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Hey, Answerman! - manga.exe

Paint Tool SAI is a really amazing program, but for screen-tone effects I'd say that Comic Studio/Manga Studio is better (it also has great easy-to-use tools for creating panels). SAI is incredible for the amount of control it provides over linework though!

So, basically, as long as everyone reads "fu fu fu" its as "hu hu hu" or "heh heh heh" instead of reading it a "fu fu fu", then its perfectly natural.

Ara, ara.

From what you said of "nakama", I think soul mate would make a good translation. But I think those other words of friend and ally and the rest still make a good fit. Easily see a best friend cover up for a friend of a crime and similar situations. Don't really need a fancy word for that.

"Friends" works for 90% of the uses of "Nakama".

An English translation of a Japanese work isn't aimed at a Japanese audience, it is aimed at a English-speaking audience, one who will have at least some people in it who can't speak a word of Japanese. I hate it when translators presume that their audience already knows what "kawaii" means, to use one example. The translation should be simple, clear and easy to follow, with a minimum of Japanese. I should only have to pause the episode (or wait till the end) to read a translation note about a term, joke or reference that was truly too difficult to get across in the subtitles or dub itself. If it could have been easily translated then that's what should have happened.

You're making it sound like Westerners never die for their friends. You're making it sound like Westerners don't have friendships as strong as the Japanese do. However, that's simply not true.

A lot of what nakama covers is what we Westerners consider close friendship to be. Someone you implicitly trust, someone whom you can confide in, someone who has your back, someone who would go to the ends of the Earth to help you.

The term "friend" can cover a person barely closer than an acquaintance to a person whom you'd die for without a second thought. While translating nakama as "friend" doesn't automatically get across the depth, it isn't wrong either. If I see Luffy pissed off that Nami is getting hurt and he yells "Don't hurt my friend", I know he isn't talking about someone he vaguely knows from his knitting class or neighbourhood watch group. The audience can tell how close a friendship is just by what context the term "friend" is used in.

You've got to stop assuming that such obvious meanings are untranslatable. Of course, you've probably heard this hundreds of times before and you still so it so nothing I say is going to change your mind.

When the envirnoment is not explicitly Japanese, I often find intrusions of Japanese cultural necessities to be annoying or incongruous. For example, in TTGL, there is an episode where Yoko decides to become a teacher. So she heads off and ends up at an elementary school. And what sort of uniforms do the kids there where? *Japanese* elementary school uniforms, complete with those crazy hard-hat things. Really? After centuries of living underground, with basically no cultural heritage left anywhere, they immediately reinstate the Japanese school system, complete with naming conventions and subject matter? Just... wow. Yes, it was incongruous, though I suppose it might have been done that way as a sort of joke.

Tuor_of_Gondolin wrote:

When the envirnoment is not explicitly Japanese, I often find intrusions of Japanese cultural necessities to be annoying or incongruous. For example, in TTGL, there is an episode where Yoko decides to become a teacher. So she heads off and ends up at an elementary school. And what sort of uniforms do the kids there where? *Japanese* elementary school uniforms, complete with those crazy hard-hat things. Really? After centuries of living underground, with basically no cultural heritage left anywhere, they immediately reinstate the Japanese school system, complete with naming conventions and subject matter? Just... wow. Yes, it was incongruous, though I suppose it might have been done that way as a sort of joke.

How dare the Japanese use Japanese cultural cues in their Japanese cartoons!

Fencedude5609 wrote:

Tuor_of_Gondolin wrote: When the envirnoment is not explicitly Japanese, I often find intrusions of Japanese cultural necessities to be annoying or incongruous. For example, in TTGL, there is an episode where Yoko decides to become a teacher. So she heads off and ends up at an elementary school. And what sort of uniforms do the kids there where? *Japanese* elementary school uniforms, complete with those crazy hard-hat things. Really? After centuries of living underground, with basically no cultural heritage left anywhere, they immediately reinstate the Japanese school system, complete with naming conventions and subject matter? Just... wow. Yes, it was incongruous, though I suppose it might have been done that way as a sort of joke. How dare the Japanese use Japanese cultural cues in their Japanese cartoons!

They can do whatever they want. My comment was that it was incongruous that *any* current societal institution, from any culture, would show up whole cloth like that. It would have made just as little sense if an American or Russian or French elementary school sprang up just a few years after humans returned from centuries underground. Underground, in holes, scraping by with barely enough to eat.

Sorry, but actually ... "nakama" is not really a stronger word than "tomodachi" (friend). Emotionally speaking, it's more the other way round. "tomodachi" is used for someone who really is your friend. While nakama can be your work colleagues, somebody with the same hobby or, generally speaking, someone who shares something, some kind of characteristic with you (which can be "friendship", but not necessarily). Sometimes a nakama is your friend (or vice-versa), and sometimes it's just an acquaintance. Somebody who belongs to the same group, people who belong together in one way or other.

Having said all that though, if I ever saw a translation that went something like, "We are nakama," I'd wonder why they didn't substitute "colleagues" or "comrades" for better dialogue flow.

"Comrades" is obviously for communists (to those of us still living the Cold War).