Not Red Reviews

This week I was there in time to translate Shinsekai. It was quite an episode.

I don’t dare write about this scene in detail. I could write a lot about it, because it’s a very detailed and very shocking part of the book, but if they bring this up in the second episode in a two cour anime, that means they’ll be very detailed about the past (from the series’ viewpoint). I don’t want to spoil anything for you. The “five hundred years later” is relative to our time: this takes place sometimes in the 26th century.

Yep, it’s a world like that.

Now you know what karma demons are. The scientific explanation will probably come in a few episodes too.

I can’t read the red seal – I’m not sure it’s a letter at all.

With the game shown on screen, this much explanation is enough. In the book they went on for ages about the details.

This tells so much about the world. Don’t even give them the idea that someone might break the rules intentionally. It’s an accident.

倫理規定 (rinri-kitei, ethic code).

Meow. Don’t ask me the meaning of this scene. Tainted cats are supposed to only go after grade schoolers without Cantus, so I don’t know why one (if that’s one at all) shows up here.

I can’t even imagine how dreadful it must be for a kid like her that she can’t trust even her own parents enough to talk about her troubles.

Manabu got the same seal as Reiko. Guess what happened.

バケネズミ (bakenezumi), literally changed, monstrous mice. I wanted one word for it that can be fit into any short sentence easily (these creatures will become essential in the books’ plot, so they’ll be mentioned a lot), and it had to have something along the lines of “weird” too. Queerat works perfectly.

This is the typical case of very ambiguous Japanese. I’d say she’s telling him she’s not scared, but others disagreed. As for the phrase her dad’s about to explain, it’s 面従腹背 (menjuu-fukuhai) for those who care about the Japanese.

I’m sure no one can understand the queerats’ “speech” unless they know what’s being said already. Luckily we know what’s being said, but spoilers aren’t nice even in subtitles, so we decided to use a close-to-unreadable font for it. It’s Etruscan, if you feel like decoding it.

Actually it says “tree”, but while in Japanese 木蠹蛾 (bokutouga) starts with the kanji for “tree”, its English translation, goat moth, doesn’t. For those who want absolute precision, I must admit that it’s not a direct translation, since 木蠹蛾 is cossus jezoensis, while goat moth is cossus cossus.

The ending animation’s really nice. There’s a bunch of references in it to the story. It’s really fun to try to find them all.

So it’s not enough that at this point we hardly even know what a minoshiro is, but there’re fakes of them already? It’ll all be clear next episode.

Originally I put “what” and not “who”, intended as a hint for you.

This entry was posted by Vale.