Greetings. Ken Hoinsky here.

I want to write to you about one of the most unique projects myself and MX Media has had the honor of assisting with.

During New York Anime Fest 2009, I was asked by an associate of mine to help out on the production of a music video for Japanese idol band sensation, AKB48. The song used was their new single “River” which debuted at #1 on the Japanese Oricon chart.

Japanese TV show Nemousu TV (ネ申テレビ) was following AKB48 on their trip to NYC. They chose two local directors to each scramble to create music videos on a strenuous one-day shoot.

One of these directors is J.X. Carrera (Jonathan Carrera) who happens to be a video director for Anime News Network. Needing someone bilingual in Japanese and English to assist with the production, I was asked to assist.

Look, Mom, I’m on (Japanese) TV!

I am not sure any of us were prepared for the scope of the shoot:

1 day, 3 locations (Central Park & two studios), 16 group members, 2 music video film crews, 2 TV show film crews, and other support personnel. I wouldn’t be surprised if it totalled over 50 people. Oh, did I mention we had about 10 hours to complete everything?

I am not sure I ever worked harder in my life. That goes for everyone involved with the project. The poor girls from AKB48, freshly jet-lagged from their trip across the world, gave it everything they had. To think they had appearances and performances at NYAF and Webster Hall that very weekend, too!

Jonathan Carrera did an excellent job captaining the ship and the finished product speaks for itself.

As a professional translator, every once in a while I am tasked to do some sort of simultaneous interpretation. Though not my strongest skill, I somehow managed to survive the day and get the director’s vision across to the girls.

I’d like to think that having worked on shows about the entertainment world (Skip Beat, Glass Mask, White Album) helped me out with some of the rather obscure lingo used on a TV shoot.

All in all, it was a great day and something I am proud to have on our portfolio of completed projects.

You can visit the director’s homepage here and blog here.

Watch video:

Good morning, everyone. This is Managing Founder and translator, Ken Hoinsky, interrupting your scheduled broadcast with an important report on, uh… anime.

I have had the rare opportunity to have worked on both the simulcast release of a show and later on the DVD/Blu-rays of the same title. I’ve noticed some interesting things with the workflow.

Today I am going to talk to you about Kurokami The Animation.

I had the pleasure of personally translating this show more or less weekly going back to late 2008 and through the first half of this year.  This was a very unique project because it was released on television, dubbed, in three different countries on the same day every week. To my knowledge, nothing on that scale had been attempted before.

As you can imagine with a project like this, myself, our subtitling team,  the folks at Sunrise and Bandai Entertainment, and the excellent dub actors and ADR guys at NYAV Post, were all working off of incomplete materials for much of the workflow.

Though this complicates matters, it doesn’t make it impossible* to pull off.

(*Assuming translating on airplanes and getting up to send scripts in at 4AM, etc., is within your definition of “possible.”)

But I’m not here to post on the process of creating a simuldub, that can be another time. Today I want to talk to you about what it is like to work on an incomplete project for a simulcast and then later work on the same project for the DVD/Blu-ray release.

You’ve got re-animating, re-recording, re-timing, re-writing, re-authoring, re-syncing… Basically re-everything to do.

It’s very interesting, as a translator, to see how what is on screen, or more importantly in this case, what is not on screen colors your translations.

This morning I was going over the resynced subtitles for an episode of Kurokami that will end up on the American DVD release. In the initial unfinished video, it looked like a character had her hand on a man’s chest while she was saying a line. As it turns out in the finished video, she doesn’t put her hand on his chest until after delivering the line. (whoops)

You will probably see much whining about the ambiguity of the Japanese language on this blog, but a slight change in a gesture like this can alter the meaning of a line anywhere from slightly to radically.

The moral of the story is: Don’t ever assume you know what’s going on screen unless you absolutely have to.

Oh, the joys of translation.

“Mind Stat of 34″
Hey all, Adam here again with another note on something that probably went by 99% of the viewing audience on Shin Koihime.  Back a few eps ago, during the tournament between Enshou and Kan’u’s group, Chouhi made a crack about Toshi having a mind stat of 34.  If I remember right she made a similar joke in the first series, too. (I was not the translator for Koihime Season 1, that was a different company actually.)  But characters in Shin Koihime don’t HAVE stats, at least, they were never mentioned outside that one joke.  So what gives?

If you read my last post, you’ll remember that Shin Koihime is based off of an old historical book called “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms”.  As I said then, that book has inspired hundreds of spin-offs, including several well known video game series.  One of these series is a terrifyingly complex historical simulation “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms” by Koei.  The game puts you in the role of one of the generals of the Three Kingdoms era, and has you try to take over China by making alliances, waging warfare, and building cities.

Every general in the book is represented in the game, and each of them has various statistics that represent their capabilities.  Toshi’s role in the game is that of a military strategist: a cunning advisor whose knowledge and insight gives you the edge over the opponent’s army.  The most important statistic for a strategist is “mind”; a high mind stat means a genius of Sun Tzu proportions, and a low mind stat means you have trouble remembering how to tie your shoes.  Stats are scored from 1 to 100, and Toshi’s got a mind stat of 34, by far the worst in the game for somebody of her type and placing her squarely in the “paint-eater” category.

So there you go.  It was a joke from an obscure historical sim that probably less than 1% of their audience has played, and less than 30% of that would remember, which may earn it some kind of record for obscurity.

Greeting and Salutations. Here is a blog post from MX Media senior translator, Adam.

Hi all.  My name’s Adam, I do a bunch of the translating here at MX Media.  For my inaugural post, I thought I’d share a little bit of trivia that may interest some of you:  a bit of background on the title “Shin Koihime Musou.”  Obviously this is a topic of interest to a somewhat limited audience, but if you’re the type of person who’s both watching the show AND reading an industry blog, it’s probably worth at least a skim.

You probably already know that Koihime is based off of one of the classics of Chinese literature, a book called “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.”  This book deals with the exploits of various generals during a period of civil war and upheaval in ancient China, around 400 AD if I remember right, and is rightly regarded as one of the greatest works of literature ever written.  At least the first two-thirds of it is.  Then all the interesting characters get killed off and are replaced by their loser sons.

Anyway, just know that the book and its characters, the honorable and noble Ryuubi, the brilliant Sousou, and the crafty Son family, are about as well known in Asia as say, Shakespeare.  Even if you haven’t read it, you know the general plotline and the character’s names.  There’ve been literally hundreds of TV shows, books, comics, and video games based off of the thing: you’re probably familiar with the Kessen and Dynasty Warriors series and the anime Ikkitousen, and if you’re a hardcore Otaku you might’ve seen the 80s anime adaptation of it.  Heck, I think there’s actually one running right now concurrent with Shin Koihime.

As they do with all things, the Japanese visual novel industry eventually decided to make a game out of it.  The idea of the game they made, at least in as far as I understand it, was that in some alternate history, all of the generals of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms are beautiful women, and somehow you (the main character) end up seducing them.  This is another one for the “Japan is odd” file; as I said above, Romance of the Three Kingdoms is practically one of the foundations of eastern culture as we know it:  this is somewhat akin to taking a major piece of the Western canon like Dante’s Inferno and remaking it as a budget action game where you kill demonic babies in the 3rd Circle…

OK, bad example.  But the point is, it’s kind of odd.  So you have your game about beautiful princesses who you fall in love with during the Three Kingdoms era.  What will you call it?  I’m not sure what your answer to that question would be, but Baseson (the creators), decided to take the name from another series: Sangoku Musou (Unparalleled Warrior of the Three Kingdoms, to use a rather loquacious translation): AKA Dynasty Warriors in the states.  Except since it was about loving princess, they swapped the first word for ‘Koihime’ (Loving Princesses.)  Thus was born Koihime Musou, and it sold fairly well; well enough to inspire a 13 episode anime and a sequel.  For this sequel, they took the title off of Dynasty Warrior 2:  Shin Sangoku Musou becoming Shin Koihime Musou. 

The anime was a success too, at least as far as I understand it, and so it spawned a direct sequel that took the name of the game’s sequel: Shin Koihime Musou.  And that’s what you’re watching. 

As an aside, this is why people don’t translate anime titles anymore.  What the heck would you call it?  True Ultimate Warrior Loving Princess?  If it’s ever released stateside on R1, I assume they’re going to change the name to something that sounds better in English.