SF Saiyuki Starzinger – Episode 46

Sad Foreign Legion

Angered by Bellamis’ insubordination, Queen Lassetz orders Kilmes from her Special Forces team to cause magnetic turbulence by radiating an asteroid cluster with a magnetic beam. A base on the planet Adaba catches sight of the Cosmos, but it is suddenly attacked by Kilmes, who is supposed to be an ally, and is wiped out. Kugo and his team go to the rescue and find the corpse of Silus, a girl from the Foreign Legion, and he’s outraged at the cruelty of the attack. Bellamis, convinced by Queen Lassetz that it was Kugo who wiped out the entire base, challenges Kugo to a one-on-one duel!

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

Translation Thoughts

This episode is about xenophobia. The Foreign Legion is an army where all its soldiers are foreigners. That means they weren’t born on either planet Lassetz or Gyuma. Queen Lassetz, who is becoming darker every day, shows that she doesn’t care if she sacrifices foreigners in order to get what she wants. She tried it before in the previous episode on planet Lovely.

There is an interesting conversation between Queen Lassetz and King Gyuma, where Queen Lassetz is plotting to force a fight between Bellamis and Kugo. At 3:05, King Gyuma says:

しかし勝ったらますますつけ上がり負けたら兵士たちの繊維が失われる危険があるぞ
Shikashi kattara masumasu tsukeagari maketara heishi-tachi no sen’i ga ushinawareru kiken ga aru zo
If she wins, she’ll gain more and more, if she loses, you risk losing the will of your soldiers

That’s the direct translation, mind you. But it’s clear what he means: If Bellamis defeats Kugo, she will definitely earn more power in the military, and if she loses, her soldiers will lose hope.

You can see the use of the onomatopoeia ますます masumasu, which means things are gradually changing. Depending on the direction of the change, it can mean either “more and more” or “less and less”.

Then, Queen Lassetz answers:

この勝負は相打ちさせます
Kono shoubu wa aiuchi sasemasu
I’ll make it a tie

Now that’s one of the direct translations of that sentence. The noun 相打ちaiuchi means “draw”, “tie”, or, funnily enough, “simultaneous striking one another”. You can translate this in several ways, like “I’ll call this match”, “This match will go against each other”, etc. But Queen Lassetz’s idea is that they both lose, by killing them both while they fight. So that’s what I used in the episode.

It took me more time than I thought to translate the following line:

前方にちょっとしたエネルギーを持ったぐんせいたいがあるぞ
Zenpou ni chotto shita ENERUGII o motta gunseitai ga aru zo

The problem is ぐんせいたい gunseitai, which I deliberated wrote it in hiragana. Is it 軍整体 like an army? Or 軍生態 like some kind of biological weapon?

Eventually I realized Jugo meant to say 群星体 which means “clusters of planets”. Now, these are very small planets, so I used asteroids instead.

Since this is a children’s show and 群星体 gunseitai is a fairly complex word, they try to explain it to the viewers. That’s why Hakka immediately asks what it is. I like how Hakka pronounces the word very slowly, so the kids can catch it properly.

SF Saiyuki Starzinger – Episode 45

A Lullaby Resonating on the Battlefield

Queen Lassetz learns that the Cosmos is approaching the planet Gamagin and orders it to attack using the monster Gamagin. Belamis objects that it will involve the nearby planet Lovely, but Lassetz dismisses it. Planet Lovely becomes a battlefield, and Princess Aurora rescues a boy there who has fallen ill. In order to save the boy, they must obtain a jewel on the planet Eisner. Kugo leaves Planet Lovely and rushes to Planet Eisner. Queen Lassetz learns of this and orders an all-out attack on Planet Lovely!

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

Translation Thoughts

The kid in this episode is actually named Cute. His real name is キュート KYUUTO which totally means Cute. I’m sorry, but even though I can imagine that’s a cool name for a Japanese kid, it’s a terrible English name. So I was between Keith and Kurt, but ultimately I decided to go with the latter. If you’re a purist, just keep in mind that the kid’s name is Cute.

I’ve got a funny story about why we need to change those Japanese names sometimes. There’s an SUV in Japan from Mitsubishi called パジェロ PAJERO. When they brought that SUV to North and South America, they had to change the name because “pajero” means “masturbator” in several Spanish-speaking countries. They chose several different ones, depending on the country. In my home country, it was called Montero, which means something like mountaineer, I don’t know.

Cute is not as bad as pajero, but it’s still bad, so I really had to change it.

The insert song of this episode is called 星の子守歌 Hoshi no komori-uta “Lullaby of the Stars”, and is performed by 増山江威子 Masuyama Eiko which is the seiyuu of Professor Kitty. I’m not a lyricist, so the translation doesn’t really sound like a song. I guess a professional translator would’ve written a song based on the Japanese lyrics. Also, there’re a lot of bangs and explosions during the song, so I’m not 100% sure of the lyrics, and I couldn’t find another version online I could listen to without the background noise. The lyrics don’t really add anything to the story anyway.

At 3:19 Queen Lassetz says:

諄い
Kudoi!
You’re being repetitive!

Queen Lassetz here is tired of Bellamis insisting they should not fight near Planet Lovely because there are innocent people there working for them, producing the food they eat in the Gilara star system.