Roving Thoughts archives

The Ancient Magus' Bride and a puzzle of the translation of a term

In The Ancient Magus' Bride, the protagonist, Chise Hatori, is a special kind of human magus. As I wrote about in passing once before, the English language term that should be used for Chise's status is somewhat unclear; the initial fan translations of the manga used one term and then the official Seven Seas version used another. Then something interesting happened when the first OVA episode came out recently on Crunchyroll, as I wound up discussing on Twitter.

@cks_anime: Well I'll be. The Crunchyroll subs for Ancient Magus' Bride do indeed call Chise a 'slay vega', not a 'sleigh beggy'. That's … interesting.
And the prob[able] reason that CR uses 'slay vega' for Chise in Ancient Magus' Bride is that really seems to be what the character actually says.

This happens at about 14:03 in OVA episode 1, if you want to see and hear it for yourself on Crunchyroll.

(When I initially watched the OVA I didn't really notice this usage, but I was recently thinking back and suddenly it stood out, so I checked back to make sure that I wasn't misremembering because of my biases.)

I think this means the Japanese dialog directions went out of their way to use 'slay vega'. So why did the US manga make it 'sleigh beggy'? ♯

I may be predisposed to hear an ambiguous couple of words this way, but it certainly seems that the fairy's seiyu is specifically saying 'slay vega', not something ambiguous. This is especially interesting because my understanding is that Japanese does not normally have 'sl[a]' or 've' phonemes; if this is correct, the seiyu has to be carefully going out of their way to pronounce this 'right', and the Japanese script likely had to call for that.

@halfadeckshort: I was curious. It looks like they [Seven Seas] answered a couple of questions on tumblr. (link) (link)

@cks_anime: Yep, their pre-OVA claim is that 'slay vega' was a fan mistranslation. But if the JP OVA dialog uses 'slay vega', well...
So, did the original mangaka say 'not slay vega' to Seven Seas & later 'sure, slay vega' to the OVA writer?
Or did Seven Seas decide to use 'sleigh beggy' without asking the Japanese side about it, then get ambushed by the OVA?

It's not clear to me who wrote the OVA. Wikipedia co-credits Kore Yamazaki, the mangaka, and Aya Takaha; MAL lists Aya Takaha as 'script' and Kore Yamazaki as 'original creator'; ANN has Kore Yamazaki as 'scenario' and Aya Takaha as 'script'. On the whole it seems most likely that Aya Takaha wrote the dialog but that Kore Yamazaki was clearly involved and thus available to be consulted for things like 'how is this term pronounced'.

@cks_anime: I suspect that what happened is that SS didn't want to use the fan translation, didn't ask the JP side & just picked a name.
What term Seven Seas use in the next translated volume will be quite interesting, since it'll be the first post-OVA volume.

Looking back, Seven Seas' first answer does not explicitly say that they asked the Japanese mangaka or publisher what the English language term should be, although it certainly sort of implies that they did. The 'translator, adapter, editors, etc' could have been entirely the team within Seven Seas.

My personal preference is for 'slay vega', so I am happy to have it validated by Crunchyroll and apparently the Japanese OVA and I hope that Seven Seas switches the term with the next translated manga volume (currently said to be released in January). Also, of course, right now 'slay vega' seems more likely to be what the mangaka actually intended, not 'sleigh beggy'.

Explaining my uncertainty about Darker Than Black - Gemini of the Meteor's ending

At the end of the series back in 2009 I wrote about my uncertain feelings about its ending, but I was of course completely oblique about it all for fear of spoilers. The whole thing has stuck with me since then, and today it came bubbling out on Twitter so I'm going to dump it here as well. This time around there are spoilers and there will be even more spoilers in my elaboration after my tweets.

(Probably no one cares about DtB: Gemini spoilers by now.)

@cks_anime: I still like Darker than Black's 2nd season. How could you not like a confused, emotionally numb teenage girl with an anti-material rifle?

Also, I continue to not know if the ending of Darker than Black S2 is a good one or a terrifying one. (It's probably supposed to be good.)

@Evirus: Did the OVAs help?
[...]

Unless they touch on the nature of the alternate world, prob. not (for this). Maybe not even if they do; it's a philosophical issue.

Alternate/second world Suo has at least completely different memories than DtB-world Suo. Is she the same person in any real way?
If she isn't, then DtB-world Suo dissolved away to death and we have some fake clone thing wandering around in the second world.
It's kind of nice that there's some second-world Suo enjoying a nice life (along with versions of other characters), but ...
... it's not really a happy ending for many of the DtB-world characters like Suo. They're pretty much all dead or otherwise nothing.

Unusually, the Wikipedia page lacks its usual spoilers, so I must describe things from my memory. At the end of DtB: Gemini, we discover that the original Suo died in a terrorist bombing as a child and the Suo we know is an imperfect copy created by Shion and stabilized by the meteor fragment. With Shion reaching the end of his life and powers, Suo's life (or if you prefer 'life') is at best limited, and I think the meteor fragment was decaying as well. At the end of the show, Shion uses the last of his powers to help Suo as she dissolves away, and we see another Earth hanging in the sky visible from the weird place Shion and Suo are.

We cut to that second Earth, where a 'Suo' is living a perfectly ordinary happy family life with her parents, and I have a memory that we see versions of some other now-dead characters as well. It is clear that the Suo of this world does not remember anything from Gemini and has led a completely different life. If this actually is the real Suo from Gemini, transported to this second world in the sky by Shion's last actions, she is at least a completely different person in every practical sense. The Suo of Gemini has gotten a happy ending by losing everything that made her the Suo that we knew.

Is this really a happy ending? I don't know. I suspect that it was intended to be at least a somewhat happy one (after all, Suo lives). But it's not the Gemini Suo that lives; it's some stranger who has a tangential relationship to the real Suo beyond sharing her name and having parents with the same names and so on.

That's why to me it's at least partly a philosophical question. Suo's soul probably survived, but she wound up as more or less a different person. Is this a happy ending or basically a tragic one, because the real Suo is more than a soul and the person that was Suo is dissolved away now? I still don't know what my answer is here, but I can't feel that the ending is any better than bittersweet at best.

(Similar questions apply to other characters in the second world if we assume that Shion shifted their souls over to the second world along with Suo's.)

PS: After all this time it's possible that I've mangled bits of the ending of Gemini, as I'm relying on my memories here.