Extra Translation Notes for 15th Touhou M-1 Grand Prix (Eiki Ver.) Watching the full video before reading this is recommended if you'd like to avoid spoilers. SPOILERS BELOW --[Dream A-un]-- The "A-un" in the team name refers to komainu. Komainu come in pairs, one saying "a" and the other "un", together forming "Aun/Om"; this is where Aunn's name and copy ability come from. --[Animal Alliance]-- Yachie: "Then, I'd dress them up like deer." Jidiao are said to very heavily lust after deer. --[Troupe miko]-- Tojiko: "Are you trying to become a solo act?" Her original line is "Are you trying to become a rakugo storyteller?" Rakugo is a type of theater entertainment in which a single storyteller, in a sitting position, tells a comical, usually complicated story while depicting different characters through subtle changes such as pitch or tone. --[Losers Bracket]-- Great Moriya Circus The name of the event is a parody of "Kinoshita Circus". --[Alcoholic Junkies]-- In order to make the dialogue work, the names of the two characters in this duo are loose translations of their unofficial Japanese names. However, it's worth noting that the English-speaking Touhou community has different nicknames for them that are different from their Japanese counterparts. "Heavy Drinker (uwabami)" is usually referred to as "Snake Youkai" or "Unnamed Snake Youkai" in English and his name in Japanese is a pun; "uwabami" literally means "large snake" but also means "heavy drinker". "Mister Antidepressant (kou'utsuyaku ojisan)" is usually referred to as "Anxious Moustached Villager" in English. Mister: "You mean Geidontei?! IT'S NOT "GAY DONTEI!" The original joke doesn't mention Geidonetei at all. The original joke involves Heavy Drinker confusing the words geinin (performer) and "gay no hito" (gay person). It's difficult to explain in English, but he mistakes "geinin" for "gaybito", the latter of which isn't an actual word. "nin", "hito" and "bito" all mean "person" and all three sound like some form of "gei person". --[Commercial]-- This is a parody of the throat spray product "Nodonool". --[Animal Alliance FINALS]-- CEK 25 CEK originally stands for "ChouEKi" meaning "hard/penal labor". --[Alcoholic Junkies FINALS]-- Heavy Drinker: "Popular and lets you go Sicko Mode." The original song title being referenced is "Tight de Cute na Hip ga Surreal na Joke to Mood de Telephone Number". --------------------------- Disclaimer / Clarification: This document was voluntarily put together by the translator/subtitler. It was written based on my personal understanding and interpretation of the dialogue. It's possible that I've missed some jokes or references. This is not an exhaustive list of every joke--only ones obscured by language or cultural barriers. I have no particular example of a vague reference worth mentioning this time, so instead, here's a potentially interesting tidbit about a behind-the-scenes translation choice that was made: Futo's dialogue in the subtitles is very stylized, differing from the Japanese speech in some ways. The original subtitle draft for Troupe miko's manzai was translated more in line with exactly what she says in Japanese, but it overall fell flat; so much of the humor of Futo's dialogue was lost in translation because subtitles can't accurately convey *how* she says things due to the nature of them being English text rather than actual English voices. This is an inevitable shortcoming of subtitles and is sometimes extremely difficult to avoid. But with a team like Troupe miko, if Futo's dialogue falls flat, then their entire performance falls flat because Futo very much has the spotlight when they're on-stage. So to restore a bit of her theatrical personality and put humor back into her English dialogue, her style of speech was cranked up to eleven such that she speaks in a verbose and bombastic manner to make her come off more like a dramatic theater actor from the English Renaissance. Her speech isn't necessarily meant to accurately reflect Shakespearean era stage plays, but the goal was for her to give that sort of vibe. For example, Futo's Japanese line addressed to Tojiko, "You haven't done a thing this entire time. You haven't said anything funny." doesn't accurately convey the feeling of how she delivered the line. It instead turned into "Thou art naught but a superfluous occupant of this stage, thine existence yielding no fruit." in the English subtitles. As you can see with this example, the actual meaning of Futo's line in both languages is basically "You're not contributing anything." but the English subtitles take a lot of creative liberty with her word choice. Handling Futo's dialogue like this conveys her lines in a more entertaining way that ultimately captures her character better than relatively direct translations that lack anything distinct aside from some outdated words like "thou". The way she delivers her lines is more important than their literal meaning. All of Futo's English dialogue across the series is written with this approach, and Futo has consequently become the most difficult, time-consuming character to write subtitles for in all of Touhou M-1, but it results in a memorable, one-of-a-kind character in the series.