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.

4 thoughts to “SF Saiyuki Starzinger – Episode 46”

  1. Thank you for your hard work translating these! I only remember seeing the first ten or so episodes on tv as a kid, don’t really know what was with that, so now I’m really watching Starzinger for the first time. It is a pretty silly kids show, but it has all this drama, and Bellamis being a Lady Oscar of sorts easily made her my favourite character.

    1. My pleasure! Bellamis was a popular character in Japan in the 70s when this show was aired, so I think the Japanese agree with you with her being their favorite character. Definitely she’s very much like Lady Oscar from Rose of Versailles.

    1. Y es por ello que uno siempre debe ver todo en el idioma original con subtítulos si es necesario. Siempre inventan en los doblajes.

      Ahora me da curiosidad qué habrán hecho en el 40 cuando Aurora revela a Bellamis que sabe que es una mujer!

      A veces cambian toda la historia, por ejemplo, Macross vs Robotech.

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