Fansub "Review": [XF] Puchi Puri Yuushi - 24 [0367DED1].avi
Background
A while back I thought it would be a fun experiment to try watching the show Puchi Puri Yuushi, also called “Petite Princess Yucie” in official releases, using the original TV fansubs as released by XenonFansubs back in the early 2000s. This turned out to be a terrible idea, as I quickly realized that XenonFansubs’ work was not up to par. The subtitles were littered with mistranslations that even I, someone who did not know the source language, was able to quickly catch onto, and the editing did not manage to make the subtitles read even remotely naturally in English. After a couple episodes, I ended up just watching every episode with ADV’s translation on the side, making notes every time I noticed something noteworthy between the two. This is an excerpt of my notes for a single episode, Episode 24, to provide an example of the average quality of an episode of the show released by this group. As such, it is not much of a review, but I hope that it can still be informative or at least amusing in some way. All screenshots feature ADV’s DVD translation on the top of the screen for reference.
This post contains spoilers for events that occur at the climax of the show.
Release Specifications
Release Date: 2003-12-09?
Video: R2J DVD-Rip, DivX3 23.976fps (improperly decimated)
Audio: 128kbps Variable Bitrate MP3
Credits:
| Role | Staff |
|---|---|
| Translation | bsx |
| Song Translation | BlOodyAngeL & Bladegash |
| Translation Check | Bladegash |
| Editing | Bladegash & chibimun |
| Timing | Renegade R |
| Typesetting | Renegade R |
| Karaoke | Renegade R |
| Encoding | marinersp |
| RAW Provider | BeMPe |
| Special Thanks | XenonQC Team |
The Subtitles
Japanese sentence structure rendered in English was a common occurrence throughout this show, and episode 24 was no exception to this.
Names being inconsistent isn’t a huge deal, as I don’t think that ADV and XF agreed on more than one name in the entire show. What is a problem is “the final test”.
XF’s translator used “test” in all lines of dialogue instead of the intended セーヌ except for one specific time, and so without looking you could be lead to believe that the Final Test and the Final Scene were two different things.
Also, “consult her as your final test”? Was that the best wording they could come up with?
XF’s writing was usually so stiff and lifeless that I started noting down any time they wrote something that sounded even remotely creative. I still wasn’t exactly sold on the line itself here, but it was still better than everyone talking like robots!
Well, it’s not the worst handling of love-love I’ve seen I guess.
If I’m going to call out XF on their mistakes, I may as well do the same for ADV.
They forgot the word “as”.
This line isn’t well written, but the important thing to note is that graduation by this point has already happened. We actually watch it happen a few minutes earlier. This is important, because two lines later, the translation writes…
…this. I could care less about the Gate’s speech tic being dropped (he ends all his lines with -gate. Two of XF’s translators dropped it, the third left a TL note about how it was like Di-Gi Charat), but graduation already happened, so it is not finally time for graduation.
Uh… I think that’s only one Princess Academy graduate, but whatever you say guys.
After a while I tried to stop writing down sentences that were solely bad because of the sentence structure, but I couldn’t stop myself with some of these because they just read so poorly.
Why is he in that condition?
This is this, this is that, why is everything this?
As mentioned above, the raw of this episode was improperly decimated, meaning that almost every scene in the show was incredibly choppy, as frames of animation were just outright missing. Every once in a while, though, we’d get a treat
where the frames were there but blended instead! It still didn’t look much better though.
Congratulations for graduating!
Honestly, I don’t really like either of these lines. ADV is at least grammatically correct though.
Case in point of everyone talking like robots.
I remember while watching the episode I had my text editor scrolled to this line in ADV before reaching the line in the video, and thinking to myself, “wow ADV’s line sounds kind of stiff”. Then I saw what XF had put there.
This one, as far as I can tell, is just an outright translation error. There haven’t been a ton of these this episode, but they were pretty common in other episodes.
I am always saying this
Wow, these sentences do not flow well together.
I wish I could be the one to help another.
The next shot is everyone flying away with determined looks on their faces, with only the Queen looking horrified. I don’t think everyone heard about their fate, I think only the Queen did.
This is the only time that the translator gets “The Final Scene” correct. It goes back to being a Test in the next episode.
Conclusion
This release is not good, and you should not watch it unless you want to see how many ways the team was able to mess up this show. This was actually one of the tamer episodes, since most of the sentences at least roughly lined up with the same meaning as the official translations from the DVDs. I don’t know if I will share the rest of my notes on this show, as with some of the episodes I’m less confident on some of the translation points, but this should at least provide an insight into the quality of the episodes.