As If The Season 3 Announcement Several Hours Ago Wasn't Exciting Enough, Now We Have One Hell Of A New

As if the season 3 announcement several hours ago wasn't exciting enough, now we have one hell of a new chapter 😭

It's just one tragic event after another...Martha can't bring herself to confess to Henry (and regrets it later), her letter gets censored so she's left waiting in vain to see him, she's basically forced to join the front lines or be killed, meanwhile Henry is struggling to figure out his own feelings but then has a total breakdown when he thinks Martha's dead, gets beaten up and thrown in jail, then is coerced by his father into marrying someone else. Gosh, these two just can't catch a break 😓

But my favorite part of this chapter is young Donovan Desmond's speech. What he says here so perfectly conveys the overall conflict of Spy x Family and sets him up as the ideal antagonist.

The series has shown us over and over how people are indeed liars, but it's also shown us time and time again how amongst all the lies, mostly through the Forgers, that people can still come to understand each other. Donovan's view is one of hopelessness - that true understanding can never be attained and human beings will always wage war, and while the series doesn't downright portray this as false, it does show that there is hope...that, even though people will never stop committing atrocities, at the very least, a middle ground of peace can be found even amongst those who lie to survive.

Donovan believes that we can never know the true intentions of others because we ourselves are hiding our own true intentions...the Forgers are hiding their true intentions, but in spite of that, they've come to love and understand each other. Like Twilight said when he first met Donovan, he won't ever stop trying to understand others and will always try to meet them "in the middle" if he can. Again, this is why Donovan is shaping up to be a great "final boss" who challenges the hopeful message the series has advocated so far. Another example of how, even though this arc seemingly has nothing to do with the Forgers, Endo still ties it back to them and the story overall.

Now the question for the next chapter is...who saved Martha? Also, judging by Henry's reaction when he first sees Martha in the present time (pictured below, chapter 72 during the bus hijacking arc), it doesn't seem like he had thought she was dead at that point. So he must have found out somehow before this that she had survived.

We'll have to wait until next time to find out! Even as the series hits chapter 100, Endo isn't done with this tragic love story just yet 😅

Japanese Linguistic Observations in Spy x Family - part 5

Part 5 - Translating humor and wordplay

Translating jokes from one language to another can be difficult, especially when the humor revolves around wordplay that's only apparent in the original language. Luckily for a comedy series like SxF, most of the humor relies on concepts that are universal to all languages, but there are the occasional jokes that require creative translation in order to get the same effect in English. What I think is the most well-known example of this kind of joke in SxF is from chapter 26, where Yuri tells Anya that "knowledge is power" during their tutoring session.

The Japanese phrase for this is 知は力 ("chi wa chikara"). Anya mishears this as ちわわぢから ("chiwawa jikara"), which means "chihuahua power," which is why we see the image of a muscular chihuahua in her thoughts. This results in Yuri calling her チワワ娘 ("chihuahua girl") from then on. Obviously this joke would be lost if translated directly, so Casey Loe, the official English translator for the SxF manga, got creative with making it work in English. He cleverly utilizes the English expression, "the whole enchilada," which sounds enough like "swole chihuahua" for Anya to believably mistake the two. This translation also makes it so that Yuri calling Anya "chihuahua girl" later on makes sense.

But unfortunately, because a series can have different companies working on the localization of its anime versus its manga, inconsistencies between the two often come up. In this case, the anime team translated this joke completely differently, and less effectively in my opinion. You can see from the below screenshots that they had Yuri use the word "unleash," which then led to Anya associating a (muscular) dog without a leash as powerful (?) Again, this translation was a stretch in my opinion and not as good as the manga version. This also makes it so that translating Yuri's nickname for Anya as "chihuahua girl" won't make sense.

But what's interesting is that, many months and episodes later in season 2, they stayed consistent with that translation and had Yuri call Anya "stupid leash girl" in episode 28.

Despite my dislike for this translation, I have to give them kudos for remembering it all that time later and not just directly translating it as "chihuahua girl." Though it makes me wonder if they'll stay consistent in season 3 where Yuri will be referring to Anya as "chihuahua girl" once again.

A further complication is that, not only do these kinds of inconsistencies exist between the anime and manga translations, but they also exist between the different streaming services that stream SxF with English subtitles throughout the world. I only have access to the subtitled version from Hulu, which is where my screenshots are from, and I think other streaming services in the US like Crunchyroll, Amazon, Netflix, etc, use the exact same subtitles. So when I refer to "the Hulu subtitles" throughout this post, I mean other major US streaming services too. However, I'm not totally sure if they all do share the same subtitle script, so if anyone who has these services could confirm, that would be great! However, @tare-anime informed me that Muse Asia's English subtitles for SxF are completely different! For example, they translated the above joke more closely to the original, by using the phrase "puppy power" and keeping Yuri's nickname for Anya as "chihuahua girl."

There are further differences with Muse Asia's translation as well, for example, they directly translate Anya's names for Loid and Yor, "chichi" and "haha," as "Father" and "Mother" instead of "Papa" and "Mama."

(thanks again to Tare for the Muse Asia screenshots!) This is different, not only compared to the Hulu subtitles, but also the official English manga as well, both of which have Anya consistently use "Papa" and "Mama."

Tare also let me know that Disney Plus in Asia, another service that streams SxF, has yet another version of the English subtitles! And these are only the subtitled versions for the US and Asia - if SxF is streamed with English subtitles in other countries, I wonder if those are different as well. That means there's at least 3-4 different English subtitle scripts for SxF, with different ways of translating certain things, like what I described above. This could make things confusing for someone without any knowledge of Japanese who reads the English version of the manga and watches the subtitled version of the anime on one or more streaming services...if they read the first few volumes of the manga with the "swole chihuahua" translation, then watch season 2 of the anime, they're gonna be confused about why Yuri calls Anya "stupid leash girl." There's other more minor inconsistencies too, like how the Hulu subtitles have Yor call Anya "Miss Anya" all the time, but the manga doesn't.

I'm sure there's some licensing reasons why there isn't one official English subtitle script that all the streaming services can use, and why they don't consult the manga translations, especially for the more difficult-to-translate parts. It seems like wasted effort for so many official English translations to exist for the same thing.

But anyway, back to the translations of jokes in SxF, another one that stood out to me occurred in chapter 23. During the scene where Loid is asking Anya about a name for Bond, he explains how dogs have trouble discerning the sounds of consonants. The phrase he uses for this is 子音の聞き分け("shiin no kiki wake"), which means "distinguishing consonants," with "shiin" meaning "consonant." However, there's another word "shiin" with the kanji 死因 that means "cause of death." This is what Yor thinks he means - 死因の聞き分け ("shiin no kiki wake"), which means "determining the cause of death." So in her thoughts, she imagines asking Bond if he prefers death by blood loss (失血死) or by being crushed (圧死), and when he shakes his head at both, she says "you're not good at these distinctions, are you?"

This is a difficult joke to translate, so Casey got a bit loose by having Loid use the word "plosives" instead of "consonants," and then having Yor mishear it as "explosives." He then changed up Yor's dialogue by having her say that Bond prefers C-4 explosions over other methods of death.

While I don't think the translation of this joke worked as well as the previous one (I feel like Yor wouldn't know about C-4 explosions?) I couldn't come up with anything better myself, lol. It just goes to show how translating things as closely to the original as possible isn't always the best choice…but oddly, that's what the Hulu subtitles did! For some reason they opted not to even attempt to rework this joke for English, and kept both Loid and Yor's dialogue as exact translations. This results in an exchange that makes no sense and will leave people wondering how Yor could mistake Loid's "can't tell consonants apart" as "can't tell causes of death apart."

However, there are some cases where the wordplay works similar enough in both Japanese and English that the joke can be translated without too much modification. An example of this is in chapter 59 where Becky asks Yor how she was able to "get" Loid…"pierce his heart" as she puts it. Yor thinks she means this literally, to which she replies that she wouldn't hurt Loid.

The Japanese version is very similar, with Becky using the verb 射止める("itomeru") which means "to shoot down" (with an arrow). However, it has a figurative meaning too, which is "to win" as in "win someone's heart." Yor thinks Becky means the literal meaning of shooting down, so she says that she wouldn't shoot Loid and that she doesn't even use a bow and arrows.

The Hulu subtitles translate it more or less directly, having Becky say "shoot an arrow through his heart" and keeping Yor's "I don't use a bow and arrows" that the manga omitted. Rare case where I think the anime translation worked better than the manga!

In the case of this joke, the concept of "shooting someone's heart" to mean "winning someone's heart" is universal in both English and Japanese, so little reworking was needed. This also helped keep consistency with Yor's tendency to associate otherwise benign concepts with violence due to the nature of her work.

I'll wrap up this post with what I think is the most commendable translation of a joke so far in the manga: how Casey translated the names of the guest characters at the ski resort in chapter 94.

Their names are puns in Japanese as well, and Annie over on Twitter already did a great breakdown of how each of the wordplay in their names was translated, so definitely check out that thread here. Since this chapter has yet to be animated, I'm really curious how the anime translators will handle this…since it seems like they don't reference the manga, they'll probably either translate the names literally or come up with their own pun names, and either will unfortunately lead to the same kind of inconsistencies between the anime and manga translations that I touched on earlier.

To summarize, humor can be a very culture/language specific thing, so it's up to the translator to make sure the same feeling is conveyed in their translation even if they have to essentially make up their own jokes. With that said, it's a shame that there isn't collaboration between the translators of the anime and manga to ensure consistent translations across the franchise. So I hope this post helped shed light, not just on how some of the jokes in SxF were conveyed in Japanese, but also on why some things in the English version of SxF seem inconsistent between the anime and manga.

<- Return to Part 4

Do you think there's gonna be an arc somewhere where Yor comes to regret her assassin work? I'm definitely hoping for one. We know she holds some very black and white beliefs regarding Garden and Garden's targets: Garden is Good, and it improves the world by telling Yor to kill people who are Bad Guys.

This has definitely resulted in Yor doing a lot of things and killing a lot of people she would probably regret killing if she understood the full consequences of her actions.

Especially assassins like the ones on the cruise ship that she fights. Of any people she's killed, they're probably the most likely to have lead lives she can relate to unless being trained and brainwashed to kill as a child is unusual for assassins in the world of Spy Family.

It's certainly possible we could get an arc like that! But some conflict would have to arise to make Yor come to this realization. The assassins in the cruise arc were portrayed as typical "bad guys," and even though the lead guy made Yor question her motives for killing, we didn't get to know the assassins well enough to say if they were led to underworld life the same way she was. Personally, I don't think she'd have much reserve killing fellow assassins as opposed to someone more "innocent," like someone who's portrayed as a kind person but is committing crimes in order to protect their family, just like she is. If she developed a friendship with this person first before Garden assigned her to kill them, that would definitely make her hesitant. For example, what if, after spending all that time with Olka, she was later assigned to kill her for whatever reason? Like, some falling out between Olka's mafia family and Shopkeeper? I could definitely see that sort of situation making her question Garden's morality. Being ordered to kill Twilight and finding out that he's actually Loid, is another way she could come to this realization, if Endo wants to go that route in the endgame. Since Garden is the most mysterious aspect of the SxF universe as of now, there's so much open to possibility!

Today's new chapter was like the sequel to chapter 39 from way back when - "Damian and friends' day out, part 2" 😅 But rather than be accompanied by a teacher, they're accompanied by their butlers! Which means we finally get to see Jeeves in person after only ever hearing him on the phone. Endo even drew Jeeves for the chapter's special illustration.

As for the chapter itself, like I said, it was very similar to chapter 39, so not a ton of plot-relevant stuff to mention. However, we do get to see a bit of Damian's relationship with Jeeves and more about his feelings towards his family.

As we've seen before, despite feeling like his family is avoiding him (as he says in the above panel, "it's not like I'm the one who's avoiding them") Damian still feels a sense of pride about his family's name. He doesn't want to sully the Desmond name even though no one in the family gives him the recognition he yearns for. Which is another reason why he obsesses over getting stella.

As for Jeeves, he seems to have a similar relationship to Damian as Becky does with Martha, even down to being able to spring into action to save his master at any moment! Did Jeeves and Martha train at the same combat butler school? 😂

Jeeves also gives Damian the "I sympathize with you but I can't say anything look" that Loid often gives to people. Makes it seem like he understands Damian's internal struggle, probably more than anyone else in the Desmond family, but he can't openly express it.

I also want to mention that there was a mistake in the English translation where Ewen says that it's currently autumn, but in the original Japanese, he says "winter."

Nice to finally know what season we're currently in, but sucks that this was mistranslated. I'm hoping it gets fixed in the volume release.

I don't believe the giant flower that the boys find is a real species, but looks like it's based on the corpse flower.

I was hoping we'd get some kind of reference to Anya's big reveal to Damian at the dance, but apparently he really didn't take her words seriously, lol. But of course he's flustered at the thought of Melinda knowing about any contact he's had with her (plan C arc soon please 🤞)

After I managed to buy these special SxF acrylics a few months ago, I wanted to see if I could make scans of them...they're just that pretty ❤️ Surprisingly, they actually scanned very well! I wanted to add an appropriate background too, figured an opera house was fitting.

I wanted to have Anya and Bond in front of Loid and Yor, but the scans were coming out blurry with the acrylics stacked on top of each other - so side by side it is!

They all barely managed to fit in this one! I love how Anya's looking all "waku waku" at Papa and Mama~

Since I really like Loid and Yor's outfits, I scanned them separately.

From fancy couple to action couple in the blink of an eye! (well, they're still fancy either way 😅)

And let's not forget these dapper gentlemen. Franky must have a hot date later.

I wish I could scan more of my acrylics, but unfortunately the ones I've tried came out blurry. For some reason these ones didn't, so I didn't want to waste the opportunity!

Also, I have another SxF project in the works that I hope to release in the coming weeks! I won't spoil what it is, but I will say it's similar to my story guide sheet 🤭

SxF displays at Anime Expo! So excited to see the "season 3 coming soon" on this one 👀

Also loved these displays at the MangaPlus booth!