Firefly Translations by goat

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Firefly Translations

POSTED BY: GOAT
UPDATED: Tuesday, August 1, 2006 13:01
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Monday, July 31, 2006 5:39 AM

I'm currently living and working in Japan right now and one of the things that I keep thinking of is how I would love to share Firefly with my friends here but that becomes a bit difficult for two reasons. The first is that most of them can't understand English well enough to enjoy it and the second is that my DVDs are region 1 and won't play in Japanese DVD players. I've searched around for translated subtitles for Firefly, but I have yet to find anything so I've been thinking about subbing Firefly into Japanese as practice translating and so that I can share Firefly with people who wouldn't otherwise be able to watch it.

Has anyone heard of any Firefly translation efforts? If I decided to go ahead and translate the series, it would take me a while and would probably end up sounding funny as I am not a native speaker. If I could find translated subtitles, I would use them.

My second question comes after reading an opinion piece about the lack of asian actors in Firefly and Serenity ( http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/archives/2005/10/inscrutability.htm
l - If you're offended by it, please don't just post angry comments on how Firefly is awesome and the author is crazy etc.. That does nothing but make ALL Firefly fans look bad. At least come up with an intelligent argument if you do comment, please). That got me wondering if people here would even be interested in watching Firefly, or if they would just see like the author of that blog. I do realize not everyone feels like that, but I thought that it would at least provide for some ineteresting conversation.

Sorry for the long post. If anyone is still reading, your thoughts would be welcome

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Monday, July 31, 2006 5:03 PM

PURPLEPENGUIN91

I live in an area with many Asian people, in my classes caucasian people are actually in the minority, and I've even converted several of my Indian and other Asian friends to Serenity loving flans.

And I don't want to get into the whole race issue right now, I'm still trying to formulate my thoughts on the matter.

But I just wanted to let you know that the Asian people I know weren't offended by it, or even noticed it. (although, that may not be the case in Japan...I don't know)

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Monday, July 31, 2006 6:04 PM

DATALESS

I don't know where of how you can get a Japanese lang. DVD, but if you have a PC go to http://www.dvdshrink.org and you can make an unregioned copy of the DVDs so they can play in any DVD player.

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Monday, July 31, 2006 6:04 PM

DATALESS

Good Luck.

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Monday, July 31, 2006 6:04 PM

DATALESS

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Monday, July 31, 2006 6:14 PM

GOAT

Yeah, I've figured out how to get around the region encoding but I think that the language thing is going to be a little harder to get around. I think that I'll start small (opening scene to the pilot or something like that) and try to get a feel for how hard this is really going to be before I start thinking about doing the whole series.

There is a Japanese version of TBDM, though so I don't have to worry about doing that.

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Tuesday, August 1, 2006 6:17 AM

GRRRARG

Well, thats an interesting point you make, since Whedon himself says that the show assumes there were just two superpowers left in the Earth That Was - the USA and China.
The Firefly crew is American, pretty much though and through. The villains are either European or American; and searching my memory the only minor character who was Asian was someone the crew was meeting for a drop, who subsequently got sniped by Niska's men.
Seems a bit disproportionate since Chinese is common enough to work its way into day to day speach.

Might be historical reasons though - we see a lot of Asian extras in the background, but caucasian administrators in Chinese garb. Might be a class distinction - Asian culture became dominant, but Western powers dominatated the political and socio-economic realm.
Say, for instance, that flu pandemic thats supposed to hit us soon does hit. It hits China far worse than it hits America, since people live at greater population densities in China and the disease spreads better under those conditions. The Chinese government collapses, and a massive Chinese diaspora occures. Economically, the Chinese would be at the bottom of the rung in the West, but say there were 25% mortality - thats still 750 million Chinese left. Send half of them out of China, and you had a cultural tidal wave descending on Europe and America.

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Tuesday, August 1, 2006 1:01 PM

DONCOAT

Some have suggested that most Chinese settled on Sihnon, and were less inclined to "pioneer" the more uncivilized Rim worlds where Mal and Co. generally go.

On a meta-level, it may be that there are fewer Asian actors, and thus a smaller pool of talent for the casting people to draw from.

I do agree that it would have been good to have more actual Chinese people in Firefly, rather than still more Canadians speaking Mandarin with a heavy American accent.

But I can't agree that this was a fatal flaw. Hey, we only had 14 episodes! It could well be that we'd have met more Asians later in the series. And at least Joss did include a strong dose of Asian influence in the 'verse, which isn't true of all that many S/F franchises.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I'm pointin' right at it!

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