their bellies and play them as a drum, and it’d make that beat. Which is a neat bit of trivia, but would either have required a TL note or would have been utterly baffling, so I went for a vaguely similar noise-based “Boing!” in the attempt to not alienate people too much. Also, boing.

I had a bit of fun with the rock-paper-scissors scene. When Candy’s all “I chose scissors I am winner”, Akane’s retort is more like “How exactly is that meant to be scissors?!” but it’s so blunt in it’s tone that something more blunt seemed appropriate when rendering it in English. And the result is what you see.

AkaRedoni makes a reference to an idiom when he shows up, using a variant of “naku ko ga inai” – literally meaning “there’s nobody crying” and meant to be a “well i don’t see anyone complaining about it.” He however, changes ‘naku’ to ‘yoi’, a verb meaning ‘crying’ into an adjective meaning ‘good’ or ‘happy’.  “There’s no-one happy about it!” and then Akane ‘corrects’ his use of the idiom to “There’s no-one crying about it.” This would have sounded so ridiculously unnatural in English, being a bizarre reference to an idiom and wordplay that doesn’t even make goddamn sense from an English perspective that I felt a “could/couldn’t care less” mistake would be a similar thing for her to correct him over, and allowed me to set the tone without sounding utterly goddamn stupid.

Anyway, that’s a lot of notes. Enjoy!