i’m sure you all know about “Your Name,” the popular and insanely excellent anime film. If you don’t know about it, go see it RIGHT NOW.
Anyway, the pre-translation title is “君の名は” which uses kimi (君) for “you”. I learned that kimi is commonly used among male friends, but also colloquially among females.
My question- is it common for a young man and young woman on the streets to use this word with each other? Or does this choice of word imply something thematic that might be lost in translation. Does it imply that they feel familiar with each other? Or is it related to their speaking styles through the anime?
I assumed it was because they recognised each other but could not quite remember the names beacause reasons, hence the 君 as opposed to あなた. They were familiar with one another, so slightly different to meeting someone on the street for the first time randomly.
Frankly I don’t know enough about the language to answer, that’s just my impression given the context.
Since kimi does have a tone of familiarity to it, I think that kind of subtle meaning is a bit lost in translation.
It also explains why so many boy bands and love songs in Japanese use kimi instead of other ways to say you (anata being too neutral and omae being more of a confrontational connotation). So the fact that they know each other without quite knowing each other through their switched body experiences would contribute to how they address each other. I havent seen the English dub of the film (assuming there is one already or one in the works) but when I watched it in Japanese I was wondering how they would handle the scene where Mitsuha is in Takis body talking with his friends at school and confuses the different words for [I] and addressing oneself as one would depending on their age, gender, and who they`re talking to.
In English theres really only one way to say [I] and [me.] Perhaps theyd handle it like they did in a certain scene of Ouran High School Host Club where they changed the dialogue to fit the core concept of the scene as opposed to trying to remain perfectly accurate to the original Japanese source text. Haruhi (who spends the whole show in disguise as a male student) says shell start addressing herself as [ore] instead of [watashi] from then on to be a more convincing boy in the original Japanese version, but in the English dub they changed her line to [Ill just call everyone dude and bro now!]
Perhaps they(ll) have Mitsuha call one of Takis friends something she`d normally call her girl friends and have them look at her strange until she settles on [dude] or [bro]…
I watched the sub, and they just explained that わたし was feminine in that context by subtitling “I [feminine]”. They then let context handle わたくし、僕、and おれ.
Apparently in the dub they changed the line to “When a girl’s walking around Tokyo…”
i appreciate that they tried to keep it as true to the original line as possible, but i like banarbra’s idea. hm i guess we’ll just have to wait and see!
i think it’s just that the phrase “when a girl’s walking around tokyo…” feels doubly-forced. in the original anime, she says “atashi” accidentally, which is a really believable slip-up for someone who isn’t used to being a guy, since it’s so automatic. but the whole phrase" when a girl’s walking around tokyo" is so flamboyant, it doesn’t seem like a believable slip up. and on top of that, it’s not a common way of talking in english, so it changes the portrayed personality of the character, i think.
of course, it’s possible that they’ve changed all the lines so it’ll make perfect sense. one of the biggest curses of learning japanese is discovering just how different all your favorite dubs / subs are from the originals :<
@Destro I can read. That doesn’t explain the full context, i.e. that the Japanese line is a slip of the tongue.
I guess I’d have to see it to see how it plays out, but I think I’m maybe more generous than most when things are adapted to fit for translation. Things that would take a paragraph to explain because of cultural differences aren’t worth the trouble.