So, translations. If you watch anime and don’t have a decent grasp of Japanese then you have to deal with them. Sometimes they’re bad, sometimes they’re good, and sometimes they turn into a meme.

So Precure has been around the block. It’s had official translations, fan translations, and it’s been dubbed in English (and other languages). Between all the seasons and all the different versions, it’s been translated, like… dozens upon dozens of times.

And sometimes it’s adorable.

“Call me Nat, okay?”

Futari wa Pretty Cure got an official English dub (as well as an official English sub) as “Pretty Cure”. This involved localizing the names, meaning that Yukishiro Honoka and Misumi Nagisa becamse Hannah Whitecastle and Natalie Blackstone, respectively. Which is already cute as is because it keeps the first letter of each girl’s given name as well as keeping the pun in the last name relatively intact – “Yukishiro” contains the kanji for “snow castle” and Misumi contains the kanji for “beautiful ink”.

Anyway, in this particular scene that I’m going to talk about, the English dub had to figure out a way to localize a particular Japanese custom that was essential to move the character development of the two girls forward. Specifically, at the end of episode eight, Nagisa and Honoka would refer to each other as their given names for the first time, rather than the more polite Misumi-san and Yukishiro-san that they had been addressing each other as before. This is an important step in their growing relationship with each other.

The English dub could have bypassed this detail entirely and kept the basics of the episode the same but they actually made the effort to localize it the best they could. In this case, they gave Natalie the nickname “Nat”, which only her friends could use, and then they had her tell Hannah that it was okay for her to use it as well. This is genuinely an admirable bit of localization and is probably the closest you can get to naturally conveying the original exchange.

(That said, I do think there is something interesting to be said about the fact that it tweaks the scene slightly – in the original Japanese, Honoka was the first one to attempt this sort of intimate peacemaking gesture, whereas the dub makes Nagisa/Natalie the one to do it. But that’s all a subject for a different blog post.)

Anyway, like I said. Adorable and also clever.

Mackenzie Makoto

So let’s talk about Glitter Force. It’s an English dub of Smile Precure, and later Doki Doki Precure, that was abridged and then put on Netflix. If you are a Precure fan, you’ve probably heard of it. In fact, there’s a good chance you hate it.

BUT WAIT, HEAR ME OUT.

Kenzaki Makoto, aka Cure Sword (or Glitter Spade) got the CUTEST EVER NAME LOCALIZATION. Her new name is… Mackenzie Mack. Which somehow managed not only to incorporate the unique sounding “kenz” present in her family name, but also kept the “mak” part in her first.

Oh, and there’s a famous song called Mack the Knife. A knife is like a sword.

Regardless of whether or not you think Precure localization needs to rename the characters, this is flipping adorable.

“I write the O like a heart!”

We’re moving on from official translations now to fan ones and I’m going to start with Fresh Precure. Specifically, I’m going to talk about a scene where the main character Love introduces herself to another character, Miyuki. Miyuki asks for her name, and the sub tells us:

“I’m Love Momozono! I write the ‘o’ like a heart!”

Which is incredibly cute and incredibly in-character for her.

It’s also not actually what she says. She says “Momozono Love desu! Katakana de Love!” – denoting that she writes the name “Love”, which is a foreign word, with katakana, the Japanese script that is usually used to write foreign words.

A neat little detail, but not one that a lot of Westerners just here for a cute magical girl show would care about. So we get “I write the ‘o’ like a heart!” instead and you know what, it’s adorable and it works.

In which Eas makes a bad pun in more than one language

Now let’s move on to the next episode of Fresh (I’m rewatching this; can you tell?) Eas makes a terrible word pun in Japanese. She’s attacking with a… Juice Monster (I love Precure) and she riffs off of the phrase “sou da” (“that’s right”), because it sounds like “soda”, which she contrasts with juice.

If you translated that straight into English, you’d lose the pun.

Not to fear, fansubs are here:

“More power… or in this case, more juice!”

Pun is intact and Eas is a huge dork. Well done.

Fuwa-Fuwa Time

Now we’re jumping way forward in the future to the currently airing season, Star Twinkle Precure. There are a few different groups fansubbing this, and they’re all translating it a bit differently. Is Hikaru’s catchphrase “Twin-cool” (twinkle)? Is it “Galactastic”? Is it “Glitteriffic?” (Hi Glitter Force, we meet again). They’re all cute in their own way.

But today I’m talking about this mascot character:

Her name is Fuwa, which comes from “Fuwafuwa”, onomatopoeia for “fluffy”.

And this one sub I’m watching?

Translated it as Puff.

PUFF.

IT’S ADORABLE. IT’S SO CUTE. I CAN’T DEAL.

Okay, anyway. There’s good translations, and bad translations, and there are translations full of old bad memes (I’m looking at you Splash Star fansub) and then there are translations that are cute and clever and that’s what I’m saluting today. Well done all around!