SF Saiyuki Starzinger – Episode 31

Rebellion at the Planet Lenfa Base!

Kugo finally gets to the planet Lenfa, Kinkinman’s home planet, but is intercepted by the Horus Attack Force, which renders all the cyborgs’ energy useless. Kinkinman takes advantage of this opportunity to attack the Cosmos and capture Princess Aurora. Kinkinman forces the princess to swear obedience. The princess adamantly refuses, saying that she must not use her galaxy energy for his own desires. Angered, Kinkinman orders Jogo, who has lost his memories and been enslaved, to hit Princess Aurora with a plasma whip!

You can download the torrent file in Anidex or Anirena, or get direct links from AnimeTosho.

Translation Thoughts

This is the final episode of the Kinkinman – Ginginman arc. It consisted of a total of 7 episodes, from Episode 25 to this one.

Jokes are always very hard to translate between different languages, and even between different cultures using the same language. Translating jokes is always very hard for everybody. I’ve noticed by watching the Spanish dub of this show that when things get tough to translate, they just remove the whole scene! There are a lot of scenes missing in the Spanish dub! Don’t worry, I won’t do that.

What follows is an example from this episode. Hakka saves Kugo by digging under the ground to escape the attack from Horus. Starting from 12:30, this is what I believe they’re saying:

Hakka:
クゴたん,もう俺のこと泥なんとかなんて言えねぇな
Kugo-tan, mou ore no koto doro nantoka nante ie nee na
Kugo-tan, you can’t call me a mud-something anymore.

Kugo:
えなんて言えないって
e.. nante ienai tte?
Huh? What is it I can’t say?

Kugo always calls Hakka a mud pig (泥豚 dorobuta) and Hakka doesn’t want to say “pig” at first. Kugo is playing the fool here, obviously. That’s why in the next line, Hakka calls him “slow”:

Hakka:
鈍いんだよ全く.俺のこともう泥豚なんて言えないって言ったんだよ
Nibuinda yo mattaku. Ore no koto mou doro buta nante ienai tte itta nda yo
You’re so slow! I said you can’t call me a mud pig anymore.

Kugo:
あーそうかそうかおまえのこと泥豚って
泥豚って言っちゃそりゃ行けないんだよな.
泥豚なんてとんでもないやこりゃ
Aa sou ka sou ka omae no koto doro buta tte
doro buta tte itcha sorya ikenai nda yo na
Doro buta nante tondemonaiya korya
Ah I see, I see. I’ve called you mud pig (before) [Direct translation: oh I see, you’re a mud pig].
I can’t really say it was even mud pig (what I’ve said to you before).
Mud pigs are terrible things.

That’s not really a direct translation because direct translation doesn’t work even remotely here. The joke is that he calls Hakka “mud pig” three times in the same sentence, but in English you would just say he’s talking about mud pigs and not actually calling Hakka one. So I changed it up a little bit to try to make it funnier than the direct translation would’ve been. I probably failed at it. What can you do? I always struggle to translate Kugo and Hakka when they are like this.

Dodge Jokes

I feel like I need a whole section to explain all the kinds of jokes that happen with Assistant Professor Dodge. You might already know that ドッジ Docchi (Dodge) sounds similar to どじ doji (clumsy), and it’s a recurrent joke throughout the whole series. Even Professor Kitty called himどじ doji in this episode.

But ドッジ Dojji (Dodge) also sounds almost identically to どっち docchi (which one). So when Assistant Professor Dodge gets confused about his own name he says, at 15:24:

どっちがどっちかな
docchi ga docchi ka na
I wonder which is which.

It can also mean “I wonder if it’s Dodge”, or “I wonder which one is Dodge”, or things like that depending if you replace the first どっち docchi, or the second one, or both. In Japanese, it is very funny, but unfortunately it is untranslatable to English.

And this is going to get worse in the next episode, where we will meet Dodge’s brother: ヘボン Hebon, that obviously sounds like へぼ hebo that also means clumsy! I don’t even know how I am going to translate all the jokes that those two names cause in Episode 32.

Is it Professor Kitty or Doctor Kitty?

I guess I also need to explain this. Kitty is a 博士 hakase, which is a word in Japanese that can only be used to address people with a Ph.D. For a Doctor of Medicine there’s a different word: 医者 isha.

The decision to use Professor Kitty instead of Doctor Kitty was made by the original ILA translator, gxseries. I would assume he made the distinction so people wouldn’t think that Kitty is a medical doctor. Since TSHS also used Professor Kitty, I used the same translation as well. Dodge is a 助教授 Jokyouju, an Assistant or Associate Professor. I have to admit that when I first watched this show as a kid I actually thought Kitty was a physician, and Dodge was the actual scientist.