Translating "The Secret of Atom's Birth" short film
Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2017 4:41 pm
So for several months, off and on, I've been working on translating this short film, occasionally getting help from my dad, who knows some Japanese but hasn't used it much since probably 1985 when he came back to the U.S. after about a year and a half in Japan. Anyway, I went into this with very little knowledge of the Japanese language and actually learned quite a bit along the way (more than doubled my Japanese vocabulary doing this, though I'm not sure how useful something like "DNA bunseki" would be in regular conversation :lol and I'm understanding a bit more each time I listen.
However, there are still several cases when, even after identifying the right sounds in the dialogue, the actual meaning remains elusive.
One case is this phrase I've heard both Tobio and Tenma repeat on a few occasions in the short film; "doko made mo." According to Google Translate, it just means "wherever", but that's kind of fragmented for a phrase that's repeated, and I'm hesitant to trust an automatic translator, especially with anything other than individual words.
Another case is the word "dagu" that I've heard used several times, but it doesn't seem to have an actual translation. Yesterday a Japanese foreign exchange student at my school even listened to a portion of the dialogue and wrote it down for me, and she didn't recognize the word "dagu" when she heard it. My dad and I think it might be an odd pronunciation of "doguu" (a clay figure) used in a metaphorical sense to refer to Atom's robotic body, especially since at one point Tenma says something about using "dagu" to resurrect Tobio, but that's just a guess on the meaning of "dagu".
Any ideas? Also, if anyone else has been translating this, I'd love to compare notes.
However, there are still several cases when, even after identifying the right sounds in the dialogue, the actual meaning remains elusive.
One case is this phrase I've heard both Tobio and Tenma repeat on a few occasions in the short film; "doko made mo." According to Google Translate, it just means "wherever", but that's kind of fragmented for a phrase that's repeated, and I'm hesitant to trust an automatic translator, especially with anything other than individual words.
Another case is the word "dagu" that I've heard used several times, but it doesn't seem to have an actual translation. Yesterday a Japanese foreign exchange student at my school even listened to a portion of the dialogue and wrote it down for me, and she didn't recognize the word "dagu" when she heard it. My dad and I think it might be an odd pronunciation of "doguu" (a clay figure) used in a metaphorical sense to refer to Atom's robotic body, especially since at one point Tenma says something about using "dagu" to resurrect Tobio, but that's just a guess on the meaning of "dagu".
Any ideas? Also, if anyone else has been translating this, I'd love to compare notes.