Presented at:
Zenkaikon 2024 (Sun. Mar. 24, 9:00-10:00)
Setsucon 2024 (Sat. Feb. 3rd, 11:30-12:30)
Schlow Library Manga Day, Nov. 5, 2022
Setsucon, Jan. 14, 2023
Schlow Library Manga Day, Oct. 21, 2023
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Bonus Gallery: Translation Thoughts!
Captain Corinth
(possible spoilers for Captain Corinth)
~Volume 1~
I had a tendency to write 'plant' instead of planet... I left myself a note to check when self-editing at the end! Same with 'star' and 'start'...
You've really got to watch out for those numbers over 10,000! Counting in units of 万 (10,000) gets tricky fast.
主要都市 could be singular, but it's more likely plural... "largest cities".The production team made the decision to go with units of measurement localized for a U.S. audience, so the distances you see were originally in meters, then converted to feet and approximated with the nearest round number. (2m = 6 feet, 700m = 2,300 feet, etc. Although 'liters' got a pass on p. 20.) |
Did you know? The word for 'Galactic Navy' in the title, 航宙軍, isn't used in the name of an entity that exists in real life, so there were several possibilities for how it could be translated! 航宙 means 'space flight', and 軍 means 'military', so especially when the term shows up in conjunction with 帝国 (empire), it can have a lot of names. Imperial vs. Empire, Space vs. Galactic, Navy vs. Force vs. Fleet vs. Army... think of all the existing fictional forces, like in Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Star Wars ("The Imperial Navy, also known as the Imperial Starfleet, Imperial Fleet, Imperial Battlefleet, Imperial Space Navy, or Imperial Space Service"!!), and even other anime like Legend of the Galactic Heroes! In the end, "Galactic Navy" won out since fans would be familiar with that wording of the title, but you'll also see "Imperial Space Fleet" appear within the volumes. The production team also made the decision to allow swear words. If your ship exploded, I bet you'd swear too! |
Japanese verb endings express different levels of formality, a nuance which doesn't carry over one-to-one into English. Iris had previously been using informal forms when speaking to Alan ('wakaranai wa', 'nani o kangaeteiru no'), while Alan had been using polite forms ('ii desu ka', 'dou naru no deshou'), when speaking to Iris. When Alan becomes Captain, he outranks Iris, so she switches to formal verb endings. It takes Alan a while to notice, but he finally picks up on it. In English, I decided to reflect this by adding 'Sir' when Iris addresses him! |
Military Titles
(Light spoilers for later volumes) Captain Corinth features not just sci-fi armies, but fantasy armies as well. I know I personally enjoy picking over the details of rank and what it signifies, so the production team spent a lot of time deciding how to best represent the Japanese rank names in English, given the different cultural histories of how militaries are organized. To top it off, the fantasy titles can draw from known precedents in history, but a space military? If it's a navy, should it be based on existing navy rank? If they're flying, should it be based on air force rank? If it's a generic military, could it be based on army rank? And what about the titles used by the existing 'space force'? Decisions, decisions!
Alan: Starts out as 中尉. Relatively straightforward translation to 'lieutenant', but... how do you fit that word in a bubble made for text written vertically?!
Iris: 名誉大尉. That's above Lieutenant, so, Honorary 'Captain'. But in the military sense, not the 'drive the ship' sense.
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Deciding on 'lieutenant' is pretty easy, but since both the U.S. Navy and Army/Air Force/Space Force use the term, which should we go with? In the end, we had already decided on 'Captain Corinth' as a catchy shortened title, so Space Force it was. Maybe.
少尉: One rank lower than 中尉. But if 'lieutenant' is hard to fit in bubbles, what about 'second lieutenant'?? (Yay for '2nd'). It's a lot of thought for a mostly throwaway line about a character we never hear of again, and a lot of letters to fit in a two-character space on the original page. But it works! |
← Did I mention this single bubble that contains 艦長, 副長, 隊長, AND 小隊 ?
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"But the pod's a one-way ticket!" That checks out, presumably in Alan's galactic society they also have one-way tickets. |
P. 20, 先ほど交換されたPM(プロセッサ・モジュール). It is a single module, or multiple? Check p. 7, from the art it looks singular, but the text says 不良ロットのPM, so I guess it's "a batch of" processor modules. (Also, yay for words I use daily at my full time job showing up~) アサポート星系 and ジャイア星系... I like to maintain consistency with terms, but with these in the same bubble and English's tendency to avoid repetition, I elected to vary the word order and go with "the star system Asaport" and "the Gaia star system". [Light spoilers] 人類に連なる者 was a really hard term to translate. Personally I haven't encountered the word 連なる very much, and according to jisho.org it can mean 1) to stand in a row 2) to participate in 3) to join 4) to be related. Fan translations chose 'connected to humanity', which isn't wrong by any means, but since it relates to the collection of planets home to independently-developed human(oid)s which have so far joined the empire, (fellow) 'members of humanity' seemed more appropriate to me. Plus, it's shorter and easier to work with grammatically. |
[Light spoilers] I love how Cleria and Alan communicate in this volume (volume 1). I really enjoy manga as a medium because of what can be conveyed with the drawings, not just the text. Alan's character design and incorporation of the language barrier in the story also reminded me of the anime Suisei no Gargantia, and from comments I've read online, many other readers noticed the same similarities! (I'm a sucker for white-haired characters so I <3 Alan) I do think reading through volume 1 a second time made it make a lot more sense, once you know what you're seeing! |
For the middle bubble above, this translation choice is more tenuous than some, but for ありがたい (literally, "I'm thankful", I went with "I'm so thirsty". "I'm thankful" comes across to me as stilted in English, and my thinking was that "I'm so thirsty" also reflects the fact that Cleria really appreciates being given water right now.
I also usually make a point of avoiding potential double meanings, but I thought the potential slang meaning here was funny, and in line with some later misunderstanding gags. |
(Thoughts coming soon: Nanom grammar (also, Nanom are cool!!), 'Earth' in the story/Alan's planet/LN, finding salt)
[To Be Announced]
On series titles!
For [redacted], the main choices were between leaving it as-is in Japanese, and trying to turn it into English. The title itself seems casual, like it's not meant to have much specific meaning to it* (unlike your typical light novel title), and one of the terms it references is not only going to be familiar to many readers who know even a few words in Japanese, but the term itself is series-specific, so it makes sense to preserve that since we'll be preserving the term in Japanese in the English translation (using it as a loan word, if you will).
*From what I can tell at this point in time, it's a play on the words [redacted] which means "to kowtow (to bow from a kneeling position such that the forehead touches the ground); to prostrate oneself; to give a deep, reverent bow" –I think that's in reference to MC [main character] and reader reactions to the theme of the manga– and also potentially [redacted] meaning "pickles made in brine and fermented rice bran (esp. vegetables, also meat, fish, eggs, etc.)". In all of these cases, I think what's important isn't necessarily that the meaning and references come across, but that the short, sweet, cuteness resonates with readers.
So anyway, now that we're deciding to leave it in Japanese, there's one more issue: how to romanize づ. "Du", "Dzu", and "Zu" are all correct and acceptable options (in fact, I was wondering about this same choice in あづき for both the manga service (Azuki) and in a prose translation I was reading (Adzuki). The final decision is extremely important for marketing reasons, so it's a tough choice. Mangaupdates.com uses 'du', while MyAnimeList uses 'zu' (though using 'du' still brings it up in search results). Mangadex also uses 'du'. While personally I prefer to romanize words as they sound, so in this case as 'dzu' or 'zu', and I also hesitate because in this case using 'du' makes it look like 'duke', which is its own word with its own meaning in English. Even so, I think using 'du' is a good final decision. For one, it seems to be most known under this spelling, which I'd say is of prime importance. Second, 'du', 'dzu', and 'zu' are all technically correct, so it doesn't really matter. And finally, pronouncing 'duke' wrong (as in, the English pronunciation) make it really fun to say~~ Which I think is really important! I think it fits the spirit of the manga. (Even if it means English speakers tend to pronounce it wrong... hey, at least it'll give the readers who know Japanese an excuse to show off their knowledge ;D ) And... update, in the end, my editor went with z. All still well!
For [redacted], the main choices were between leaving it as-is in Japanese, and trying to turn it into English. The title itself seems casual, like it's not meant to have much specific meaning to it* (unlike your typical light novel title), and one of the terms it references is not only going to be familiar to many readers who know even a few words in Japanese, but the term itself is series-specific, so it makes sense to preserve that since we'll be preserving the term in Japanese in the English translation (using it as a loan word, if you will).
*From what I can tell at this point in time, it's a play on the words [redacted] which means "to kowtow (to bow from a kneeling position such that the forehead touches the ground); to prostrate oneself; to give a deep, reverent bow" –I think that's in reference to MC [main character] and reader reactions to the theme of the manga– and also potentially [redacted] meaning "pickles made in brine and fermented rice bran (esp. vegetables, also meat, fish, eggs, etc.)". In all of these cases, I think what's important isn't necessarily that the meaning and references come across, but that the short, sweet, cuteness resonates with readers.
So anyway, now that we're deciding to leave it in Japanese, there's one more issue: how to romanize づ. "Du", "Dzu", and "Zu" are all correct and acceptable options (in fact, I was wondering about this same choice in あづき for both the manga service (Azuki) and in a prose translation I was reading (Adzuki). The final decision is extremely important for marketing reasons, so it's a tough choice. Mangaupdates.com uses 'du', while MyAnimeList uses 'zu' (though using 'du' still brings it up in search results). Mangadex also uses 'du'. While personally I prefer to romanize words as they sound, so in this case as 'dzu' or 'zu', and I also hesitate because in this case using 'du' makes it look like 'duke', which is its own word with its own meaning in English. Even so, I think using 'du' is a good final decision. For one, it seems to be most known under this spelling, which I'd say is of prime importance. Second, 'du', 'dzu', and 'zu' are all technically correct, so it doesn't really matter. And finally, pronouncing 'duke' wrong (as in, the English pronunciation) make it really fun to say~~ Which I think is really important! I think it fits the spirit of the manga. (Even if it means English speakers tend to pronounce it wrong... hey, at least it'll give the readers who know Japanese an excuse to show off their knowledge ;D ) And... update, in the end, my editor went with z. All still well!
Last update: Feb. 2024