Post
by Herms » Thu Mar 03, 2016 1:59 am
Still sort of vaguely in the "Saiyan arc" theme, but continuing with the afterlife/god characters:
Princess Snake
Forgot about this one yesterday, but it has certain similarities to the whole Kaio/”King Kai” boondoggle. In Japanese this is Hebi-Hime, “Snake Princess”, and is actually the exact same title Boa Hancock has in One Piece, where it’s pretty universally translated as “Snake Princess”. But Funi went with “Princess Snake”, as if she were actually a person named “Snake”. It’s a small, odd thing, which I would possibly attribute to stylistic choice if it were surrounded by otherwise competent translations, but in the context of the early Funi dub it seems to highlight that they weren’t sure how to handle things. Well, at least they didn’t call her “Princess Hebi”.
King Yemma
Complicated. This is one of those names that originates from a language outside Japanese: Enma is simply the Japanese approximation of…the Chinese approximation of…(possible further steps in here)…ultimately the Sanskrit name “Yama”, referring to the god of death and the underworld. You might think Funi stuck the “Y” on there in homage to the original source of the name, but in fact it’s even simpler than that: while not exactly typical, romanizing the Japanese え/e as “ye” is sometimes done. The most famous example being the “yen”, which in Japanese is 円/えん/en, the same sound at the start of Enma (Ebisu beer becoming "Yebisu" is another example). So even without the Yama connection, it’s entirely possible Funi would have stuck the “Y” on his name anyway, if only to keep it from looking too much like the name “Emma” (they seem to be consistently anxious over the prospect of characters being mistaken for women). The “nm” in Enma becoming two “mm”s is also perfectly cromulent. So, Yama --> Yemma. The fact that an English adaptation of a Japanese approximation of a Chinese approximation of a Sanskrit name isn’t too far removed from the ultimate Sanskrit source is truly a testament to…something, I guess.
In short, “Yemma” is a valid Romanization of the name Enma. If “Enma” was a name Toriyama made up, that would be the end of the story. But since it comes from “Yama”, should Funi have used that instead? After all, that’s precisely what they did in their dub of Yu Yu Hakusho. If nothing else, the two different ways they handled the same name/cultural reference across two different franchises is an interesting case study. I think their approach with YYH was better, but I think “Yemma” is serviceable too.
Oh yeah, his title: dai-ou literally means “great king”, but is also often used in Japanese as the title for historical figures usually called “the Great” in English: Alexander the Great, Cyrus the Great…even Kamehameha the Great. It’s kind of sad that apparently nobody ever went down in history as “the Great” on account of being a really good painter or singer...“Great” men are always kings and conquerors! Anyway, back on topic, leaving out the “great” and just calling him “king” is a valid option, although “Yemma the Great” would also have been valid (and the Simmons subtitles for YYH go with “Yama the Great”). Elsewhere in DB, Cold has the same Dai-ou title, and is likewise called “King Cold” in the dub. But Pilaf has this title too, and instead gets called “Emperor Pilaf” for whatever reason. Well, more on him later.
Kami, the Guardian of Earth
Right, well people are already debating this one, so I might as well address the issue myself. The first thing to note is that since their release of BoG and continuing on with RF, Funi has consistently translated Kami as “god” or “God”, in regards to everything except the God of Earth, which they keep as “Guardian of Earth” for the sake of continuity with their dubs of previous material. So far, nobody has died and nothing has been burned down. Likewise, while Viz uses “Kami” a lot too, they also alternate it with “God”, to the point of introducing the character in their DB vol.14 translation simply as “God”, and having characters refer to him as such. It all went fine, and nothing bad happened to anybody. Outside of DB, Funi’s One Piece dub called the villainous Eneru a “God” (though they changed this to “Sky King” for the TV broadcast version), and Viz’s release of One-Punch Man cheerfully talks about God-Level Disasters. Maybe times were different when Funi was starting out back in the mid-90s, but I think this all nicely illustrates that there’s nothing inherently dangerous about translating the Japanese word for “God” into the English word for “God”. People automatically jump to say it’s “too controversial”, but I think the evidence is mixed at best.
The main issue really isn’t even the question of whether to call the green dude “Kami” or not, but instead on how the scripts as a whole are handled. Like I said above, the Viz manga typically defaults to calling the character “Kami”, but it’s also not shy about throwing the G-word around: in their translation, the character is clearly identified as a god and is often referred to as “God of Earth”. In that context, the fact that they use “Kami” most of the time isn’t actually so bad. It comes across as no different than how they alternate between calling the blue guy “Kaio” and “Lord of Worlds”, or how they switch between “Genki-Dama” and “Energy Sphere”. Viz isn’t leaving “Kami” untranslated as a way of covering up what the word means…which, let’s face it, is precisely what Funi was doing. You can say “Kami=God therefore it’s fine to call him ‘Kami’”, but the flipside to that is if Kami=God, it must likewise be equally fine to call him “God”. In Viz it’s clear that “Kami” means “God”, but in the Funi dub “Kami” means nothing. It’s simply a name people call the character, and it might as well just be “Zonk” or “Flibbelbink”.
Instead, the actual way the Funi dub translates Kami is as “Guardian”. Which…OK. If you’re not going to call a god a god, “guardian” is not the worst euphemism in the world. It worked for Doctor Who back in the 70s (with the “White Guardian” and “Black Guardian”), and on a basic level “guard” sounds quite similar to “god”. Theoretically speaking the purpose of most of the gods throughout the series is to watch over stuff, even if they’re uniformly terrible at their jobs. So since Funi changed “God of Earth” to “Guardian of Earth”, what is the word “Kami” still doing in the dub at all? It’s really just adding extra confusion. If a character called “Kami” is said to serve as “Guardian of Earth”, leaves, and then is replaced in his duties as Guardian by a character named Dende, surely almost everyone casually watching these events would assume “Kami” was the man’s name, printed on his birth certificate. Which makes it weird when (from the dub’s perspective) the character named Kami fuses with the character named Piccolo to create a character who solemnly declares that he has “forgotten his name”. In Japanese this (halfway) makes sense because Kami/God is simply a title held by a man whose true name we do not know (see again, Doctor Who). When this character abandons his title to fuse with Piccolo (and return to being the Namekian he was before obtaining that title), he therefore is left with nothing to call himself.
Well, this could go on forever, so in short: if Funi felt calling the character “God” all the time was too controversial, it still would have been fine to call him “Kami” so long as they made it clear that he was a god. Or if any use of “god/God” was deemed too controversial, Funi should have always called him “Guardian of Earth” or simply “Guardian”. Their approach of going with “Kami, the Guardian of Earth” is needlessly confusing.
Mister Popo
Oh, but they handled this guy’s name perfectly. Good!
Korin
The original name, Karin, comes from a type of candy called karintou. “Tower” in Japanese is tou, so the joke is Karin-tou --> Karin Tower. Changing it to “Korin” of course ruins the joke, though it’s another one of those puns an English-speaking audience was never going to get anyway. Regardless, it seems a pointless change. In my heart of hearts I still believe they just made a typo somewhere along the line and never spotted it in time, but the usual explanation I see is that they didn’t want people to confuse the name “Karin” with “Karen”. Since “Karin” (properly pronounced) does not actually sound very much like “Karen”, this strikes me as a poor excuse. Surely if they just did their jobs and pronounced it correctly, there wouldn’t be an issue. Or if it’s the spelling that’s the problem, how about something like “Karyn”, so that you’re not changing the pronunciation? Or hell, let people mistake his name for “Karen”; it wouldn’t be the end of the world. These days we’ve got dubs for Bleach and other series with characters named “Karin”, and in those cases the name is left as-is without any apparent mishaps.
To be continued...
. Because nowadays, it seems like localizers are a lot more free to let edgy stuff stay in their scripts (as opposed to the Woosley days when Ted Woosley had to swap out "Holy" for "Pearl").
