nedragrevev's notes

My Neighbor Totoro (となりのトトロ | Tonari no Totoro) subs by nedragrevev (Last Update: 1 October 2021)

 

• AU Madman Blu-ray Release. Should Sync up Fine with other releases.

Dimensions: 1920 x 1036 (or more precisely 1920 x 1038 for an exact 1.85:1 ratio and perfect trim of the black bars).

 

• Started With: thora v2. Basically had no typesetting (except maybe the credits), used the official translation.

Completely reworked in every aspect.

 

• Translation: Where do I start? The official translation simplified and skipped a lot of dialogue.

Every single line has been retranslated in a natural way from the Japanese. I'm very particular about getting things right these days, and being such an iconic film, I tried to translate this as carefully as possible, including the signs as noted below.

Referenced Disney's dub at times, which was a surprisingly good translation of the Japanese.

Thanks to hydes for offering some pointers about translation choices and including some typeset signs. And for picking up a few errors that I missed.

 

Translation notes: I don't like TL notes unless absolutely necessary. I created five of them, and considered including a hardcore version with all showing, but decided not to. Three of these TL notes concerned Mei purposely mispronouncing some words at times. It's interesting but not necessary to enjoy the film.

For example, when Mei is explaining to Satsuki that she met "Totoro", Satsuki thinks she meant a troll, which is pronounced "tororu" in Japanese (totoro <--> tororu).

There was a reference to Tadpole, which has been translated as pole-tads, which works fine, but the other word she mispronounces is "corn". I considered translating as "corb" but you'd probably be scratching your head and thinking I misspelled it, so I left this out altogether.

The other hidden translation note was for what "Jizo" is about. Not required.

 

4 Versions ignore any versions that don't appeal to you):

(1) Honorifics. Only one TL note included as mentioned above.

(2) No honorifics. No TL notes so "The Monkey and the Crab" folktale reference is removed. I recommend defaulting to this one.

(3) No honorifics, localized. As with (2) but also removed the Jizo reference and this has the western naming order in dialogue and signs. Almost didn't see the point with this one, but it gives you the choice as to what you prefer.

(4) Signs and Songs Only. Songs have been k-timed to Disney's English versions of the songs.

 

• Timing. Completely and carefully retimed as I usually do. Thought given to presentation quality.

 

• Typesetting. Plenty of new signs translated and typeset. The only sign I'm not happy with is the corn engraving just before the ED song. It's good enough for the few seconds of onscreen time it gets, but I feel like it needs an artist's touch to get perfect so I didn't spend much time on it. Otherwise, there's plenty of new stuff that has been translated and typeset (including during the ED credits, the book mentioned above), some of which is basically pointless but it blended in fine so I left it in.

 

Cat Bus Destination Signs: These are left untranslated as place names as they should be. Translating stuff like this, is like translating Shinjuku to the literal meaning of "New Lodging/Inn", which makes no sense. To double check, I asked a native speaker who confirmed these are always read as place names, not descriptors like "Forest" or "Cemetery" as translated in the official stuff (guessing it was to make it kid-friendly). The consensus on the web agrees with this. I did translate Taisha to "Grand Shrine" though as this seemed more logical to do so.

 

Opening Credits: All credits follow the western naming order because everyone is probably used to reading Joe Hisaishi and Hayao Miyazaki, and not the other way around.

 

I had typeset a "Dragon whiskers" label to one of Satsuki's drawings on her letter since I didn't typeset any of the letters, but I thought it'd be more distracting; it's narrated anyway, so this set of signs have been hidden. Feel free to unhide them if you want to include it as it's fully tracked and ready to go.

 

• Songs: I made some translation adjustments. The Japanese had the final say but after listening to the English version, I liked some of the lines and copied them over (to some extent) if it actually reflected the Japanese lyrics.

OP: I wanted to work on an original k-effect, but in the end, a standard preset (with some adjustments) looked best, so credit to KaraEffect0r ( https://github.com/KaraEffect0r ) for that particular k-effect.

ED: Translating this nicely was difficult, so it might seem a bit disjointed between some lines. Another one where the k-effect was pretty standard, with just a few modifications. Nothing special but worked well.

 

• If you find mistakes, please post on my Github issues page and I will fix it as soon as I get to it. (Last Update: 1 October 2021)

 

tl;dr, Enjoy these subs!