Pichi Pichi Pitch translated manga vol. 5

[nenena]

Page 41 - Minor nitpicky thing. Sara talks about a single sphere of light in the panel where she first explains about Seira's heart. But really, there are multiple spheres of light, each one constituting a fragment of Seira's heart. In the next panel, however, Sara is using the plural "orbs of light."

Page 76 - Lucia is talking about Hanon, not about herself. Argh.

Page 81 - Rina speaks in typos.

Page 180 - The Great One addresses Michel as his "grandchild." In the Japanese version, the Great One used the word 御子 miko, which is only used for
a) the Emperor's son, or
b) Jesus Christ, the Son of God, or
c) a virginal priestess.
Either way, it's an interesting little Japanese tidbit that does not translate well into English. But if I were writing the translation, I would have chosen "my son" instead of "my grandchild." On the other hand, however, given the spoilers that we know are coming in volume 06, "grandchild" is the more accurate term here. Oooooooh, foreshadowing!

Page 189 - From Michel, not for Michel.

Aaaaand finally... Indigo.

Argh.

I've already said my piece about this once, but here goes again, just because.

The problem with translating color terms from one language to another is that... they don't translate well. Especially between Japanese and English. And that's the problem with the word aiiro. Japanese speakers use the word aiiro to refer to a broad range of colors that English speakers would label as blue, navy blue, indigo, and royal purple. So if you showed an English speaker, say, a sample of purplish wallpaper and a sample of navy blue wallpaper, the English speaker would call one sample "purple" and the other sample "blue." But a Japanese person might very well call both colors "aiiro."

The problem, however, is that if you look up aiiro in a dictionary, the only English translation that ever comes up is "indigo." Which is crap, of course, because Japanese speakers use aiiro to refer to colors that an English speaker would NEVER label as indigo. But such are the limitations of dictionaries.

Another example: Aoi. If you look up this term in a Japanese-to-English dictionary, the only translation that you'll find is "blue." However, Japanese speakers use the word aoi to refer to a) unripe bananas and b) green stoplights. Would an English speaker ever describe an unripe banana as "blue"? No. We'd use the word "green." So, hypothetically, if I were translating a manga in which somebody said kono aoi banana, would I translate that as "This blue banana"? No. I'd write "This green banana" because that's the color that an English speaker would say. It's not the color that changes, it's just the word that people use to describe it.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to Noel. If you look at her color - just look at any damn illustration of her, in either the anime or the manga - she's freakin' blue. Call it royal blue or deep blue or navy blue or whatever you want, but she's definitely not indigo. While a Japanese speaker would describe Noel as aiiro, to an English speaker, she's blue.

But there's the problem of that damn dictionary definition, which says that aiiro only means "indigo" and no other color.

So in the Del Rey translation, Noel is indigo. But really... She's blue. Whether you use the intuitive or the counterintuitive color term to describe her, Noel's color doesn't change. She's still blue.

Finally, here's the Japanese wikipedia entry for aiiro. Does that look like indigo to you? I would definitely call that color "blue." And for the curious, here's a google image search for the color aiiro. You can see that a whole lot of different colors show up, some of which are definitely blue, some of which are definitely indigo. Like I said, the Japanese term aiiro can be applied to colors that English speakers would label as blue or indigo. So we have to go by what we see, not what the dictionary tells us.

And that's all that I have to say about that.