geekyIn the meantime, we just finished Season 2 of Miraculous again, and it's always bittersweet, because it's like, "Awww, that was nice," followed by, "So when do we get more!?" followed by, "WHO KNOWS!?!?!?" Season 3 is already airing in France, so maybe about six months for part one in English, another six months for part two in English, and another six months for the whole thing in French.
We're so bad about it, though, which is to say we're our usual selves. Only it's worse, because we don't know French, so now we're back to being the Japanese 101 students who always know better than the professionals. Of course, before it was a matter of, "I learned what that word means and you got it wrong!" while now it's more a matter of, "Those French words sounded a lot like these English words, and HOW COOL would it have sounded if you'd have used those words!?"
For example, there's a part where Cat Noir talks about wearing black. When Athena heard the line, she wasn't really reading the subtitle, so she was busy being proud of herself for understanding the second half of the sentence, which was "the green in my eyes," and because she thought it was cute, she repeated it, only in English (which is how we do things a lot, re-quoting anime in English), and said, "It brings out the green in my eyes." I don't know as much French (I only pick up the words that are close to English ones), so I was reading the subtitles, and I was like, "Wait, is that what he said? I don't think that's what I read." So we replayed it, and sure enough, the subtitles said, "It makes my eyes stand out." And we don't know what the French verb was (probably something that means "makes stand out"), but we were like, "Oh my gosh, our version is so much better!"
Of course, that's only one of maybe three things that we felt needed improvement in the whole second season, and considering what snobs we are, that's a super good ratio. ...I'm suddenly reminded of working on a certain series where we get feedback from the editor, and the editor manages to catch our mistranslations, and it makes me go, "Ooooohhhhh noooooooo, I'm losing my touch, I'm a failure, I'm a has-been, aaaaaaaahhhhhhh..." Then I had to remind myself that out of the whole book (which had way more text than it had any right to have), he only found a few things to correct, so our score is still like 99%. And that's how we feel about the Miraculous subtitles...which are actually the captions for the dub, which means there's a good chance all the lines were tweaked by somebody who doesn't know any French. (One time Ladybug said something where the caption was completely different (again, based on our limited French), and we're pretty sure the English version was an ad-lib.) So I don't even know what I'm saying anymore.
What I'm saying is that I'm obsessed with translation and very opinionated. That's what I'm saying. And I'm very sorry. But I'm also very thankful that there's someone out there translating Miraculous so people like me can watch it and have a pretty good idea what's going on. And now I need to stop rambling.
Today I'm thankful for translators, Cat Noir's sing-song voice, all the transformation sequences in Miraculous, meeting our work quota for today, and knowing where we stand with our panel for AX. (On the bright side, this means they should have a schedule up pretty soon.)
