Annoying Anime Titles

[steepholm]

Things are sometimes lost in translation - I understand that. Cultural references can't always easily be preserved. Quite a lot of anime titles in English are not exact translations of the Japanese original, and that's fineBut there are some cases where they seem to have gone out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot before sticking it in

Comments

[heleninwales]

Weathering with you sounds very odd. It's what Google translate gives if you put the Japanese into it, but as you say, you would have thought for something professional they would have used a proper human translator.

I find with Google translate and Welsh that it's very good -- until suddenly it isn't. If you're reasonably good at Welsh, it's a helpful tool, but it's a snare and a delusion for people who don't speak the language.

[steepholm]

Yes, Google Translate is the equivalent of Wikipedia. Invaluable, often, but not to be relied on! I generally use it to check what I've written, in case I've made a basic error.

Unfortunately, Google Translate "knows" (or thinks it does) that anyone typing "Weathering With You" into the box is wanting to know the Japanese name of the film, and vice versa, so just gives that rather than a literal translation. This of course means that it's entirely useless if a literal translation is what you want. Likewise, if you type in "千と千尋の神隠し" you will be told it translates as "Spirited Away", because it's the film's Japanese name. But it literally translates to "Sen and Chihiro's Being Hidden by a God."

[heleninwales]

Oh, dear! That's annoying but not entirely surprising because Google works with text it's found online, and probably most occurrences of those phrases are references to the films.

I also use Google translate to check that I've written what I thought I'd written. It's quite good for that, though it can't quite cope with the fact that nouns have gender in Welsh so it will give "he/she" instead of "it".

[aerodrome1]

Hmmmph. I was thinking about this the other day. I was looking at lists of anime and wondering if the titles in English had anything at all to do with the Japanese titles or if they were just totally random,

[andrewducker]

Am interesting comment here
https://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/3964252.html?thread=27441244#cmt27441244