I wanted to share this masterpiece with fellow countrymen who don’t speak English — let alone Japanese — well enough to be able to follow along. And then I noticed just how masterfully the script twists and tangles, sometimes deliberately disjoints only to connect into wowing coherence again. Obvious Kimi no Na wa spoilers ahead.
Japanese carries an enormous amount of semantic meaning that is absent in English
Simply comparing my native language to English, there are clear distinctions. Every verb in Slovenian carries attributes such as tense, (non-)finality, count (singular, dual, plural), gender etc. Nouns have count and gender, but also person (me, you, he/she/it). There is also an expression of relation to the subject like e.g. “he is giving”, “he isn’t giving”, “he’s being given to”,… all these can be deduced from single words where you’d normally require context in English.
Similarly, Japanese carries implied speaker — receiver social standing and affinity. There are also distinct regional dialects which can’t be translated. But the major issues present obvious speech pattern differences between girls and boys, children and adults.
There is never a doubt as to who is in somebody’s body if you understand Japanese. To port these distinct patterns over into English subtitles is impossible. It is possible, to some extent, to do it in Slovenian. My goal is to avoid leaving plot holes behind because of localization. Something English simply cannot succeed in.
There is very little redundancy in the dialog
Rarely anybody felt bored watching this movie. Those that did, usually didn’t comprehend cultural and religious differences. In certain instances you either need to accept your disbelief or start digging into Shinto for explanations. No supernatural occurrence in the movie is baseless.
Two supernatural occurrences are explained, but there’s a third, that wasn’t:
- Kataware-doki — the time of day, when the sun just sets and you can’t really call it day anymore nor is it night. Then the inexplicable can happen.
It’s explained very early in the movie and slips many people’s minds when their timelines suddenly align on top of the mountain. Of course it’s fantasy, but it isn’t baseless. - Musubi — the connection of everything, even time itself.
Because Taki had Mitsuha’s braided cord, Musubi connected the two through time and space and the body swaps happened. But when Taki learned the truth, the Musubi that needed to connect the facts erased every existence of the supernatural — notes, memories, things that made no sense. The braided cord remained because it was there due to chronologically sensible events. - Tsukiyomi — the god of the Moon. This was never explained but is present in Shinto.
Musubi could not erase love. Feelings are not like memories. You can have strong feelings simply because of a dream, even if you forgot what the dream was about. Throughout the movie the Moon was always present. Be it somebody looking directly up at it, the camera panning up for no apparent reason or on Taki’s t-shirt when the three were eating ramen. Tsukiyomi is the reason for the lingering feelings Taki and Mitsuha have. The “I love you” that Taki wrote on Mitsuha’s hand wasn’t erased by Musubi even though it’s factually impossible for the writing to be there. But Mitsuha doesn’t know what the facts are. She only has this feeling of someone dear to her leaving something behind. She hopped for a name but it wasn’t. If it was a name, the conflict with actuality would most likely prompt Musubi to erase it.
There’s also the red string of fate which is kind of a universally recognized symbol, but isn’t even needed for the explanation of the story. It does tie in nicely, however.
At one point, the English sub made me rage
There is a scene translated so badly in the official English sub, that it messes up plot coherence. Remember when Taki looks for a way to connect with Mitsuha and he drinks her kuchikamizake? At that time, Taki doesn’t know her name. He remembers afterimages of the time the Miyamizu family took the offerings to their god, which he thinks was a dream. His connection to Mitsuha through Musubi was lost when he faced the fact that she died. Because it was physically impossible for them to have communicated, the realization made Musubi erase all records of the supernatural. Musubi also erased his memory of her, however, it could not erase his feelings.
Driven by a lingering feeling of affection, he ascends the mountain and enters the cave. There he points the flashlight at the bottles of kuchikamizake and says:
“Before the comet struck... Does that mean that I’ve been switching with her (“aitsu”) from 3 years ago?”
And the English sub says:
“Before the comet struck… So the Mitsuha (“aitsu”???) I know is from 3 years ago?”
Following this there are additional occurrences of “Mitsuha” in the subtitle even though the name itself is never spoken.
This is blatant ignorance for the coherence of the story from the translator. Taki does not know the name Mitsuha. It bothers me so much because plot holes is the only thing anybody ever points out as the problem with this movie. And many plot holes people mention are the result of a bad translation. The rest are because of cultural and religious differences that can’t possibly be explained in the subtitles.
Drive and reason for localization and a word on piracy
This movie never got to the theaters in my country and I don’t think it ever will. Getting a localized disc or digital release is also doubtful. Fans even tried to get in touch with TOHO to confirm where in the distribution chain it got stuck, but got no response. Why bother with a thousand-something potential fans, when you already have hundreds of millions, right?
A pirated copy is rarely a lost sale. However, every pirated copy is a potential new sale. If I don’t care about some anime, I won’t see it and I’ll never buy it. But if I see it because there’s easy access to it, and it amazes me, I just might go out of my way to support the creators. Consumers, if they have the capability, will support what they like. If they don’t have the capability, then what is the harm anyway? I fully support non-profitable piracy. I support creators. I despise all middlemen — record labels, distributors, copyright trolls. How is it possible for Comiket to function within a country with such regressive views on copyright as Japan, is beyond me.
Anti-piracy advocates would always point out how they’re losing sales. Production does not happen for free. Everything had already been paid for by investors who took the risk of not turning a profit. Creators are not hurt by piracy directly. What hurts them is if their work isn’t popular because that will make it harder for them to get future investments. As a freelance programmer, if I don’t have satisfied customers, nobody will ever hire me. Why should this be different for musicians and filmmakers? If I’m being fair, it’s not really content creators who are complaining, but investors who are bad at their job — record labels, publishers…
I’m a pirate. I don’t have a CrunchyRoll or Netflix subscription. Yet I’ve spent much more on Japanese economy than anybody who has had a subscription to all the streaming services since their inception. And I’m about as average of a pirate as it gets.
How do you make a fansub?
Here’s a funny anecdote; I asked our anime community for proof-reading help when a prominent fansubber pointed out that he’d already translated the movie. The way he works is; he takes somebody’s release, extracts the already timed English subtitle file, translates from English, re-encodes to 720p with baking the subs into the video (hardsubbing) and uploads that to his streaming site where he begs for donations. If someone uses his release to create a softsub, he accuses them of “theft”. All the while he thinks he’s doing God’s work spreading the love for anime in the local community. Now that is so many levels of wrong, I will only point out this;
Fansubbers have never been profitable and when asked to stop, they complied. CrunchyRoll is a business built from profiting off of fansubbers not-for-profit work.
The process of creating fansubs involves several steps:
- script translation — a translator translates line by line resulting in a text file with the speaker’s name on the left, followed by a colon and the translated line.
- timing — using Aegisub, timers import the translation, open the audio file and using the audio spectrum display, map start and end times to all the lines. All lines then get some additional lead-in and and lead-out offsets and are snapped to scene changes to avoid bleeds.
- typesetting — a thing only ever done properly by (some) fansubbers. You adjust the styling for maximum readability. You can also use visual cues to add semantic meaning for deaf viewers, e.g. use a slightly smaller font size for distant speech, use italic for monologue etc. You can do complex transformations and animations to put translated signs onto the screen but using that properly takes some skill. More often than not it results in visual clutter. Karaoke effects are also possible.
- quality check — it’s impossible to do a great translation solo. Your mind shifts into a different thought pattern and you don’t notice weird sentence formations. A fresh perspective is invaluable, especially from language majors and grammar nazis.
- encoding and release — the days of bad TV recordings are gone. You either get the video from a stream in which case the encoding had already been done for you or you rip a BD. To create a release, you take the video and audio streams, the subtitle file and the fonts it uses and mux them together into an MKV container. Share that as is publicly and be proud that you’ve released the highest quality product possible. Let others do hardsubbing or whatever they want — all the resources inside the MKV can be easily extracted and modified. If you get a DMCA from legal rights holders, do comply. If you live in a country without legal access to content, you most likely won’t be bothered.
Creating fansubs is incredibly fun and satisfying. You can showcase your technical know-how and you get thanks from people who otherwise wouldn’t see and appreciate something you’re passionate about. I don’t want a single cent. If one person says, “hey, that movie was awesome,” that alone makes it worth it.
American citizens and other native English speakers will have a hard time understanding this if they weren’t around before 15 years ago, when fansubs were the only reason series other than Pokemon made it west.
I can hardly wait for Shinkai’s next piece. He’s proven he has amazing writing skills and is passionate about quality. Now he also has all the money in the world to not have to rush things again. Lets put Miyazaki finally to rest.
