Kenjuu. Takusan kenjuu.

[shirenomad]

Saturday I was at the Kitai's when they stumbled across a showing of The Matrix on TV and decided to watch. It was on a cable channel: here that means that they broadcast multiple dubs and you can select between them, like a DVD. They actually had both turned on for a bit (that was bizarre to listen to), but I explained that I had already seen it multiple times and didn't need the English to know what was going on, so they went with the Japanese dub for the rest of the movie. They had perfect voice actors for Agent Smith, Tank, and the Oracle; Morpheus and Trinity were okay; Cipher lost some weaseliness, sadly; and Neo... well, he could only improve. :p Anyway, I had the unenviable job of trying to explain the plot to Mrs. Kitai, who was thoroughly engrossed even though she only got about half of what was going on at any time (she even had trouble understanding that "salaryman" Neo and "hacker" Neo were the same person... probably a cultural thing, since I don't think Japanese businessmen generally go to wild parties or sell illegal software).

I added shinjitsu (reality) and kyuuseisha (savior) to my vocab while I was at it, since they were both mentioned so often. The latter is how they translated "the One", which I'll live with, since there's no equivalent for "the" in Japanese and just "One" doesn't have the same ring to it. Plus Neo's a pretty blatant Christ figure anyway. I think that last part went right over the Kitais' heads, along with all the Alice in Wonderland references, which got translated more or less literally. And I'd already been informed by Ikuyo (a Japanese friend of mine in the States, for those unaware) that the "come here" gesture Morpheus and Neo were using so often is only used for dogs in Japan. So it took on a an extra implication to the Kitais that didn't work when Morpheus used it on Neo. I should have explained it right off, but I didn't remember until Mrs. Kitai giggled when Neo used it on Smith (where it DID successfully communicate Neo's opinion of the guy). *shrug* Some things just don't translate.


which kingdom hearts character are you?yeah, yeah. jackie made this.

Comments

[bugen.livejournal.com]

I think I'm the only living being in the known universe who hasn't seen that movie yet. I think that most of the inanimate objects have seen it, too. It's near the top on my list of movies which everyone else has seen and I should watch one of these days but I'll never actually get around to to watching, knowing me. I know enough about it that I understand all the obvious parodies of it, but I still have yet to watch it.