Game:

Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes (2010)

Duration: 19:44

2,368 views

110

This is a sort of experimental thing I've wanted to try. After all this time, no one else has tried to properly translate SB3:U and made any real progress towards it, so this is my attempt. I don't know if I'll do this for all character since I hate some of them (e.g. Hideaki), but I intend to finish Matsunaga's story and at least see how many people actually care to watch these.

I'm not perfect when it comes to translating Japanese, and Sengoku Basara can have some pretty complex (and convoluted) writing that makes it difficult to translate at times, especially for an audience you need to assume isn't Japanese and doesn't just 'know' a lot of the stuff the dialogue seems to expect you to. I prioritized translating these lines in a more coherent manner, so some context may be lost, but it should feel like a more natural experience.

One example in this video is that when Matsunaga refers to the Tatenashi, the Takeda's prized armor, he calls it "Mamorazu no kawa" (despite it using the same kanji for Tatenashi in text). Him calling it by this different name will be completely lost on an English speaking audience, so I opted to have him call it "the tiger's armor" in the same vein he does when talking about Masamune's swords as "the dragon's swords". Because it's already hard enough to expect people to know what the Tatenashi even is. Its literal translation is "shieldless armor" but that's an awkward name that makes it sound sort of weak to me, when its actually called that because it's so damn sturdy you don't need a shield, because it could just tank the hits. (I only knew of it because I played Nioh and it's an armor set in that.)

Another example is Matsunaga talking about how people during the Genji era must have feared pain when talking about the armor. He doesn't actually say that it was made IN the Genji era, so I added that bit of text to the line he says so the viewer will know that information for the line to make sense. There's also several instances of lines not really working because they just sound too awkward in English, like Sasuke having "monkey's eyes", that I changed to sound more threatening. That's the kind of stuff I changed, so it's nothing too major I feel. SB: Samurai Heroes also changed stuff like that, they never talk about Sasuke having monkey eyes and instead say lines like him having "cold, black eyes". Playing Samurai Heroes and seeing the Japanese lines in SB3, you can really tell how much work the dub put into making the dialogue more accessible to non-Japanese. Just consider these videos to be done as if it were a legit translation in the same style as Samurai Heroes, as that's what I was going for.

All that said, if you have any issues with my take on these lines, feel free to let me know in the comments. I'm fairly confident in this or I wouldn't be uploading it, but if something should be changed that I didn't catch, it'd be good to know for the future as I do more of these.

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