Game:

Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes (2010)

Duration: 18:03

1,439 views

70

The third and final stage for Matsunaga's SB3: Utage story.

I talked about how Mitsunari's dialogue can be hard to translate in the last video. Nobunaga is considerably more difficult. Some of his lines are borderline nonsense without context, and I've seen multiple comments online while looking into this where even Japanese players struggle to understand what exactly he's talking about, especially in this stage with Matsunaga. Let's start with his very first line. "者よ…貴様も余に根張りし民か". Directly translated, it'd be something like "Mortal... So you, too, are one with roots within me?" Yeah... That sounded like he was asking if Matsunaga was someone from his past, so I worded that line more like that and left out the mention of roots.

One of his generic lines is "三劫の生じたが故、者の暦を無為とせん". Direct translation would be "Triple Ko has come about, the calendar of man shall be void". What the hell is Triple Ko? Good question, and one you will not know the answer to without an in-depth knowledge of Go, the Chinese board game. Triple Ko is when the game has entered a state where neither player can win and will be played indefinitely, constantly taking each other's pieces unless they call the match void. So what Nobunaga really means with that line is that endless battle is at hand and the time of man is over, which is what I translated that line as, rather than expecting anyone to know some VERY specific Go ruling. Or using the word "calendar".

But when he and Matsunaga start fighting is when the dialogue gets its most convoluted. I'm not gonna lie, I was winging some of those lines. This is the hardest thing I've ever translated, and I've translated a lot of stuff for Super Robot Wars--which has different writing styles from various mecha animes throughout it--so it's not like this is my first attempt or anything either. They talk about using each other's skulls as teapots, but the kanji uses "skull" while their pronunciation is "teapot" or "cup", they talk about the fight as if they're "drinking" it, they use terminology used for tea ceremonies that I doubt even most Japanese would know off-hand, basically none of it works in English and it sounds incredibly awkward. I did my best for those scenes, translating the lines in a way that retains how unhinged they both are for this fight but with easier to follow dialogue. It's the most I've deviated from the script, and I don't like doing that, but I just don't think it was going to work otherwise.

Also, a lot of people really seem to like Nobunaga's JP voice, I see people mention it a lot. I'm not a fan. The guy can take a full 10 seconds to say a single line and it feels like it takes forever for him to just get his point across. It was especially irritating for this, because I try to time how long it takes me to read my translated lines with how long it takes the character to say the line in Japanese, so it feels more natural when the viewer reads them. But it's basically impossible to do with Nobunaga with how his VA talks.

ANYWAYS. Hopefully this was enjoyable to the people watching and didn't alienate anyone. I feel like the impact from a lot of this stuff will be lost if the viewer spends too much time thinking "well what does THAT line mean?" This was more effort to translate than I expected, and honestly, kind of put me off from doing more. I'll wait and see people's reactions to these videos and see if people really want to watch this kind of content before doing more.

If I do make more, it'll take longer to come out than these videos did. I basically had all 3 of these videos practically done when the first one release, just needed some minor editing done to the other two. It takes a long time to record the footage, extract the text, translate, review, and edit it all back in. Especially when it's something like this, where I have to stop and look up what certain things are like Triple Ko, Fudo-Kuniyuki, etc, etc. So just be patient with me, please.

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