Trigun Translation Trip-up

As is usual practice on this blog, sentences marked with an asterisk (*) are incorrect for the language in which they are typed.

For some reason when I was younger I really liked the show Trigun. I thought it was fascinating and compelling, so I decided to watch it again to see if it still held up. As with many things some of the magic fades once you're older, but I did come across a surprisingly basic translation mistake that illustrates some interesting points of Japanese grammar. It comes at the end of episode 3. A group of bandits is robbing a bank while the entire town looks on in fear. After a show of courage on the part of certain characters, everyone in town pulls out a gun and stands up to the bandits. Unwilling to admit defeat, the bandit leader plays his trump card by revealing that his gun's barrel splits into many smaller barrels that point in many directions. Oh, snap—now he can mow down everyone in front of him, which is basically the entire town. Luckily, Frank Marlin, the main minor character of this episode, sneaks up behind the leader and delivers a witty one-liner that sends the bandits packing. Let's see what he says.

Dialogue Click for Romaji Click for Kanji/Kana Bad Guy:　てめえら、勝ったと思ってるだろう。甘いんだよ。切り札は最後まで取っておくもんだなあ。 Frank Marlon：チェックメートだ。後ろには撃てねえなあ Bad Guy: temeera, katta to omotteru darou. amai n da yo. kirifuda wa saigo made totte oku mon da naa. Frank Marlon: CHEKKUMEETO da. ushiro ni wa utenee naa.

What?! "I can't shoot you in the back."?! Sure, just stroll up behind the bandit, make him think he's dead meat, then tell him he's safe and can go ahead and slaughter the townsfolk because you have qualms with shooting people from behind. That'll send him running for sure. Someone really should have caught that. The dub version renders this line as "Shootin' from behind's just not my style.", which sounds niftier and removes the-finger-pointed-at-head-not-at-back problem but still makes no sense in context. Luckily this moment in the show passes so quickly that the mistake is not fatal. Still, how did this happen?

Omitted Words and Context

Something that often makes Japanese difficult to figure out is that it favors omitting things from the sentence that can be understood from context. Japanese is especially fond of dropping the verb's arguments (subject, direct object, indirect object), particularly the subject. In fact, it this is often a reason that non-native speakers' Japanese sounds foreign and unnatural: We use the pronouns we learned when we first started studying Japanese way too often. You see, even if you don't specify the arguments of the verb in the sentence, the arguments are always there as "null (i.e. nonvocalized but understood) pronouns". For more about this idea and how it affects Japanese grammar and sentence interpretation, see Jay Rubin's Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don't Tell You. The basic idea, though, is that even when a verb/sentence does not appear to have a subject (or direct object etc.), it still does and the subject does not have to be the same as the previous verb/sentence's subject. You are supposed to determine the subject from the context. Sometimes this gets really hard because you aren't sure if it's I or we or he or whatever. Most student's assume that if the subject is dropped it's I, but it can just as easily be you or anything else. This is problem number one: the translator appears to have assumed that the subject of うてねえ(utenee) was I (the speaker, Frank Marlon) rather than you (the bandit).

Words Have Multiple Meanings

Problem number 2 is that the translator might not have understood that the word 後ろ(ushiro) has multiple English meanings. Ushiro is often glossed as meaning back because it is the opposite of 前(mae), front/forward. However, the opposite of front/forward can just as easily be considered to be behind. If the translator had considered the definition "behind", maybe would not have decided that Frank Marlon was talking about shooting the bandit in the back. Hopefully, though, he would not have made the mistake of thinking that Marlon was talking about shooting the bandit in the behind, which brings me to my next point.

The tranlator also might not have understood that the English definition provided is not necessarily correct for every sense or usage of the English word. Like many other Japanese position/direction words, ushiro typically refers to a particular part of the space around the object but can also refer to a part of the object itself. Ushiro can mean the space behind an object or the back part/side of the object. Although because of that property it can refer to the body part known in English as the back, it typically doesn't, and and there's a word that refers exclusively to the back as a body part rather than a position metaphor (背中 [senaka]). Here are the example sentences in my electronic dictionary (広辞苑 [koujien] 2008)that were given for the senaka meaning.

Japanese	English Translation (Mine)
敵に後ろをみせる teki ni ushiro wo miseru	[to] show your back to the enemy
ひさしの柱に後ろをあてて hisashi no hashira ni ushiro wo atete	[with his] back against the eave's pillar

The "show your back to the enemy" example is open to a back-side-of-your-body interpretation, so it's not very convincing in my mind. The pillar example comes from 枕草子(Makura no soushi, a.k.a. The Pillow Book), which was written by a court lady of the Empress Teishi in the late 10th and early 11th century. According to this, the rest of the sentence says that the subject was sitting, so in that example ushiro seems indisputably to mean back as in the body part. Given the context there could be some sort of politeness thing going on where ushiro is used as a more polite way of referring to the person's back (just as bottom in English is a more polite way of referring to someone's butt), but in any case, suffice it to say that it is minimally plausible that ushiro in our Trigun clip meant back in the body-part sense. That is, as long as you don't pay attention to the particles.

Particle Mistakes

Problem number 3 is that the translator must not have known what particles (sort of like prepositions) the verb utsu (shoot) uses. That problem is not always the result of ignorance of the Japanese language: Dictionaries often do not provide the information clearly, and because Japanese favors dropping words that can be understood from context, you can hear and read a word dozens of times without ever encountering all the proper particles. Some Japanese verbs take totally different particles from what you would assume based on English.

For example, 探す (sagasu), which means search or look for, can take the location for the direct object (just as English does in "search the trunk") or the lost item (which English does with a certain verb but not with search: "I seek my phone" vs. "search for my phone"). What particles do you use when you use both the location and the lost item in the sentence ("search the trunk for my phone")? I don't know—I've never encountered it and my dictionaries' examples don't resolve the question. The way I would work around that problem is to make the the item the topic and the trunk the direct object and then cross my fingers.

Another example is the word 手伝う (tetsudau), which means help. In English the person you help is the direct object, and you use the preposition with to indicate the thing you're helping with. In Japanese the thing you help out with is the direct object, while the person you help is sometimes the indirect object but typically something else altogether.

Japanese Examples (Sentences I made up)	English Translations (mine)
1. 妹を手伝った。 imouto wo tetsudatta.	I helped my sister.
2. 妹の手伝いをした。(possibly preferred over 1) imouto no tetsudai wo shita.	I helped my sister.
3. 妹に宿題を手伝った。(uncommon I think) imouto ni shukudai wo tetsudatta.	I helped my sister with her homework.
4. 妹の宿題を手伝った。(possibly preferred over 3) imouto no shukudai wo tetsudatta.	I helped my sister with her homework.
5. 妹が宿題をするのを手伝った。 imouto ga shukudai wo suru no wo tetsudatta.	I helped my sister do her homework.

So which particles does utsu use? In translating "ushiro niwa utenee na" as "I can't shoot you in the back", the translator must have thought that Japanese followed English usage (shoot [person/animal/plant] in the [bodypart]) and believed that in that particular sentence the "you" was dropped because it was understood from context while the body part that would be shot was specified. In fact, Japanese does follow English usage somewhat, but instead of treating life-forms differently from objects ("shot someone in the foot" vs. "shot the doorknob" vs. *"shot the door in the knob") Japanese treats them all the same. The thing you shoot is the direct object, and if it's a life-form's bodypart you mark it possessive in a pattern similar to sentence 4 in the tetsudau chart. When the particle ni is used with utsu it marks the direction of the shooting. To test this understanding, which I gleaned from a combination of English-Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries, I searched Japanese google on a topic that was sure to have lots of results—zombies! I tried various Japanese renditions of "shoot the zombie in the head" with quotation marks to search the exact phrase. *"頭にゾンビを撃つ" (*atama ni zonbi wo utsu) and *"ゾンビを頭に撃つ" (*zonbi wo atama ni utsu) both had no results, but "ゾンビの頭を撃つ" (zonbi no atama wo utsu) did have some results. Other searches, such as "に撃つ" and ”人に撃つ” (hito ni utsu) confirm that ni marks a direction when used with utsu. This table sums up how particles work with utsu.

Japanese Examples (Sentences I made up)	English Translations (mine)
ゾンビを撃った。 zonbi wo utta.	[subject] shot the zombie.
2. ゾンビに撃った。 zonbi ni utta.	[subject] shot at the zombie.
3.ゾンビの頭を撃った。 zonbi no atama wo utta.	I shot the zombie's head. I shot the zombie in the head.

On that note I'll leave you with this video.