Script Review: [SubDesu] Medaka Box – 01 This entry was posted by Xythar.
Another contender for the ‘box.
r/a/ge level: 40/100. It has honorifics, a TL note and avoids translating the names of kendo moves to the point where it does more harm than good, but on the other hand it’s SubDesu. Uses Japanese name order and a fairly inconsistent approach to localization (one instance of “freshman” and then several of “third year” or “first year”. “Upperclassman” and “underclassman” are used as well. I really don’t know.
I don’t really understand what this line is meant to mean. I don’t think the present really does anything, it’s just a point in time.
A comma is not a period (nor is it an ellipsis). You could either get rid of the “In” and just end the first line with an ellipsis or you could rewrite this entirely to flow a bit more naturally.
Pretty sure this is referring to her specifically and not freshmen in general. “There’s no way she would have been elected student council president as a freshman otherwise”.
To their credit, I appreciate that SubDesu’s editor for this show knows how to use contractions and write dialogue that sounds more or less like actual high school students…
…but that doesn’t stop them from dropping the ball frequently as well. “Hey, don’t say stuff like that, Zenkichi.”
The president was mentioned all of one line ago. There’s a time and place for “aforementioned”, but it’s definitely not here. “So what’s going on with Hitoyoshi and the president?”
Every day. “Everyday” is an adjective, like “my everyday life”. I like the execution of this line other than that, though.
Starting a letter with “Dear ____,” is one of those rare cases where a comma actually does end the sentence. Just nuke the “actually” and capitalize “Student Council President” since it’s being used as a proper noun and you’re good. One other issue though is that the script previously used “freshman” for “first-year student”, but now they’ve switched back to just saying “third year”. The approach you take for localizing terms like “first-year student” is largely a matter of preference, but you need to be consistent throughout the whole script.
I , uh, really wouldn’t phrase it like that.
I’m sorry, but this makes no sense to me.
What? I can put up with awkward phrasing from time to time, but several lines in this whole scene have been all but incomprehensible.
Having commas after three words in a row should really set off a red flag for you that something’s not right. There shouldn’t be a comma after “but”, and I’d probably just rearrange the sentence to “I’ve thought this for a while, but are you just stupid or something, Hitoyoshi?” to make it read a bit more naturally. Alternatively, you could use “I’ve thought this for a while, but… Hitoyoshi, are you just stupid?” if you wanted to split it into another line after “but” for dramatic effect.
Needs a full stop or exclamation point.
For some reason they decided to use a TL note to explain that “sanbai” means “three times”, but this particular phrase is left a mystery.
Somehow I doubt this.
What I liked: The language for the students wasn’t too stiff, for the most part. Most of the show more or less made sense.
What I didn’t like: The language was also all over the place, from fairly casual to “aforementioned”. I wouldn’t call the phrasing excessively literal as just… weird – there were lots of lines throughout that really didn’t read naturally at all, though I didn’t bother taking screenshots of most of them. There were also a number of lines that made no sense whatsoever, whether due to randomly untranslated Japanese terms or just not making sense in the first place. And based on what I’ve heard about the translation accuracy, I’d have a pretty hard time recommending this release.
Overall Grade: 2/5