Utena Fansub Ep 33 Translation Notes

Revolutionary Girl Utena Episode 33 The Prince Who Runs Through The Night.mkv

Some very fun lines to translate this episode! Even though this is kind of a summary flashback episode, it’s actually one of my favourites of the series, and it has some of the most interesting dialogue too, with the one-sided Utena conversations and the shadow girl radio show.

Let’s start with the line I spent the longest trying to figure out.

今夜の二人は永遠さ！

This literally means “Tonight’s pairs of people are eternity!” But in context, this is a radio host waxing poetic about the beauty of the night. This literal translation doesn’t work at all given the intent behind the words. This line is a huge challenge because it’s so concise and exploits the ambiguity of the は particle. 今夜の二人は永遠さ doesn’t necessarily mean that tonight’s couples are eternity. It just states that “tonight’s couple(s)” are what we’re talking about, and then says eternity is closely related to them. In academic circles I believe は is often translated more as “as for”, so it’s more like “As for tonight’s couples… Eternity!”

Here are some other examples of how this line was translated.

Tonight, we’ll be together forever! (ohtori.nu)

Nicely ambiguous, and I like “together forever” coupled with “tonight”, but “we’ll” makes it sound like she’s either talking directly to her co-host, or she’s somehow involving herself in the listener couples she’s talking to.

A night for couples to glimpse eternity. (internet archive subs/dubs)

This reads nicely and sounds like something a radio host would say, but I don’t like “glimpse”. It makes it feel like eternity is something in the distance, something that you don’t need to concern yourself with. But in Utena, eternity is not in the distance. It’s looming over everything, an immanent threat that’s already got you in its clutches. Eternity, at least in this line, needs to feel tempting and attainable all at once.

I needed to look back at more of the context to figure out my final translation. Here are the lines immediately prior:

今夜は星空がとってもきれいです！このラジオを聞きの皆様ももしよかったら窓から空を見てください！美しい秋の星座が瞬いていますのー！

The stars are beautiful tonight! To all our listeners out there, why not open a window and take a look at the sky? The stars of the autumn constellations are twinkling tonight.

The hosts are giving advice! So why not make the next line sound like a continuation of that advice?

My final translation was this:

If you’re with someone special, go make tonight last forever!

This was 22 characters-per-second, which is slightly over the extreme 20 CPS limit I usually adhere to (I try to stay under 15 for most lines, allowing myself 20 for lines that really need it). But this one really needed the extra words. I hope it’s not too fast for most people! I’m really happy with the translation itself!

There were a couple of spots where I made the choice to change certain words because the direct translation of the word was inconvenient or conjured an incongruous image.

Utena: あの先生、明礬ってあだ名がついてるんだよ。

Utena: Everyone calls her “Sulphate” you know.

The word used here is 明礬 (myoban) which is the common name for the chemical salt of aluminium, known as “alum” in English. But “alum” as used to refer to a person is sure to be misinterpreted as “alumnus”, not a chemical. And not only that, the misinterpretation is extremely loaded here — the teacher graduated? That means A LOT in the Utena universe, and the Japanese word has none of this extra meaning. So instead, I chose a chemical salt that doesn’t come loaded with all this baggage, which is easily recognisable as a chemical but not too difficult so as to be reasonable as a nickname.

Utena: まー作り置きだと思えばいいんだけどさー。ハンバーグとかお弁当用に。でもシチュー系は無理だな。

Utena: I guess it’s fine to make a bunch and eat it later. Like, use it as a side or in a bento. But you can’t do that with stuff like curry.

I changed two things here: the use of ハンバーグ and the use of シチュー系.

ハンバーグとかお弁当用に means “for stuff like hamburgs or bentos”. A hamburg is a popular Japanese dish comprised of basically a large flat meatball covered in a demi-glace type sauce, accompanied by a side salad, sometimes roasted potatoes, boiled broccoli and carrots, and often a side of rice. It’s the type of dish you can and must serve a lot of sides with, since the actual dish is basically just a meat patty. I translated this as “use it as a side or in a bento” because the word “hamburg” is confusing to English speakers without context. While “hamburg steak” is certainly a thing in English, it’s nowhere near culturally prevalent enough to be casually mentioned in conversation like Utena is doing here. It just sounds like hamburger, which would imply use of leftovers as a topping on the burger, which is simply not the case here. I removed the word hamburg entirely to avoid this confusion and keep the dialog clippy and natural.

The change to シチュー was less necessary and more of a personal pet peeve. In Japanese, the word シチュー (an english loanword from “stew”) only refers to ONE specific type of stew. This one:

However, if I translated it as “stew”, the audience will imagine something different to what Utena is thinking of. Probably something hearty and tomatoey. Something MORE different than say, a Japanese curry. In Japan, curry and cream stew are thought of as sibling dishes. They have basically the same ingredients, the only difference is the sauce it’s cooked in. So I opted to translate this as “stuff like curry” because if Utena had said カレー系 (curry-kei) instead, it would have meant pretty much exactly the same thing, because 系 (kei) means like “curry and similar foods to curry”. And I’d say in this context Japanese カレー (curry) is part of シチュー系 (stuff like japanese cream stew). This is all very nitpicky and doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but it matters to me!

And now for one of the most harrowing scenes in the whole show. The bento planning scene.

困ったな // I’m so lost.

どうしよう // What should I do?

名にも思い浮かばないや // My mind’s gone blank.

あと、どうしよう？ // What else can I do?

ね、なにがいいかな？ // What… what do you think?

わからないな // I have no idea.

I’ll leave the climax of the scene for you all to watch yourselves, I won’t spoil it here. And I don’t really want to explain the reasoning behind these translations because I think explaining it will cheapen the meaning somehow. But I do want you to know that a lot of thought went into this scene.

Thank you so much to @dontbe-lasanya for editing! And for sticking to this project for so long. We’re almost at the end!

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Rose divider taken from this post.