Utena Fansub Ep 6 Translation Notes
Revolutionary Girl Utena Episode 06 Take Care, Miss Nanami.mkv
My god, so far every Nanami epsode has been a nightmare to translate. So much tricky stuff and wordplay!
Translation discussion:
Saionji: ちなみに僕とアンシーの愛は… しのぶ愛。
Saionji: しのび愛。
Utena: 誰も聞いてないよ。
Saionji: Anthy’s and my love takes the form of… Forbidden love.
[7 full seconds of silence]
Saionji: …Forbidden. Love.
Utena: No one cares, dude.
My absolute favourite moment of the whole episode, which is saying something! しのぶ has two meanings in Japanese depending on the kanji. The more common meaning is “to be hidden”, but the other meaning is “to long for something that was once close but now distant”. I thought both applied — he’s showing the hidden exchange diary, but he has also lost Anthy. I originally went with “Lost love” before @dontbe-lasanya and I had a discussion about it and they suggested “Forbidden love” which I really liked because I feel like it conveys both the need to stay hidden and the idea that it’s something he can’t have. It also makes him sound more in denial about the fact that it’s over between him and Anthy which I like a lot.
The other thing I love about this exchange was that it was an opportunity to let Utena use “dude” again. I really am looking for any possible opportunity to slip in some masculine turns of phrase since the 僕 self-gendering gets lost.
Astute viewers may have noticed that there’s only been one time Utena gets they/them’d so far — by Wakaba in the first episode. I promise you this is intentional and that it will ramp up! I’m planning on using the student council’s gendering of Utena to indicate their acceptance/understanding of Utena’s identity and their own personal growth. After their duel losses, they will each start using they/them for Utena. Miki is at that point now, but unfortunately he hasn’t had the chance to talk about Utena in third person yet.
—-
何故さっさと片付けない。あんな奴、生かしておいてもためにならん。 (…) 今更計画の変更は出来ない。一思いに、殺してしまえ。
Why haven’t you done it yet? We can’t let this walking problem stay alive. (…) We’ve gone past the point of no return. Don’t think. Just kill.
Contrary to my obsession with Utena’s pronouns, this was an exercise in pronoun avoidance! “Walking problem” saved me from having to use a clunky “them” here, which Touga wouldn’t use for Nanami. I was also really happy with the “Don’t think. Just kill.” translation. It makes it sound super dramatic while also being plausible as something Touga would say about killing bugs.
—–
Miki: How could she bring herself to want anyone else? Everyone else is worthless to her.
Utena: Worthless?
Miki: Worthless. （かす） Disposable.（おまけ） They’re parsley.
The word Miki uses here is かす which means like, scraps, sawdust, useless crap. Then he says おまけ which means something you get for free when you buy something else, often something you don’t need or want (hence, parsley). I struggled with the translation for おまけ for ages. It needed to be a joining word between “worthless” and “parsley”, something that connected the two. What means “worthless” and “a garnish you throw away” at the same time?! I must’ve spent 30 minutes looking through synonyms. In the end it was a toss up between “disposable” and “unnecessary”, but I felt disposable flowed a bit better. This line in particular I’m curious what other translators think of!
—–
Thank you @dontbe-lasanya for your wonderful editing!
The first 5 episodes were released extremely quickly (there was one point where I was working on 3 episodes at once!) thanks to our extreme fervour for the newfound project, but I think the release schedule will even out a bit from this point on, probably to around one episode a week. Also I’ve been working on a different project this week, a new dice/card game, so my attention has been a bit split. I’ll post about that soon too.
Be sure to follow for more! For all episodes released so far, go here: