#shojo kageki revue starlight

Yes, I draw other characters too. Once in a blue moon. Nana with pride coat for a friend’s birthday. (Have the version with just the colors too, I wanted to see how it looks.)

Hello! I subbed the Revue Starlight movie back in December (the one that has color coded dialogue) - this is my first post because I was too much of a coward to make an account anywhere then.

To put it simply, I was not satisfied with my original work, which had mistakes from mishearing and also just misinterpreting things. It was rushed for various reasons, and I really regret not being more patient with it. I don’t think the mistranslations impact any plot points of the movie, it’s really more in the specifics, but I misrepresented some things I consider to be important, and for that I am truly very sorry.

After not touching it for 2 months and then working on it in all of my spare time for the past month, I finally!!!! finished the revised version and a widescreen version, since I had originally done it letterboxed. I think the widescreen version is actually more readable, so that’s one more thing to bonk my past self on the head for, but the letterboxed version has its merits too. They can be found on nyaa and anidex like before, and to make sure this appears in the tag, I’ll add links in a reblog!

Now I’m going to ramble a lot about the fixes I made and translation decisions and other things under the cut… it’s going to read like half a callout for myself and half a defense, and half just fun rambling about translation (yes that’s 3 halves) so do with that what you will…!

This is going to be unnecessarily long - so long, in fact, that I am going to divide it into parts. You may be thinking “I don’t wanna read all that” so a tldr for you if you are: 

1. major changes: 

• revue of malice -> revue of resentment, fixed lines in futakao conversation towards the end of the revue
  
• a line the giraffe says that is directed to the audience but I misinterpreted
  
• Nana’s line about feeling drunk: sake -> alcohol (this was just stupid of me)
• revue of souls -> revue of the soul (yes the the is ugly but necessary)

2. minor changes: really nitpicky stuff and obsessing too much over timing, typesetting

3. this took so long because I actually just fully stopped working on it for 2 months, I had like 0 time due to work and had no motivation, i overshare about the process

okay, time for the longer explanation!!! you don’t have to read this but if you want to witness someone be a little insane then have fun (also, warning for spoilers)!! we’re dropping capitalization now! i know nobody asked for this, but i have to talk a lot about this bc i haven’t, really, to anyone. and i think it’s kind of fun

first off i want to say… i’m not a professional translator (as of right now at least, who knows  this might change in the future, though maybe not for japanese) i’ve never taken translation courses and i’ve only taken like one creative writing course in my life. but i really enjoy linguistics and translating and am always, but especially after subbing this movie, trying to improve myself. generally my principle for translating things is that. Words are just words. personally i think that as long as something makes an equal amount of sense in the target language then all of the information in the source language should be retained as much as possible. of course, with english and japanese being so different, it’s difficult to stick to this. anyway i’m already going off topic, mainly i wanted to say my goal is always to present what MY understanding of the source is in a way that i feel is accurate to the source and would 1. convey the same meaning to an english speaker 2. read well to me as a person who can (to an extent) understand japanese. now let’s get into how i failed here.

PART 1: major changes / decisions

when the giraffe speaks to the audience, saying “it’s because of all of you”, i misinterpreted it as being about karehika and put “it’s because of you two” even though that’s not what he said.

• this is the WORST mistranslation imo and i lost my shit when i realized, but at least the message isn’t entirely lost because right before that he talks about how it’s the stage the selfish and greedy audience longs for. i have no idea how tf i ignored that previous line and thought it was about karehika.

i decided to change the title of the futakao revue to “Revue of Resentment”.

• the original title, “Revue of Malice”, i honestly took from the wiki without thinking too hard about the translation of the name that someone else had done, which was stupid of me. I also forgot to translate wagamama highway as selfish highway and just left it as wagamama highway in the subs, so you see. 
• 怨み (urami) generally means “grudge, resentment” in the same way that the more common form for urami, 恨み does, only it’s a stronger, more hateful emotion, and not commonly used. it’s usually used for a very deep-seated, strong grudge/resentment, or for things that are supernatural, ie. the grudge of a soul.
• either way, “malice” doesn’t really represent the meaning properly imo, because while resentment is about bearing ill will/bearing malice towards someone, the word by itself doesn’t cover the meaning of resentment, at least to me. but i’ll admit that it sounds a lot cooler, and i don’t think it’s toofar off, so i think it’s fine if people keep referring to the revue as revue of malice. if you take the midpoint between malice and resentment then that’s what my understanding of 怨み is.
• i also thought about changing it to revue of grudges, but to me that sort of implies actual tangible, countable grudges, which isn’t necessarily wrong, but considering the kanji selection it has the vibe of the actual feeling/act of holding a grudge, which in english is only resentment. so that’s what i settled on.
• i probably won’t change what’s on the wiki until the official translation for it comes out on starira, and no matter what starira says this is my final decision for my subs. 

I changed the final lines to the final line. 

• i had originally called the karehika revue “the final lines” and made karen say “i have to say them. the final lines”, when there was no need to make it plural and makes less sense to make it plural, because the final line is, one final line. i can’t say why this happened other than i apparently was not thinking hard enough about it until one day i was

originally what i put for A Beautiful Person, Or Perhaps It Is was “A Beautiful Person, Or Somebody Like That”.

• i had also taken this from the wiki and thought it was a reasonable interpretation because i didn’t know the backstory of how it was genuinely supposed to be cut off at the end (A Beautiful Person, Or Perhaps It Is [A Love Song]). that was my fault for not doing enough research and not looking in the right places to find this out before finishing it, and also a lesson that sometimes trying to extrapolate things from vague grammar is not a good idea

in the scene with the vegetable giraffe, right after junna says “putting an end… to what?”, maya says “greedily, ferociously, in order to continue standing on stage, we will go to the next stage.”

• here i originally made a dumb mistake and thought that when she said 貪欲に、獰猛に it was an extension of junna’s line instead of an adverb - like what are we putting an end to (何に？) to greed (貪欲に), to brutality (獰猛に).  

this isn’t a mistake but since i am explaining my choices i feel i have to mention - the なんだか強いお酒を飲んだみたい。line (Somehow it feels like… I just drank some strong alcohol.). actually i did make a mistake here and it was calling “sake” “sake” instead of just alcohol, which was really just me being careless. 

• besides that, there’s an issue with this line in that it lacks a subject/identifier. it could be that nana’s the one feeling drunk, or that the rest of them seem drunk to her, but there’s no way to eliminate a subject in english and have it make sense (Somehow, it feels like strong alcohol was just drunk. <– ??????? what?? people don’t talk like this)
• the first time i even heard of this line b4 the bluray was out it appeared to me that it was about nana, and every time i went down a twitter search rabbithole while working on both the original and the revision, it appeared that jp fans took it the same way - i wanted to link this fanart i saw where futaba is drinking w/ nana and makes fun of her for it but i lost it..
• i think the whole brushing hair back thing she does it seems to imply it’s intended to be more about her, but really it can have a double meaning (i found one or two jp fans talking about this, that at first it seems to be about nana but could also be about the rest of them).
• since it the general consensus is that it’s about nana, i stuck with “I”.
• i also considered removing the “just” because it’s technically not in the original line but it sounds a lot more awkward without it, and adding it doesn’t change the meaning of the line at all in context (like she’s not saying someone drank alcohol before they got on the train or something lmao so)
• speaking of this scene, here is a fun jp blog post analyzing it which is pretty parseable even just w/ google translate (it’s less about the actual line, but their theory for the line is that nana was very stimulated from the fight = feels like she had a strong drink): https://note. com/suzumya/n/n7ee2160d039c
  

revue of resentment:

• didn’t you say we were cutting ties? when futaba catches kaoruko after her truck flies off.. originally i just had “did we cut ties?” umm this was just me being dumb. anyway funny line because kaoruko was the one who said they were cutting ties in the first place and then she turns around and asks this to futaba LMAO
• towards the end when futaba is saying “this time, it’s my turn to say something selfish. it’s my turn to-” and then kaoruko says “it’s my turn to make you wait”? she’s imitating futaba/predicting what she’s going to say. i…. again, was careless and did not realize this and just had “it’s time for me to wait” (you’d think it’d be easy to catch because she said “atashi” and not “uchi” but well. I was not thinking clearly..)
  
• after she says this, she says “i know that much, okay” basically saying she knows that that has to happen/that futaba was going to say that, but this was one that i misheard and i thought she said わっかてませんや when she said わかってますんや and i put “i dunno about that” which is basically the opposite meaning.. lol
• the final line of this revue, i originally had as “guess i can’t win against the selfishness of a kid”. I changed this to “i just can’t win against the selfishness of a kid”. i can see where my past self was coming from with the “guess” to represent the わ but it makes it feel too.. speculative and like she didn’t know? which isn’t really right. I just can’t better portrays the sort of helplessness of it while still being like she’s stating a known fact, i think

this is kind of just a discussion, but i’ve been thinking about how “revue of souls” isn’t entirely accurate to 魂のレヴュー because it’s, a revue of a singular soul. but “revue of soul” doesn’t feel right to me, because… i dunno there’s some sort of rule to these revue of ___ things to me where it’s like the thing has to be a noun that’s either uncountable or plural if it’s countable. to say revue of soul makes me think that it’s like . revue of who is the most soulful or revue of soul music LMFAO so… i think it’s actually just a rule for using (something) of (something), maybe. like… tree of noodles vs tree of noodle. wow every day sentences that have never been spoken before are created

i think it’s more accurate to say “the soul” in this case, actually… but i don’t like putting the in a revue title……. but i think i will change it actually. you’re watching me make this decision live as i write this blog post lmao okay so i changed it to Revue of the Soul. maybe ateam were onto something with putting the Thing first actually. (just kidding i really don’t like that anyway moving on)

other stupid things that i almost forgot to mention in this post bc i changed them so long ago, but they’re in the first version: i wrote “kuro” instead of “clau” for .. some reason, and i wrote “bakkaren” instead of “karenitwit” and i spent some time thinking about alternate ways to localize this but karenitwit ended up being the best option.

PART 2: minor changes (summary, some specific lines i thought were notable, etc)

the minor things were really more minor, enough that i can’t actually list everything that i changed. some examples off the top of my head:

• i misheard “jesters” as “idiots” in the distant el dorado lines that hikari recited in english. or rather, i couldn’t make it out, and i did a twitter search and found jp fans saying it was idiots and went “i guess that makes sense, idiot can kinda mean the same thing as clown”, but then later when i looked at the chinese subs they had put “jesters” and i felt like the biggest idiot in the world
  
• i said “stage prop” for 舞台装置, the fake blood in the revue of annihilation, but it really shouldn’t have been prop. i changed it to equipment, then waffled on it and changed it to set, then my theater kid friend who speaks jp proofread for me and told me to change it to equipment
• when kaoruko tastes the fake blood, she says “it’s sweet.” i put “it’s tasty” - i think i might have thought she said うまい not 甘い and not challenged it
• at the seisho fest one of the students talked about making a new cyc(short for cyclorama but nobody calls them that apparently) and i didn’t get that
• thanks to my theater kid friend i realized i misrepresented the text that hikari gets from the giraffe, where i originally said “the house is already open for entry”.
  the original here is 小屋入りはもうはじまっています. apparently when i searched 小屋入り the first time i somehow misunderstood what i was reading and i thought it was about the audience entering the theatre, and i went with “the house is open for entry” because i thought hey, the audience section of a theater is called the house so that works out well. but it’s actually basically tech week, where “entering the hut” means to move into and start doing things in the theatre ahead of the first performance.
  what i ended up going with was “the dry tech is already underway”, which imo is the same amount of jargon-y ambiguity as the original and pretty much the same meaning. Thank you again to my friend
• when nana talks to masai + amemiya in the bg of her career interview i misheard what they were saying LOL originally i put that amemiya wasn’t going to hand over the script but she was saying that she WOULD. this + the kaoruko line both being me mishearing something as the negative.. is funny to me.
• not a mistake but a defense: in mahiru’s revue intro the first thing she says is 宣誓 which is most commonly translated as I swear/vow/oath but I wanted to stick to the olympic theme and in the olympic oath in english the word “promise” is used, so that’s why i used promise. however, in the original i translated 輝け、私 as “I will shine” but i changed it to “shine, me” because it just doesn’t fully capture the meaning the first way..,, speaking of revue intros i also fixed a small thing each in hikari’s and junna’s but its nbd i think.
  
• when mayakuro are playing shogi at the beginning, maya’s chick gets captured by claudine and it shows that claudine still has 2 chicks on the board, and when claudine calls her weak(/basically saying she sucks at it) maya was like “your chicks look too pitiful for me to…(take them)”. i am very embarrassed to say this took me too long to understand and at first I thought it meant maya’s chick got taken by claudine and then she was saying her chick looked pitiful on claudine’s side…
• AIJO KAWAN!!!!!!! again something i didn’t know mostly because i was not paying close enough attention, i only knew of this after i checked the korean subtitles. baby karen wrote her name wrong on her cubby she wrote かわん instead of かれん :’’’)))
• changed “pep rally” to “kick-off party”
• stuff like this. aside from that, i reworded some more awkward sounding sentences, fixed capitalization (why did i think capitalizing the beginning of every line was a good idea?) doubly made sure all information was kept in the translation, etc.
• i added some more onscreen text translation and some more bg conversation lines thanks to the korean subs catching things i couldn’t, and made a few really small changes to the lyrics that i don’t think are worth listing out here
• i added watashitachi wa mou butai no ue lyrics to the credits - this is my own translation and i purposefully did it without looking at the one on the wiki by lunaamatista, but they kind of ended up pretty similar, so i thought i should mention that it was not my intention to just steal/reword that translation or anything. the one on the wiki is great and you should go listen to the song and read it there and appreciate all the work luna has done!!!!!
• if there are any more mistakes (which i sure hope there aren’t bc i have watched this movie so many times now and cross referenced the chinese and korean subs, though the chinese one i looked at had some mistranslations as well imo) i can change them in the sub files, but i won’t be making a new release again.. if you see something you think is worded awkwardly, just know that i probably agonized over it for too long and decided i wanted to word it that way (ie., saying you who ___) also i Know i use too many em dashes and ellipses i’m sorry for that… i think they’re fun
• UPDATE thank you @flibbityflob​ for telling me i messed up the very final on screen text caption because i misread 本日 as 日本 like 100 times in a row apparently . I um. reposted the torrents because it’s been less than 12 hours so. woohoo

also one last thing I guess i can call this a decision i made but mostly i think it’s fun trivia - for karen’s middle school play, i wrote her character’s name as “sara” (it is seira in romaji). the reason i did this is because i found some jp fans talking about how hikari playing “lavinia” when she was 5 and karen playing “sara” in middle school is possibly related and a reference to princess sara, though the spelling is SLIGHTLY diff (セイラ vs セーラ)

PART 3: putting the worst and most annoying last, i apologize and defend myself at the same time. disclaimer: might sound kind of negative as i complain about tiring myself out and stuff, but overall i have SO MUCH fun doing this ok i want to make that clear

first of all: i am truly very sorry. maybe to some (most) people this isn’t a big deal but. i’ve spent most of the time working on this revision miming punching myself in the face every time i read over a translation that i changed, because i remember the original and want to die. but on the other hand, i don’t think what’s in the first version is really /that/ bad. i think it’s decent, passable i guess, and a lot of the things i changed were minor - the most important lines like the ones in the revues are relatively untouched, bc those are the ones i had already done enough agonizing over to be satisfied with what i had (except the futakao revue). but i am still very ashamed of myself and very sorry that i couldn’t do a better job the first time. 

this took me (looks at calendar) three and a half months, because first i fixed a lot of the timing issues, which was very tedious and time consuming and mind numbing. then i ran out of motivation for a month and a half bc things got very busy at work and i was in a horrible place health wise and did not have the energy to work on it. and then it was mid March and i took a few weeks to review + fix things over and over bc i only have time to work on this on the weekends and a few hours on weekdays and even then it’s hard to find the time and focus to watch a 2 hour movie while agonizing about the translation and timing and make changes… 

when i published the original, i was tired of working on it and too impatient and i couldn’t imagine working on it more because i knew things were going to get busier at work for me. every time i thought about the fact that people couldn’t watch and experience The Movie Ever with better understanding, i could not STAND the thought of just letting what i had done sit there on my computer for another week (let alone a whole month) while others couldn’t watch it… so i just released it… i am sorry if this reflects poorly on my character, but it is the truth. i regret not taking like, at least a few more days to proofread more, but at the time it really felt like the only thing i could do. 

i also want to say that it was never meant to be a response to the other subs - i was (and generally still am) so distant from most of the fandom that i didn’t even know there were other people subbing the movie. of course i knew that someone somewhere would probably be doing it, but i had no clue until after I posted my own that there were discord-only showings of the other subs or anything (the only reason i am not in the discord is bc i don’t enjoy large discord servers, and i don’t have any opinion on this). i’ll admit i still haven’t looked at the other subs because i didn’t want it to impact my own interpretation as i worked on the revision.

but also… i didn’t plan to sub the movie at all, actually: this is how it happened

• i watch the movie on dec 21 (i’m in est so it was dec 21)
• i absolutely lose my mind
• i think o___o i…………….. could sub this because i already translated the song lyrics…….. and revue intros……………. and… isn’t that like… a lot of the movie…. so…….!!!
• i spend the next 7 days in a hell of my own creation (barely sleeping and barely working which i could only do bc i work remotely and it was holiday season and all of my coworkers were away but i’m a lowly student coop who doesn’t get PTO)
• why did i do this? who asked me to do this? i don’t know. myself i guess.

so it was kind of an impulsive decision made in a vacuum. i don’t want to regret it, it was fun and i learned a lot, but were the mistranslations worth it? i suppose that depends on how much you care about the specifics. i think overall it’s not a big deal but, well (gestures to this whole post).

when i was working on this v2, there were a lot of moments where i thought that i really shouldn’t have subbed this in the first place. unfortunately, i am kind of a person who feels compulsed to do Things when i get too excited and that’s why this happened, and there is nothing i can do except move forward, fix things, and try to improve for the next time (yes there is a next time sorry! i’ll be stuck here for the forseeable future). 

all that’s to say if you want to hate me for this, or instead want to hate me for this stupidly longwinded!!! post that’s totally cool. next time, i will try very hard to put out better quality the first time around, and i ask for your understanding. thank you!