Herms' Huge Project (Viz translation review)--DB vol.5!

[Herms]

----Notice:This old thread is part of my series of guides. To avoid necro-posting, please post any comments you have in the sticky thread for my guides, rather than here. Thanks!----

The legend begins. And this thing too.

So now that I've arrived back in Sprinfield, and after finally digging out the box with my old Viz manga from out of the attic (it turned out to be at the very bottom of a large stack consisting of every single box that has every existed at any point in time during the entire history of the universe), I'm now ready to start my project of listing every single change in Viz's English translation of the manga.

Well, actually I gave up on listing every single one, since there's quite a bit that's really, really minor and uninteresting, even for a nitpicker like me. For instance, when Goku's riding the motorcycle up to attack the pteradactyl...oh screw it, I can't even list it as an example, it's too irrelevent. But I'm still trying to keep track of every change that could possibly matter to anyone, and a lot that probably don't matter to anyone but me. To try and sort them out I'm ranking everything with 1-4 stars. 1-2 stars are for minor stuff and 3-4 are major things. I've also got [lost] for things lost in translation, [sound] for sound effects related things, and [note] for, well, notes. I'm going to try and expand the notes a lot later. "Tr:" marks my own personal translation of things, and "Viz" is for how Viz has it.

Anyway, for the time being here's chapter 1. I'm going to try and do the rest of volume 1 tomorrow. I'll probably also expand chapter 1 later, since there's a whole lot of general stuff that needs explaining at the beginning (Goku's accent, for instance), but I don't want to do that now.

Chapter 1

[***/lost]
And so, very first of all, we have the opening narration for the series:

Tr: Long, long ago, deep in some mountains thousands of kilometers from the city…this fantastic story begins from such a place, for the time being…

Viz: Long, long ago, in a deep, dark forest far from civilization, beyond a towering range of…well, you get the idea. It’s the kind of place a story like this has to begin…

So the Japanese for the opening words of DragonBall are mukashi mukashi no koto, “long, long ago” (or literally “a thing of long, long, ago”). It’s used as a standard opening to legends and fairy tales, so it’s essentially the Japanese equivalent of “once upon a time”. It’s a fitting way to begin the story of DragonBall.

[lost]
Goku’s first line is a greeting, appropriately enough:

JPN: Ya, ossu
Tr: Yo, heya!
Viz: Hey, bro! Wuzzup?!

Ossu is an informal Japanese greeting equivalent to howdy, heya, and things like that. It’s one of Goku’s trademark lines, as it’s how he begins each next episode preview in the anime.

[**]
In the original, Goku simply yells as he smashes up the log, but in Viz he shouts actual threats at it, like “prepare to die!”.

[**]
In the original, as it closes in on Goku’s tail, the giant fish wonders if the tail belongs to a monkey or a mountain cat, but in Viz he instead says “Got ya, ya dumb-butt little monkey!!” (the “got ya” part is in the original, just not the rest).

[lost]
In Japaese, Goku believes Bulma to be a youkai, a term for all manner of spooks and specters that's a bit hard to translate since it has unique connotations but is still rather vague at the same time. Look it up on Wikipedia. Viz translates it as "demon", which is fine, although youkai isn't the same term used for the various demons who turn up later in the series, like Piccolo Daimao and his men.

[*]
Tr: Ge…gege…
Viz: Yee…Gods..!!

“Ge” is a Japanese exclamation of fear and disgust (it’s used for instance in the title of the manga and anime series Gegege no Kitaro, which is about youkai, as it happens). I guess this isn't really a change, since "Yee Gods" means basically the same thing, but...what the hell kind of teenage girl says "Yee Gods"?

[*]
After Bulma shoots Goku, in the original he says he wouldn’t die from that, but in Viz he says it doesn’t hurt him. He also says that his body is as hard as stainless steel, but this isn’t present in the Viz.

[*]
In the original, when Goku describes how Bulma is different from him, he says she is “frail and weak”, while in Viz he calls her “softer…and bumpier!”. “Softer” is in keeping with the original, but “bumpier” is an…interesting choice.

[*]
For whatever reason, Viz has Bulma call Goku a “he-man” where in the original she just calls him a man/male.

[***]
Viz has Bulma refer to Goku with quite a wide range of terms that aren’t present in the original, mostly insults. The first is “brainiac” and it and the other insulting things Bulma calls Goku in Viz are things they added in, and don’t correspond to anything she calls him in the original. So why did Viz put them in? I think it’s an attempt to replicate Bulma’s general tone she takes with Goku, which at this point is very terse and short-tempered.

[**]
Bulma’s immediate reaction to Goku being surprised to learn she’s a woman:

Tr: What a Hick
Viz: Heh-loh!!

[*]
In the original Goku asks Bulma if she’s from the city (miyako), but in Viz it’s “civilization”. This is the second time in the chapter that miyako/city gets rendered as “civilization” (the first time being the opening narration), probably because in this case it doesn’t refer to a specific city but just a generalized idea of “the city”.

[*]
Bulma’s reaction to Goku’s house

Tr: What a dilapidated house.
Viz: Not much for home repair, are you?

The meaning is the same, but in the original she directly states it, while in Viz she says it sarcastically. There’s quite a few instances of this kind of thing in Viz, and you could see it as Viz adapting the dialouge to an English audience. I'm probably not going to note the further instances of this kind of thing.

[**]
In the original Goku calls the 4-star ball his memento/keepsake (katami) of his grandfather, but Viz has him call it his grandfather’s “last possession”. Is this just another way of saying memento that I’m unfamiliar with?

[**]
Goku, on being told these strange spheres are called “dragonballs”

Tr: Dragon…balls?
Viz: Y’mean…some poor dragon?

This is, as far as I’m concerned, the single greatest Viz line ever.

[lost]
Normally the word “dragonball(s)” is written out in Japanese in katakana: ドラゴンボール; that is, it’s simply the English words “dragon” and “ball” written out in the Japanese script for writing foreign words. But when Bulma is first explaining about the dragonballs, they are written out 龍球, the kanji for “dragon” and “ball”, which would normally be pronounced ryuukyuu. However, ドラゴンボール is written out in tiny letters above the kanji, to show that they should still be read out as “dragonball” rather than ryuukyuu.

The use of hiragana or katakana (the Japanese phonetic scripts) to indicate how kanji (the ideographic script) should be read is called “furigana”. In DragonBall and other comics aimed at young children, almost all the kanji have furigana above them to show the proper way to pronounce them, since children don’t necessarily know how to yet. In addition, sometimes furigana can be used to give kanji a different reading than it would normally have, like in the example above, where it’s used to have the kanji for “dragon” and “ball” be read like the English words for those things, rather than the Japanese.

[lost]
In Japanese, the dragonballs are given Chinese names, all based on the number of stars in them (1-star ball, 2-star ball, etc). They’re written out in kanji, meaning that Japanese kids will know what their names mean, but the furigana for the kanji indicate they should be pronounced with the Chinese readings for those kanji, rather than the Japanese ones. When writing the ball names, Viz uses a direct Romanization of the Japanese way of writing these Chinese pronunciations. So basically it’s an English approximation of a Japanese approximation of Chinese. So for the 7-star ball, the direct Romanization of the Chinese name is Qi Xing Qiu, while the Romanization of the Japanese approximation of that is Chii Shin Chuu, which is basically what Viz goes with.

[***]
When Bulma’s explaining about the second dragonball she found, in the original she says she found it 10 days ago, but this gets left out in Viz. And I’m giving that 3 stars because I’m a chronology nut.

[*]
Bulma’s “Almost half way there!” in reference to her dragonball collecting is something Viz put in.

[*]
“Listen goof”: another name Bulma calls Goku that doesn’t directly correspond to anything in the original, but like most of the others this is probably meant to better convey the tone Bulma has in Japanese.

[lost/note]
Bulma says that the last person who gathered the dragonballs became a king. The Japanese word for king that she uses is ou-sama. Now, the term for the global king we meet later on in the series is koku-ou, literally “nation king” (the idea being that DB Earth is a single worldwide nation). Lots of people wonder if the king Bulma is talking about is the same as the global king we see in the series, but like I said the terms used for each is different. Also, Kame-sennin later says that he picked up his dragonball about 100 years ago, so if the current global king is the same guy, he’d have to be at least 100 years old.

[*]
More Viz-added Bulma insults for Goku: “Idiot boy”.

[***]
When Bulma introduces the dragon radar, in Viz she instead simply calls it her “ball detector” for some reason.

[**]
Goku’s reaction to Bulma’s name

Tr: Bulma!? Hahah, that’s a strange name.
Viz: Doesn’t that mean “bloomers”?! Haw!!

Tr: Hahaha-----Bulma, huh----
Viz: Hahaha “Bloomers”!!

Presumably this is Viz changing the dialog a bit to make the pun in Bulma’s name more obvious to an English audience.

[*]
When Bulma is tossing her capsule, Viz has her say “Thar she blows!!”, while in the original she just says “get away” and whatnot.

[*]
More Bulma name-calling: “Ape-boy”, which she follows up with “swing your tail up here!”

[note]
In the speech bubble that says “20 minutes later”, Viz’s printing has the text printed very, very small, so that most of the balloon is empty. I just found that odd.

[*]
Goku uses the Nyoibo for the first time

Tr: Staff, extend!!!
Viz: OK staff--do your stuff!

[***]
Tr: Well well, what on Earth will happen next in Goku and Bulma’s great adventure?...Tune in next time!

Viz: Remember your Chinese fairly tales? You don’t? Not even the impish monkey king and his magic staff, the Nyoibo? Oh well…drop in next time and you’ll learn…

I’d assume that Viz simply wanted to use the closing narration to explain a bit about all the references to Journey to the West, which would be unfamiliar to an English audience. Incidentally, while Sun Wukong’s staff in Journey to the West is called Nyoibo in Japanese, just like Goku’s weapon, in Chinese it would be Ru Yi Bang.

[sound]
These sound effects were originally in English anyway, so Viz didn’t have to translate them:
Bakokokoko..!!
Baoooom
Bom!

Toriyama uses alphabet letters rather than Japanese kana to write out sound effects fairly often. It’s one of the things that made his early manuscript stand out to his first editor at Jump, Kazuhiko Torishima, and helped open the door to his manga career. Torishima mentions this in Shenron Times #1.

[jda95]

Wow. Just wow. I remember you mentioned this before, but I didn't realize what a large scale thing this would be. Thanks so much for this.

[Chuquita]

This is amazing! What a wonderful read and what a huge undertaking.


Looking forward to reading more!

[DBZOceanHD]

This is quite a huge undertaking, Herms. I wish you the best of luck with this and will continue to read these.

[Tsukento]

Bookmarking this thread. That's how awesome it is.

[saiyanprincess]

This is really fascinating and quite intriguing. I can see how much time Hermes has been putting in, Amazing.
Can't wait to see some more, I think at the end of it I might event paste it together and print it off for future reference.

Top stuff Hermes, You are a legend!

[Bussani]

Bulma’s reaction to Goku’s house

Tr: What a dilapidated house.
Viz: Not much for home repair, are you?

The meaning is the same, but in the original she directly states it, while in Viz she says it sarcastically. There’s quite a few instances of this kind of thing in Viz, and you could see it as Viz adapting the dialouge to an English audience. I'm probably not going to note the further instances of this kind of thing.

This one's interesting. Is sarcasm used commonly in Japan? Now that I think about it, it seems more common to outright state something in Japanese, or is that just my imagination?

[Tsukento]

[**]
In the original Goku calls the 4-star ball his memento/keepsake (katami) of his grandfather, but Viz has him call it his grandfather’s “last possession”. Is this just another way of saying memento that I’m unfamiliar with?

Wanted to also throw this in.

A memento technically can be something that is someone's last possession that another person wishes to treasure in memory of them.

[Bussani]

[**]
In the original Goku calls the 4-star ball his memento/keepsake (katami) of his grandfather, but Viz has him call it his grandfather’s “last possession”. Is this just another way of saying memento that I’m unfamiliar with?

Wanted to also throw this in.

A memento technically can be something that is someone's last possession that another person wishes to treasure in memory of them.

That's true. It's not explicitly a way of calling it a memento, but it's sort of implied.

[NeptuneKai]

Ah very, very cool. Can't wait to read more of these. It just goes to show changes can be made to the dialouge so long as it isn't mind blowingly stupid and out of place.

[JulieYBM]

Awesome. This shall provide a great deal of help for those making comparisons and such later on.

Will each chapter have it's own post?

[Kendamu]

That was a pretty nice read.

[Adamant]

Nice.
I don't have my Danish manga here at the time, so I can't double-check everything, but most of the things mentioned here were translated correctly in that version.
"Ossu" is simply "Hi" for some reason, which doesn't work too well in all instances it's used. The Dragonballs are referred to as both "Dragon Balls" and the direct Danish translation "Dragekugler", depending on which word orks best in context, and it actually works pretty well.
"Youkai" was translated as "monster", I believe.

[SHINOBI-03]

This is awesome, Herms.

Currently I'm doings something sorta similar to yours, but for Bakuman.

Have you checked your volume 9 yet about this matter?

DB vol. 09 - Count Dracula - Dracula-Man

Are you sure about that? I could of sworn they kept it as "Dracule-man". Perhaps this is another change between different editions of the Viz manga?

But if you'll make one post per chapter ((Unless it's a one thread for one volume)), we need to make it sticky.

[Herms]

Will each chapter have it's own post?

Well, I was originally planning on having one post per volume, but the individual chapters are taking up much more space than I'd thought. Hmm...

Well, at any rate, here's chapter 2

Chapter 2

[**]
Tr: Goku and Bulma’s journey has begun to find the seven dragonballs are said to grant any single wish.
Viz: In her quest for the seven dragonballs that will grant her fondest wish, Bulma has enlisted the help of the strange creature named Son Goku

[*]
Goku
Tr: Shall we camp here tonight?
Viz: I get the soft leaves for my bed!

[*]
Bulma
Tr: Hey, what are you doing? Come inside.
Viz: Well? Still lusting over those leaves?

[**]
Bulma
Tr: Are you going to camp out?
Viz: Cold enough to come in yet?

[*]
Bulma
Tr: I didn’t think you were that much of a full-blown hick.
Viz: You have a long way to go, Tarzan.

Another thing which is more just an example Viz spicing up the dialogue than an actual change, but I’m including them for now so you can get a sense of how Viz handles dialogue. The word Bulma always uses to call Goku a hick is inakamon (inaka itself basically means “the sticks”, and both these words get used quite a lot in Dr. Slump). Incidentally, a Tarzan parody named Parzan appears in Dr. Slump.

[*]
Bulma
Tr: There’s no greater fortune than this.
Viz: What a waste of my babe-itude.

[**]
In Japanese, Bulma refers to Goku’s tail as an “accessory” (like a fashion accessory), before she learns it’s real. In Viz she just calls it a phony tail

[***]
Bulma
Tr: You’ve really got an easy-going personality.
Viz: I take it back…”weird” doesn’t even come close…

[***]
When Bulma asks Goku how old he is, in the original she calls him Son-kun. This is the first time Bulma calls Goku this, and it becomes her standard way of referring to Goku throughout the series, kun being a Japanese honorific used mostly on young males to show familiarity. So this shows that Bulma is already treating Goku as something of a friend, or at least someone she knows. However, in Viz she simply calls him “kid”, not even using his name.

[*]
More Viz-added Bulma insults (VABI?): "Monkey-boy", "moron"

[*]
In the original, Goku mentions that he will make a whole roast out of the wolf and centipede he catches, but this gets left out in Viz.

[**]
Goku
Tr: This futon is soft, it feels good
Viz: This “futon” thing is going to be fun!

Viz strongly implies that Goku has never slept on a futon before, which the original doesn’t really do, although Goku’s delight at the futon could be interpreted as due to unfamiliarity.

[**]
In the original Bulma explicitly asks Goku if his parents are dead, but in Viz she just asks what happened to them.

[*]
Goku, on waking up
Tr: Morning?
Viz: Wha?

[***]
Goku
Tr: Reminds me of grandpa’s fluffy testicle pillow!
Viz: Well, her pillow’s not as big as grandpa’s…

Right then…OK, so how Goku describes his grandfather’s “pillow” in Japanese is kintamakura, which is a combination of kintama (balls/testicles; literally “golden balls”) and makura, pillow. In Viz you still get the idea of what Goku’s talking about, but it’s not as explicitly described as in Japanese.

[**]
Goku
Tr: No balls…!! No wee-wee either…
Viz: Y-y-y-you’ve…l-l-lost your ba-ba-ba-ba…

In Viz Goku doesn’t mention Bulma not having a wee-wee, or even finish saying “balls”. Since “wee-wee” was used in Viz back in chapter 1, I think this wasn’t done for censorship reasons, but rather to make Bulma look less stupid for thinking Goku was talking about the dragonballs.

[*]
Closing narration
Tr: Bulma sighs in relief that the dragonballs are safe…But on Earth is this creepy shadow drawing closer?!
Viz: …And so Bulma sighs in relief, her greatest fear averted…but perhaps she shouldn’t relax quite yet…

[sound]
More Toriyama English sound effects (TESE?): Bomb!

[Kingdom Heartless]

Jeez, "testicle pillow?"

That's pretty funny.

And just a little bit disturbing.

[VenomSymbiote]

Herms! You've done it! Some of it anyway. Congrats! I'm totally going to keep checking this thread!

[MagicBox]

Three questions, Herms:

1.) Will you be devoting a section of Kanzentai to this project? Such thorough work deserves to be archived in something better than a message board topic.

2.) I'm curious. How will you take into account the changes in recent Viz releases of the manga? I'm sure you know already from reading the various VizBig threads that dialogue is being revised. With that in mind, and with so many versions of the Viz manga (all with slightly different changes), how do you plan to list every alteration?

If you're only covering one version, could you tell us which one so that we can keep up?

3.) Will you be covering visual edits as well, like nudity edits?

Fantastic work on the first two chapters. I've been wanting a guide like this to reference for a while, so it's going to be extremely helpful to have a comparison guide for the manga. Thanks a bunch. You continue to rock.

[Snail]

Fricking awesome endeavor. Such a great read Herms. Your work never goes unappreciated. Keep it up!

[Thanos6]

This is superb. Reminds me of a project that does the reverse of this for the Harry Potter books, shows what was changed for them when they were translated for Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam and China. Can't wait for more!