Suisei no Gargantia 04 – notes and the like

This episode of Gargantia proved a lot more challenging than I thought.

Contract

During this episode I saw so much of the “writing of Earth” that I tried to figure out what it was. At first I thought it was Thai or Khmer, since it looks very similar to those, but after I called in the anons for help (huge thanks and over 9000 internets to everyone who helped!), it was quite soon decoded. The contract on screen is titled “Certificado de Conexao de Aprovacao” which is Portuguese for “Connection Approval Certificate” and the subtitles are all “Article (1)” and so on.

The script is written in a tricky way, just like the IGHL alphabet (that’s used in for example Chamber’s subtitles for Ledo) that got decoded a while ago: while it’s Portuguese, the words a reversed by pairs (or triplets or whole syllables sometimes) of letters (so for example “conexao” would be “aoexonc”). The IGHL script does the same with German. (The pretty-much-complete (though mousewritten) transcription chart for the earthling alphabet can be found in the thread I linked.)

Invoice

This one is the toughest. I still couldn’t figure it all out. In the middle it says “Mr. Ledo” and the big letters in the left corner probably say “bill”. The serial number is indicated by “bill numero” in the top right. As for the text in the bottom right, the first line is probably “pretendente” (probably literally translated from “suitor”), but as for the second line, only the middle three words make any sense: it’s “representa o xeque”. This could be a part of “the suitor is legally bound to repay this check until the deadline”, but then the Portuguese is seriously broken (according to Portuguese-speaking people).

Crat

One thing is sure: Gargantia is quite a bureaucracy.

Broken

He speaks in broken Japanese. At least Japanese think that when foreigners start learning Japanese, they speak like that. I’ll tell you a big secret: they’re wrong. Real “beginner Japanese” in broken in very different ways (and is much less understandable).

Left

The sign on the left is in some calligraphic font and we didn’t manage to figure it out. It looks like “CREF OINP”. Once the camera pans down, there is a sign saying Marumiya.

Sign

This sign in the foreground reads Asamaru (or Uramasa, depending on which direction it’s supposed to be read in) and the sign in the back says Taro maybe, I’m not sure about that. Sometimes they use Japanese words like that.

Blinds

The signs on the blinds say Kagoshima, probably the home of someone on staff.

This

This is what started it all. I just couldn’t resist so many books. (The other books in Doc’s room are also the same, just different colors.)

The brown books are the Cosmic Atlas. The green one’s title is Totonyan, which is the name of a Japanese art company who are contracted to draw the backgrounds in Gargantia.

The cyan one is Satsumakenshi Hayato (in romanized form, in Japanese it’s written as 薩摩剣士隼人), a drama series set in Kagoshima. Yep, someone on staff definitely must be from Kagoshima.

The magenta one reads Shouyu Tottekure (しょうゆとってくれ, “please give me the soy sauce”), which is apparently a standard example sentence in junior high English textbooks in Japan.

The red one says Suiyou Dou Deshou (水曜どうでしょう, “Do you like Wednesday?”), a Japanese variety show.

The blue one reads Red Dwarf, which is likely a reference to the BBC sci-fi franchise.

The last one is Ryokucha (緑茶, green tea). I’ve got no idea if it’s a reference.

Real

The left page is the star map of the area within 15-20 light years from Earth. The right page shows an illustration of the Daedalus Project vessel.

The Book

The book is titled The Ocean.

Chamber

I thought I’d point it out that the writing on Chamber’s chest (not on its head) says “Store carefully. No open flame or plasma.” Yep, “or plasma”. Made me laugh so hard.

Impressive

I find his character development impressive. He started learning the local language and even question his own place.

Words

Did you notice that Chamber answered on its own here? I can understand now why would Ledo make the effort to learn the language himself.

Chamber

Through that headset, Chamber’s supposed to see and hear everything Ledo does. Then how come it didn’t notice the starmap in Doc’s book?

This entry was posted by Vale.

7 thoughts on “Suisei no Gargantia 04 – notes and the like

  1. Urobuchi wrote the scripts for the first and last episodes. We can guess that either some shit gets fucked by the end, or the staff will fuck with the script. That has been the only thing going through my mind when Chamber says his data is insufficient.

  2. This is really really interesting! Thank you so much for your time! n.n~
    Though I gotta admit that I still can’t notice the words eheh (and I speak Portuguese)

  3. now i’ve got the complete alphabet of #gargantia earth-man.
    http://minus.com/mbadZMadgJUBqy
    Bevel was actually reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in ep.2
    easy to find that the letter J is a variation of letter C
    although the letter Q is still fuzzy

  4. Seeing a map of nearby stars isn’t enough to understand where those stars are if you don’t recognize at least one of them and know where it’s located.

    Basically the map and sky portion Chamber saw so far are outside the space observable/mapped from the Human Galactic Alliance (although that is pretty implausible considering they know about the Earth…).

    The rest is pretty interesting.

  5. Totally with you on the broken Japanese. Of course it’s understandable since Japanese has such a limited enunciation spectrum to begin with. It started getting to me by the second half of the fourth episode, though. Hopefully he’ll become fluent soon, and judging by his inhuman language acquisition skills, he probably will.

  6. じゃあ、逆にレドさんにとって 必要だって そう思える人はいないの?
    Dialogue: 0,0:20:00.78,0:20:06.26,Default,,0000,0000,0000,,Well then, is there anyone out there who needs you?

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