Spoilers for Kanon (2006), Bunny Girl Senpai, and Fuse: Teppou Musume no Torimonochou
When you're fansubbing anime, Japanese first-person pronouns can be a nightmare. They're pretty much the closest thing to "untranslatable" that I've run into as fansub editor. The problems that they create are often super interesting, so I figured I'd put them down on paper.
Example clip (Kaede refers to herself as "Kaede")
In the context of anime, referring to oneself in third-person is something an infantile character would do. But it's basically unheard of to do so in the U.S., except in the context of... I don't know... professional wrestling promos? Instead of being cutesy, it's just bizarre. So the dominant trend among translators is to just ignore when characters do this (i.e., when Kaede says, "Kaede wants to go!" you write "I want to go!").
I know of two cases where this has bitten the translator in the butt. The first was in Kanon (2006), where a character named Kurata Sayuri speaks in third-person for 12 solid episodes before finally revealing in episode 13 that she actually has a specific reason for doing so (which, like everything else in Kanon, is rooted in a traumatic past). Back in 2006-07, when the series was first being fansubbed, the translator casually disregarded Sayuri's choice of referring to herself in the third-person and simply wrote it with "I." I was working on fansubbing a Blu-Ray release for the show, and I laughed out loud when I saw that that original translator left the following note in the script after the big reveal in episode 13 totally undercut what he'd been doing: "f*ck! What do we do?" Then I cried because I realized that now this was a problem that I had to try and fix.
The second case was in Bunny Girl Senpai, where the official translator for Aniplus (not to be confused with Aniplex) ignored the fact that Kaede speaks in third-person. When Kaede reverts back to her former self late in the season, one of the big changes is that she stops speaking all cutesy and uses normal first-person pronouns. So that aspect of the transformation was lost because the translator didn't set it up throughout the season.
In both cases, I don't really know if the proper course would be to write the script so that it accurately reflects the character's speech. In Bunny Girl, the way I would probably handle things in retrospect would be to sprinkle in moments in the script where Kaede uses third-person, maybe whenever she gets emotional. This might get the viewer to pay attention to the audio and pick up on the change in speech patterns when Kaede reverts. For Kanon, I decided that it wasn't worth distracting the viewer with a bizarre speech pattern for 12 episodes for a brief payoff that wasn't even that emotionally powerful, so I just left the script the way it was.
Translators probably have the most collective experience dealing with Ore-sama, a comically arrogant first-person pronoun. The typical solution is something along the lines of a character named Gonzolo saying, "You dare challenge the great Gonzolo?" Note that I have just spent four paragraphs talking about how weird talking in third-person is, but suddenly it makes sense to do it in this instance because it actually has a cultural grounding in the way we use English. (Wrestling promos, remember?)
I'm mostly including this section so I can give a shoutout to a fantastic send-up of a misguided fan retranslation of Final Fantasy VI wherein the translation team translated Ore-sama as "Mr. Me." It's a really good read, so go check it out.
I've run into two anime projects where first-person pronouns were so intertwined with the themes of the story that translating them seemed basically impossible.
Men and women often use different first-person pronouns. Someone might use "Ore" to express adult masculinity and "Atashi" to express femininity. The gender lines are distinct enough that one can say that it's weird, or at least markedly unusual, for a man to use "Atashi" and a woman to use "Ore." Writers can use this phenomenon to express certain ideas to the audience.
In episode 1 of Ouran High School Host Club, the main character, a girl, gets conned into dressing as a guy and acting as a "host" (i.e. an unpaid emotional prostitute) for women at the academy she attends. The punch line of the episode comes as the last line, where our cross-dressed MC says, "Hey, maybe I should start using 'Ore' now! Tee-hee!"
How on earth do you translate that?! The dub's attempt at it fell pretty flat ("Maybe I should start saying 'dude' and 'bro' now!"), but surely it's no better to transcribe the dialogue and put a TL note explaining what "Ore" means. The line lacks any sort of punch if you do that. This is where the creative juices of the translator have to flow--I feel like there's definitely a good solution out there, but I was never able to think of one. Give it your best shot.
On the other hand, the same problem popped up one episode later, and I was able to think of a solution for that just fine. Behold. Does it work? You tell me.
The second anime I've seen where this problem has really reared its ugly head is Fuse: Teppou Musume no Torimonochou, a 2012 movie with outstanding animation and music. It's a coming-of-age story of a girl who was raised in the mountains with her grandfather and doesn't really know anything about femininity. She learns more about her female side as the movie progresses and eventually declares her love to a humanoid wolf during the climactic scene. Her use of personal pronouns reflect this transformation: she uses "Ore" for most of the movie and then switches to "Atashi" when she's going off to rescue her wolf bf. I know it's not a coincidence because the camera ZOOMS IN ON HER MOUTH during the split second when she uses "Atashi" for the first time.
Again, how on earth do you translate this? Should the translator make her speak crassly/manly during the first part of the movie and markedly more refined later on? Is there any way at all to handle the zoom-in scene so that English viewers can view it as a turning point for the character just like a Japanese viewer would? I certainly don't have answers to those questions. If you do, tell me so that I can write them into a script and release it.
Finally, we have the most famous example of the first-person-pronoun issue in anime history: that one scene in Your Name. But there's not much to talk about there, since translating it smoothly was EZPZ. Comparison of Funi's translation and the two major fansubs' translation.
I hope you've enjoyed this tour through some of the annoying problems that English scriptwriters have to deal with in anime.
