Thursday, November 04, 2004

School Rumble Episode 4 translation notes

You know the drill. Top comment.

posted by ed at 7:34 PM

1 Comments:

Blogger ed said...

SOME SIMPLE DEFINITIONS TO START WITH
because the rest of the notes are horribly long-winded

daifuku
大福
Literally, the characters mean "great fortune", but it's also the name of a type of sweet rice cake with a bean jam filling.

hakama
袴
A sort of thick skirt-like pants, traditionally worn by samurai but nowadays mostly worn by martial arts practitioners. The original purpose of them was to protect a samurai's legs from brush and weeds while on a horse. You'll recognize it when it appears.




When is a frog not a frog?
If wishes were fishes... we'd have another overabused bad pun

This episode is noteworthy because the show producers seemed hell-bent on making my life harder with all the bad puns. Remember when I said there weren't a lot of different sounds in the Japanese language? Thus, the language ends up with a LOT of homonyms, a concept which they've abused in this episode. I'll start with the easy one, first:


koi
恋、鯉
These two are both pronounced "koi". 恋 is one of the terms for "love", but 鯉 is a carp (a type of fish for the uninitiated. They're quite popular as pets, especially among older men, due to their long lifespans.) Some think that this pun is a little overused.

Now comes the really fun ones:




KAERU mo KAPPA mo GAA GAA GAA
or, "I swear, the show producers aim to kill me through these puns"

The above is the title for the third sub-episode, and it's actually a rather clever play on words. See the below:

kaeru
帰る、蛙
帰る means to go home, but 蛙 means frog. And they're both pronounced "kaeru"

kappa
合羽、河童
These are pronounced "kappa". 合羽 is a raincoat, but 河童 is a green water imp with a beak, shell, and pool of water lined with green hair on the top of its head.

Thus, the title for the third sub-episode can be interpreted in one of four ways:
"Frogs and Kappas both go GAA GAA GAA!" (what one would assume given the titles of the other two), or,
"Both me going home and Kappas scream GAA GAA GAA!"
"Going home, and raincoats! GAA GAA GAA!"
"Frogs and raincoats! GAA GAA GAA!"

(btw, note the design on Tenma's umbrella. And yeah, somebody just kill me now. yeah, somebody kill me now)

As an aside, there are actually a lot more homonyms for the above two terms than the ones I listed (especially for kaeru), but these are the relevant ones.



aoi mushi ga tonde, aoi ha ni tomaru
青い虫が飛んで青い葉に止まる
"a green bug flies and lands on a green leaf"
or, OBSCURE ANIME REFERENCE++

This is a reference to the old baseball anime and manga Kyojin no Hoshi (巨人の星) - the original anime aired from 1968-1971!

Anyway, apparently the main character's father, Hoshi Ittetsu, uses these words to describe his "Major League Ball #2: Disappearing Monster Pitch", where the ball is camoflauged by its surroundings and appears to disappear for a moment, or something. Hence, "when pitcher Hoshi's leg raises up high, a green bug will fly and land on a green leaf".

November 4, 2004 at 7:34 PM  

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