So I picked up ポケットモンスター スペシャル 番１, (Pokémon Special Book 1) in Japanese to give myself a fun way to practice and identify what I am learning in my Elementary Japanese text book. Within the first page I already have 3 questions so this topic will be an ongoing thread that I will keep posting on as I go through this manga.
I am using a combination of Wanikani, Japandict.com, and Google translate to check things that I am unsure about and adding those new things to my Anki decks for further study.
So here are my first 3 questions:
Don’t know if there is an answer for this one but…in the first dialog box, it says: 南国の町マサラタウン. I understand that 南国の町 means roughly “southern province/country town” but why is it that マサラタウン doesn’t translate to “Pallet Town” unless I type ば or something similar on the next line down. I am currently just chalking this one up to Google translate not really sure about what I am wanting.
The next dialog box starts off with “くそう” which I can’t find any entry on Japandict.com but Google translates it to “damn it”. That seems strange for a children’s manga. Do American cuss words no have the same weight in Japan or is the translation just wrong again?
This one is similar to question #2. One of the characters says ”よおし” which translates to “Okay.” This seemed straight forward. However on Japandict.com they have “Okay” written as ”よし” with out the お. Is the お just being used in this instance like “Ooooookay”?
Google Translate is okay but I wouldn’t mind finding something better if possible.
Well, it’s not a direct translation but rather a localisation. There are theories that the Japanese name comes from either 真っ白 or 真っ更, but the English name was invented out of whole cloth.
It’s that Japanese cuss words don’t really have the same weight. Like, Japanese essentially doesn’t have any swear words.
Yeah, you can draw it out for more emphasis. Though I reckon it’s more like Okaay!
There is no direct connection between 「マサラ」 and “Pallet”. Google Translate might see a relation between 「マサラタウン」 and “Pallet Town” to the point that it translates one to the other, but that’s not always going to be the case.
Out of curiosity, I put the text into various sites to see how they translate it:
Site
Translation
Google Translate
Tropical town of Masala Town
DeepL
Masala Town, a town in the southern region
ChatGPT
The tropical town, Masara Town
Grok
Masara Town, a town in the southern country.
The word is considered crude, but it doesn’t have the same weight as the various English translations you’ll see for it.
What? That’s crazy talk. It’s exactly like a jelly-filled donut… except it’s got rice instead of dough, and tuna-mayo filling instead of jelly, and nori on the outside instead of powdered sugar… and it’s triangular instead of round… but otherwise they’re identical.
Chiming in to say that マサラ town follows the theme of all other towns in Kanto being named after colours → or the absence of colour with being similar to “pure white”.
In japanese, the town’s slogan is
マサラは まっしろ はじまりのいろ
“Masara, the color of pure white beginnings”
I’m not really sure why the English translation went wint “Pallet Town”, unless they wanted to directly reference the town’s slogan. (“Shades of your journey awaits”), instead of simply going with some wordplay around white.
Interestingly enough, other languages kept the “white” theme in their own translation.
(In italian the town is named Biancavilla, literally “white town”, and also the name of a real life small town in Italy…. Must have been fun to be a kid there when the Pokémon mania first exploded lol)
I always saw “Pallet” town as in a painter Palette if though it was spelled like a wodden pallet. Each town being named after another color signifying that as you/Ash/Red make there way through the region adds more “color”/memoies and experiance from the towns to their overall journey/Palette.
That aside though, thanks everyone for clearing up those questions. A lot of great information here. I am sure these won’t be the last questions that I have. Good to know though also that Google Translate seems to be just as good as other translaters.
