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Forum - View topicNEWS: A Place Further Than The Universe U.K. Home Release Scheduled for April 22
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vanfanel
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On the anime's Japanese Wikipedia page, I found this, which I'll translate below:
The Japanese title 宇宙よりも遠い場所 would normally read "Uchuu yori mo tooi basho." "Uchuu" can be translated as either "space" or "universe." You have to figure out from context which is correct in English. "Uchuu Kyoudai" = "Space Brothers" "heikou uchuu" = parallel universe. In the case of this show, however, 宇宙 has been given a specified reading of "Sora" ("Sky"), which clarifies the intended meaning even if you don't know the background. |
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shosakukan
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No offence, vanfanel-san, but actually, the given name of astronaut Dr Mōri is Mamoru. However, I understand that it is sometimes difficult that someone sees a Japanese name in Kanji at first sight and he/she correctly conjectures the way to read the Japanese name. I have read the Sixteen Lectures on Popular Fiction written by 木村毅 in the original, but if a person is not familiar with studies in the Meiji literature and culture, it would be difficult for him/her to correctly read the name of the author. |
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vanfanel
Posts: 1243 |
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(Duckduckgoes): So, 木村毅 is Kimura Ki, eh? I would've assumed it was Kimura Tsuyoshi.
Thanks for the correction; I should've checked that before posting, but I once had a student named Ei, and assumed that would be the correct reading. Silly me. Given names can be so tricky...a friend of mine named Yukiko once told me that as a child she'd been unable to find where she was supposed to go on her first day at a new elementary school. Students' names had all been posted in hiragana, but her teacher had read 幸子 as Sachiko, and written that instead. (For non-Japanese speakers: both readings are plausible; without furigana, the only way to know is to ask.) When I was an ALT, I would always get a list of incoming students at the start of the school year, and try to guess the readings of their names. I'd write down my guesses and get their homeroom teachers to correct the errors. Year by year, the errors decreased, but they never went away, and there would always be a few names that even the teachers couldn't read at first without checking on the computer. I'll leave the original post unedited as a reminder that things need to be checked...when posting a message on a forum, or when approving a title for use in English-speaking territories. Though it's possible the English title was dictated by the licensor; that happens sometimes. |
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shosakukan
Posts: 294 |
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It's a pleasure. And thank you for the tolerant response.
And what is more confusing, the given name of 井上毅, a member of the draft committee for the Meiji Constitution, is 'Kowashi'.
I have posted messages about name reading and a teacher on the Encyclopedia forum before. The manga's title 'An Unsuitable Job for Miss Fujiwara' is wordplay on P. D. James' An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. The Japanese title of Ishii's An Unsuitable Job for Miss Fujiwara is 『女には向かない職業』, and Ishii has put the furigana 'わたし' on the kanji '女' in the title. The Japanese title of P. D. James' An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, too, is 『女には向かない職業』, and the Hayakawa Shobō publishing firm has published it. Since you seem to be a big fan of science fiction, I guess you have read books published by Hayakawa. Other facets of Hayakawa are mysteries and 'serious' literary books such as works by Graham Greene. I remember the title page for an edition of Stamboul Train published by Heinemann said, 'An entertainment,' though. Perhaps Ishii Hisaichi is known to an average non-Japanese person who likes anime but who is not necessarily familiar with the manga scene in Japan mainly or only as the guy who wrote and illustrated the manga on which Takahata Isao's My Neighbours the Yamadas Ghibli anime film is based, but Ishii Hisaichi is a big-name mangaka in his own right in Japan. The Kawade Shobō publishing firm has even released a book about Ishii Hisaichi as an extra issue of its Bungei literary magazine. And manga by Ishii Hisaichi are very funny. Recently I happened to re-read Ishii Hisaichi's Hon no Issatsu ('A Book/Just One Volume'), which consists of manga and book reviews. Ishii Hisaichi had also designed a cameo character who appeared in the Crusher Joe anime film. In view of what companies such as Benesse say, Japanese lowbrow and lower-middlebrow parents still tend to give more or less Kirakira-ish names to their babies.
Such as What Mad Universe? Tsutsui Yasutaka has said that Hoshi Shin'ichi liked Martians, Go Home but Tsutsui himself preferred What Mad Universe. Before Hayakawa's release of a translation of What Mad Universe (translated by Inaba Akio) in the 1960s, the Gengensha publishing firm released a translation of What Mad Universe (translated by Satō Toshihiko) in the 1950s, and Tsutsui Yasutaka read it. Gengensha's science fiction series was usually infamous for its poor translations, but Tsutsui has said the Gengensha edition's translation of What Mad Universe was not so bad. Satō Toshihiko attended the University of Wisconsin Graduate School. A chapter in novelist Kobayashi Nobuhiko's A Personal-version Account of the Prosperity of Tokyo gives us a vivid description of Inaba Akio, who used the Savoia café in Shinjuku as his drawing room-cum-study, and editors who visited Inaba at Savoia. Dr Mōri has said, 'You can reach 宇宙 in a few minutes,' and the BBC Sky at Night Magazine says, '...the Artemis 1 spacecraft took 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach an altitude of 162 km (100.6 miles) above Earth.' So what Dr Mōri talked about seems to be a manned craft's ascending and going out of the atmosphere of Earth. The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary says that 'the universe' is 'the whole of space and everything in it, including the earth, the planets and the stars,' and Webster's 3rd says that 'space' is 'the region beyond the earth's atmosphere.' So, as you have translated, 'space' seems to be a better way to translate the '宇宙' part of the title of the anime TV series in question. As you have said, certainly, it is possible that someone like a Japanese senior staffer might have insisted on using the 'universe' translation, however. In the Agent AIKa anime, the title of Trial 4 is '宇宙に咲く華 (A Flower Blooming in Space)', and the way to read the word '宇宙' in the title is 'そら (sora)'. |
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