聞く：銀河英雄伝説：新たなる戦い序曲

 I have written a blog post about the main series "Legend of the Galactic Heroes" before, but I had not yet seen this film, which is a more detailed retelling of the content featured in the first two episodes of the original series. In the far future when humanity has colonized the Milky Way galaxy, the two remaining nation-states in existence, the Galactic Empire and Free Planets Alliance, have been locked in war for almost 150 years. "Overture to a New War" tells the story of the Battle of Astarte, in which the Imperial Fleet under High Admiral Reinhart von Lohengramm inflicts heavy casualties on the Alliance Fleet under Commodore Yang Wen-li (who takes command only after his superior is gravely wounded) but is ultimately forced to withdraw.


I could scarcely understand a thing when Imperial noblemen and the Emperor were speaking with each other, but I could catch much more of Alliance commoners' speech. To that end, I find it interesting to note how simple some sentences really are, and that I can understand more than that for which I give myself credit. In particular, at 22:15 Secretary Trunicht says, "you don't think battles are won by numbers, do you?" which I would have thought impossible for me to translate into Japanese, but when I listened more carefully and heard 「戦いは数でする物ではないと考えないのかね？」, I realized that some phrases really are not so complicated as they seem.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

聞く：戦艦の世界

Image
World of Warships is a free-to-play online game made by the Russian company Wargaming, who also made the more famous World of Tanks . Players take control of World War II era warships ranging from destroyers to aircraft carriers and compete against each other in teams usually consisting of ten players. The game ends either when one team secures 1000 objective points or when one team sinks all the other team's ships.  The real IJN Fusou ( 扶桑)  in 1933 About a month ago, I changed my game language setting to Japanese because I typically use the Japanese ships, and I thought it would be good fun and practice to set the language to match. The game is difficult enough as it is, and not understanding some of the vocal cues and none of the written ones at first was not much help. However, while I still don't know any of the kanji in the game, I can now say that when the game announcer yells "終了まで、残り五分です" or "敵軍の優勢になりました" or, my personal favorite, "右舷から、魚雷接近,...
Read more

Nobunaga: King of Zipangu

Image
Nobunaga: King of Zipangu is an NHK drama from the early 1990s that follows the life of Oda Nobunaga, who fought to unify Japan during the Warring States period of the sixteenth century. The first episode is about his father's struggle to establish control over their home province of Owari amidst interference from the lord of Mino, Saito Dousan, and the shogunate's nominal governor. He must also decide an heir, since Nobunaga, despite being his eldest son, is unpopular due to his perceived stupidity and femininity. In the background throughout the episode is a story about certain Portuguese monks who were the first Europeans to visit Japan. The Japanese spoken in King of Zipangu is very different from what I have heard in other Japanese media. The characters use very formal styles and vocabulary; for example, 御座る seems to be preferred to ある.
Read more

聞く：キング・オブ・ザ・ヒル

Image
 I have never actually watched King of the Hill, but I know enough about it to find a Japanese dubbing hilarious. The show is a slice of life comedy about the Hill family, who live in a small town in Texas. In this clip, Hank Hill, the main character, is teaching his son Bobby that smoking tobacco is wrong by forcing him to smoke dozens of packs of cigarettes, which results in Bobby learning his lesson and vomiting. I could understand much of what was said, but I do not think I could rewrite the script from listening to the video; their casual speech is too syncopated. It was interesting to see how both father and son use extremely casual forms with each other and to see 「いいか？」translated in at least three different ways. Also I noticed 「えんぴつ」was translated not as "pencil" but as "dowel," a strange complication as seems common when subtitling Japanese programming (I have never heard the word "jalopy" once in my life, but anime translators have some aversion...
Read more